The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [136]
The problem is partly nostalgia. Even back in the golden age itself, in the eighth century BC, the poet Hesiod was nostalgic for a lost golden age when people ‘dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things’. There has probably never been a generation since the Palaeolithic that did not deplore the fecklessness of the next and worship a golden memory of the past. The endless modern laments about how texting and emails are shortening the attention span go back to Plato, who deplored writing as a destroyer of memorising. The ‘youth of today’ are shallow, selfish, spoiled, feral good-for-nothings full of rampant narcissism and trained to have ephemeral attention spans, says one commentator. They spend too long in cyberspace, says another, where their grey matter is being ‘scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Orange, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences’. Balderdash. Of course, there are twerps and geeks in every generation, but today’s young are volunteering for charities, starting companies, looking after their relatives, going to work – just like any other generation, maybe more so. Mostly when they are staring at screens it is to indulge in rampant social engagement. The Sims 2 game, which sold more than a million copies in ten days when launched in 2004, is a game in which the players – often girls – get virtual people to live complex, realistic, highly social lives and then chat about it with their friends. Not much scalding and defoliating there. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips believes that ‘for increasing numbers of Britons and Americans, the “enterprise culture” means a life of overwork, anxiety and isolation. Competition reigns supreme, with even small children forced to compete against each other and falling ill as a result.’ I have news for him: small children were more overworked, and fell a lot more ill, in the industrial, feudal, agrarian, Neolithic or hunter-gatherer past than in the free-market present.
Or how about the ‘end of nature’? Bill McKibben’s bestselling dirge of 1989 insisted that a turning point was at hand: ‘I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change; that we are at the end of nature.’
Or the ‘coming anarchy’? Robert Kaplan told the world in 1994, in a much discussed article in the Atlantic Monthly that became a bestselling book, how a turning point had been reached and ‘scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet’. His evidence for this thesis was in essence that he had discovered urban west Africa to be a lawless, impoverished, unhealthy and rather dangerous place.
Or ‘our stolen future’? In 1996 a book with this title claimed that sperm counts were falling, breast cancer was increasing, brains were becoming malformed and fish were changing sex, all because of synthetic chemicals that act as ‘endocrine disruptors’, which alter the hormonal balance of bodies. As usual, the scare proved greatly exaggerated: sperm counts are not falling, and no significant effect on human health from endocrine disruption has been detected.
In 1995 the otherwise excellent scientist and writer Jared Diamond fell under the spell of fashionable pessimism when he promised: ‘By the time my young sons reach retirement age, half the world’s species will be extinct, the air radioactive and the seas polluted with oil.’ Let me reassure his sons that species extinction, though terrible, is so far under-shooting that promise by a wide margin. Even if you take E.O. Wilson’s wildly pessimistic