Ignore all the gloom and cheer up — you’re living in the best of times
There really isn’t much point getting up in the morning, is there? I’m afraid I have worse news for you: according to a new report by the Irish Academical Medical Society (the I AM’S for short), we are all going to die.
Yes, that’s right, every single one of us is going to have our lives ended. Shock! Horror! I need to warn you of this appalling fate that awaits you because if you listened too much to governments, you could be forgiven for concluding that if only you didn’t eat, drink, smoke, take foreign holidays or drive a car, you could live forever. Sorry — you can’t.
Almost every day our media is in thrall to the latest nonsense: 10,000 Irish people will succumb to colon cancer; half a million will fall victim to heart disease; 2,000 people are likely to be killed on the roads this year; climate change threatens the lives of a billion, or whatever.
Yes, if we change our behaviour we might — just might — be able to extend our lives a little bit. But the one big, black fact cannot be changed: we are all going to meet our maker one way or another.
Health charities, the European Commission and the ever-expanding army of environmental campaigners all play upon one of the more depressing characteristics of human nature, namely that we only feel good when the news is bad.
On one level, this appears to be a commonsense reaction: we fear that if we allow ourselves to become optimistic about life as we live it, the step beyond that is complacency. The step beyond that is arrogance and, after that, an inevitable, resounding, crash. So while we like to hear Tiny Tim’s words from A Christmas Carol — “God bless us all, everyone” — we refuse to allow ourselves to believe in it.
Perhaps it is precisely because fewer and fewer of us believe in a god and hold to any concept of an afterlife that death terrifies us so much.
Perhaps it was ever thus: since the day people first climbed down from the trees they have been complaining that society has been going to the dogs. Either way, what appears to be a rational mode of thought is, actually, not corroborated by the facts. Yes, we are all going to die but, for as long as we are alive, we have never had it so good. That’s the conclusion, at any rate, of a recently-published book I have been reading by the Indian-American scholar Indur Goklany, entitled ‘The Improving State of the World’.
It’s a powerful antidote to the all-pervasive gloom that tends to surround public discourse these days. While siren voices seemingly everywhere insist we are all going to hell in a handcart — and it’s all our own fault — it’s refreshing to come across an author who remains determinedly optimistic about the world and man’s influence upon it.
Goklany marshals an impressive array of historical data to argue that the trajectory of the 20th century was generally upward and onward. Taken as a whole, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, we’re living longer, healthier, more comfortable lives on a cleaner planet.
As any 19th century novel will inform you, people living in 1800 were only mildly better off than people living in 1000 AD. But sometime around 1820, that all began to change.
Between 1820 and today, world per capita real income grew 20 times as fast as it did in the previous eight centuries. Just about everyone living today is the beneficiary of what can almost certainly be called the single most consequential development in human history, namely the onset of industrialisation.
If our great-grandparents could be brought back to life, they would be astonished by humanity’s achievements, but also bewildered by our ungrateful attitudes towards these gains.
In the west, above all, the effects of this transformation have been so massive as to be practically unfathomable. Real income, life expectancy, literacy and education rates, and food consumption, have soared while infant mortality, hours worked, and food prices have plummeted.
Developing countries too have enjoyed dramatic improvements in what the UN calls ‘human development indicators’, even if most of their citizens remain poor.
One consequence of this is that people at a given income level today are likely to be healthier and to live longer than people at the same income level did 40 or 50 years ago.
While many parts of the world still lag behind the west, they are also ahead of where the major industrialised nations were at comparable levels of economic development. Parts of Africa, in particular, do not yet enjoy freedom from hunger and fear, and the Middle East is poor when it comes to freedom of speech and worship, but many more parts of the world enjoy these freedoms than could have been imagined in 1941 when US President Franklin D Roosevelt enumerated them. This is an important point ignored by those who rage against globalisation as bringing poverty and exploitation to the poorest parts of the world and seek to do everything possible to rein in businesses and consumers.
It is worth bearing in mind, for instance, that the average life expectancy worldwide in 1900 was just 31 years and most of homo sapiens weren’t worrying about what they had read on the subject of global warming — because they couldn’t read.
EVEN in the developing world, despite the ravages of HIV, life expectancy is now touching 65, largely because technology has allowed us, literally, to feed the world. The proportion of the earth’s people living in absolute poverty has dropped from 84% in 1820 to about 20% today — and it is the poorest countries that are making the biggest leaps forward.
The unfortunate exceptions to all this progress, the countries where famine is still experienced, all just happen to be dictatorships which reject capitalism and globalisation. Think North Korea. Closer to home, we have come to take our current state of affairs for granted, but large cities like Dublin and London really do enjoy cleaner environments today than a century ago and it’s because of, not in spite of, the greater level of economic development.
The bottom line is that when people no longer have to worry about where the next meal is coming from, and can afford healthcare and education, they begin to turn towards other aspects of improving their lives, and that includes tackling pollution and other environmental problems.
In this sense, those who care about saving the world should be campaigning for more economic development, not less, and promoting the benefits of technology, not obsessing about the risks.
It might not feel like it, but our lives are better than those of our ancestors. Our descendants can be even better than ours. Now, for all our sakes, go and make some money — and cheer up.
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