The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [135]
Worse and worse
After the Second World War, led by Konrad Adenauer’s West Germans, Europeans enthusiastically followed America down the path of free enterprise. There dawned a golden age after 1950 of peace (for most), prosperity (for many), leisure (for the young) and progress (in the form of accelerating technological change). Did the pessimists disappear? Was everybody cheerful? The heck they were. George Orwell kicked it off in 1942 with an essay complaining about the spiritual emptiness of the machine age and a book in 1948 warning of a totalitarian future. The torrent of gloomy prognostication that characterised the second half of the twentieth century was, like everything else from that time, unprecedented in its magnitude. Doom after doom was promised: nuclear war, pollution, overpopulation, famine, disease, violence, grey goo, vengeful technology – culminating in the eruption of civil chaos that would undoubtedly follow the inability of computers to cope with the year 2000. Remember that?
Consider the opening words of Agenda 21, the 600-page dirge signed by world leaders at a United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992: ‘Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities within and between nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continued deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.’ The following decade saw the sharpest decrease in poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy in human history. In the 1990s numbers in poverty fell in absolute as well as relative terms. Yet even the 1990s were marked by (in the words of Charles Leadbetter) ‘an outpouring of self-doubt and even self-loathing from the intelligentsia of developed liberal societies’. An unspoken alliance, Leadbetter argued, developed between reactionaries and radicals, between nostalgic aristocrats, religious conservatives, eco-fundamentalists and angry anarchists, to persuade people that they should be anxious and alarmed. Their common theme was that individualism, technology and globalisation were leading us headlong into hell. Horrified by the rate of change, and the undermining of the status of noble intellectuals relative to brash tradesmen, ‘the stasis-craving social critics who have shaped the western zeitgeist for decades’ (in Virginia Postrel’s words) lashed out at the new and yearned for stability. ‘It is the failure of modern man to observe the constraints necessary for maintaining the integrity and stability of the various social and ecological systems of which he is a part that is giving rise to their disintegration and destabilization’ groaned the wealthy environmentalist Edward Goldsmith. The price of prosperity, in the words of the Prince of Wales, has been ‘a progressive loss of harmony with the flow and rhythm of the natural world’.
Today, the drumbeat has become a cacophony. The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity. In an airport bookshop recently, I paused at the Current Affairs section and looked down the shelves. There were books by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Al Franken, Al Gore, John Gray, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot and Michael Moore, which all argued to a greater or lesser degree that (a) the world is a terrible place; (b) it’s getting worse; (c) it’s mostly the fault of commerce; and (d) a turning point has been reached. I did not see a single optimistic book.
Even the good news is presented as bad news. Reactionaries and radicals agree that ‘excessive choice’ is an acute and present danger – that it is corrupting, corroding and confusing to encounter ten thousand products in the supermarket, each reminding you of your limited budget and of the impossibility of ever satisfying your demands. Consumers are ‘overwhelmed with relatively trivial choices’ says a professor of psychology. This notion dates from Herbert Marcuse,