If I had my way, the new year would start tomorrow. After the purgatory of August as the nation’s holiday, autumnal September is when we return to work, supposedly regenerated. Plans, budgets, accounts and the statistical year should begin then. September, not cheerless January, should be the month of new resolutions.
September is my month for optimism. Last summer I enjoyed reading Yuval Noah Harari’s rollercoaster panoptic on the rise of the planet’s superheroes, Sapiens. This summer I did not enjoy his gloomy follow-up, Homo Deus. It is a classic of worst-case futurology. The digital revolution is so sexy and potent, Harari predicts, that we simply cannot resist its downside. Gene science and robotics will lead to subservience to the “techno-religions” of Silicon Valley, with different classes of humans and the brain of most ordinary humans reduced to obsolescence. To Harari we are doomed – pending more research.
Any fool can extrapolate the present. As the headline writer knows, anything “could” happen. But I doubt this one. The school subject that should be compulsory is not maths but history. During the 1840s railway boom, alarmists said 600 projected railways would invade every village in the land in a mania of steam. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through Arnold Toynbee, HG Wells and Aldous Huxley, each human advance is accompanied by forecasts of disaster. In the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich shatteringly declared “the population bomb” would lead to mass starvation by the end of the 1970s. He was supported by Barry Commoner and his thesis of an imminent “closing circle” of ecological suicide.
As recently as 10 years ago, James Lovelock, scientism’s revivalist preacher, warned of “the revenge of Gaia” against our worship of combustion. “It could now be our auto da fé, and the cause of our extinction,” he declared. All these books make much use of the word “could”. They also add that it is “not too late” – usually pending their next bestseller.
More appealing was my other summer reading, Johan Norberg’s Progress. It looks not at what “could” happen but at what “has” happened. Norberg is a prophet of anti-pessimism. He is shocked by a 2015 YouGov poll that found 71% of Britons convinced “the world is getting worse”, against just 5% who said it was getting better. More than half thought world poverty was rising, against 10% who thought it falling. It was the same in the US.
Norberg points out that every index of global improvement – measuring starvation, poverty, child mortality, literacy, women’s education, democracy, violence, death in war – shows a steady upward graph. It is easy to retort, “But what about Syria and the Congo?” When an argument is general, the objection must be general.
What exercises Norberg is that progress deniers risk generating what he calls “nativist backlash”. To him, “When we don’t see the progress we have made, we begin to search for scapegoats for the problems that remain.” Misinformed about the improving state of the world, people wander about under a cloud of superstition and fear. They soon accept the authoritarian “curtailment of the freedom and openness that progress depends on”. They vote for Ukip and Trump.
The politics of fear has become the default mode of democratic politics. The desensitising word crisis is applied to any and every problem. The chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff can “personally attest … that the world is more dangerous than it has ever been”. He had no evidence, just a budget to defend. Most of us belong to a tribe, with tribal interests at stake. The left seizes on evidence of inequality, ignoring absolute prosperity. The right seizes on moral degeneracy, with the philosopher John Gray warning of “the approaching end of civilisation”.
Cue the latest chase. Brexit was a triumph for the pessimist tendency. Its theme was that Britain was doomed if immigration were not controlled and the country released from bondage to Brussels. Now that the remainers’ Project Fear has been shown to be exaggerated, Brexit must tone down its own gloom. It must see some virtue in European co-operation, and build a new relationship of continental trust. Given the recent past, this will be a hard sell, but sold it must be. Optimism must become a strategy.
A running theme of Norberg’s book is the dependence of such political argument on the media. He is right. Almost the entire Brexit debate – one of the most passionate and intriguing in modern British politics – was conducted as a contest of competing menaces. This was no surprise. The media depends on bad news “to sell newspapers”, but newspapers are veritable libraries of congress compared with internet news sites, drenched in polarisation. I still think the internet has contributed to the diversity of public debate, but even an optimist finds this a close call.
Journalists customarily defend themselves from the charge of distortion by claiming their job is to report deviations from the norm of progress. Good news is rarely news. We report plane crashes and divorces, not take-offs and happy marriages.
This does not excuse such scaremongering as the claim that the 2014 Ebola outbreak could infect “1.4 million people by 2015”. Similar fear-inducing pessimism about bird flu, Aids, terrorism and climate change deaden us to real risks. Apologists claim to be raising awareness and stimulating “something to be done”. But governments are easily terrorised into doing the wrong thing. In the case of bird flu, the diversion of medical resources was said to have caused more deaths than the epidemic itself.
By far the most positive sign of humanity’s advance is the decline in global violence, on a state and personal level. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker attributes this to historical evolutions. These include nations becoming inherently more “pacifist”, the “feminising” of politics, the growing power of reason and “the expanding circle of sympathy”. He, like Norberg, is puzzled by the potency of pessimism.
My optimistic future sees the post-digital age as putting live experience back at the centre of human activity. Machines will serve humans ever more efficiently, but not enslave us, as Harari miserably predicts. But that is the future. Optimism’s trump card is the past and present. It is facts. These too can lie, but those who say so must prove it.