As we awake this morning with the nauseous prospect of Donald Trump as the next US president, I am reminded of something I read recently which may offer consolation about living in a better world.
“We have fallen upon evil times. Politics is corrupt and the fabric is fraying.” Who said those words? Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders? Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen? The populists of the left and right sound so alike, it is difficult to keep up.
It may be consoling to know that, a century ago, an American professor found them inscribed on a stone in a museum in Constantinople. He dated them from ancient Chaldes, a country in what is now southern Iraq, in the year 3,800 BC.
We live in an era of global media and iPhone cameras everywhere. Every day we are bludgeoned by news of how bad everything is. Brexit, financial collapse, unemployment, poverty, environmental disaster, disease, hunger, war. Even Trump for President. We are led to think our world is on the brink of collapse.
Nostalgia, too, bears its share of the blame. As we get older, we are prone to look back on an imaginary carefree youth. We hark back to an idyllic Malta of the 1940s or 1950s, where life was simple, moral discipline was strong and everybody knew their place.
Many my age look back to a 1950s Malta which no longer exists. A society cannot remain preserved in aspic. Those who yearn for some imagined golden age are destined to be disappointed.
When I ask people about that period in history when they think the world was most harmonious and happy, they say it was the era they grew up in. They describe a time before everything became confusing and dangerous, when the young became rude and crude, or listened to discordant music, or stopped reading books in order just to play computer games. Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a poor memory.
Pessimism resonates. A recent YouGov poll found that only five per cent of Britons think that the world is getting better. In the United States only six per cent think the world is improving. More Americans believe in astrology and reincarnation than in progress.
If you think that there has never been a better time to be alive, that humanity has never been safer, healthier, more prosperous or less unequal, you are in a minority. But that is what the evidence shows incontrovertibly. Poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, child labour and infant mortality are falling faster than at any other time in human history. The risk of being caught up in a war or of dying in a natural disaster is smaller than ever. We live in a golden age.
In the last 50 years, world poverty has fallen more than it did in the preceding 500. Thirty-five years ago, almost nine in 10 Chinese lived in extreme poverty. Now it’s just one in 10. Then, just half of the world’s population had access to safe water. Now, 91 per cent do. Global trade has led to an expansion of wealth on a magnitude which is hard to comprehend. During the 25 years since the end of the Cold War, global economic wealth has increased almost as much as it did during the preceding 25,000 years. Extreme poverty has decreased from 37 per cent to 9.6 per cent.
We live in an era of global media and iPhone cameras everywhere. Every day we are bludgeoned by news of how bad everything is
Conflicts always make the headlines, so we assume that our age is plagued by violence. We concentrate on ongoing wars, such as the horrifying civil war in Syria. But we forget the conflicts which have ended in countries such as Colombia, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Angola and Chad.
The jihadi terrorist threat is new and frightening, especially since Daesh appeared on Malta’s doorstep in Libya. But Europeans are at 30 times greater risk of being killed by a ‘normal’ murderer than a terrorist, and the European murder rate has halved in just 20 years.
The central story of our era is that we are witnessing the greatest improvement in global living standards ever to take place. Life expectancy at birth has increased twice as much in the last century as it did in the previous 200,000 years. A child born today is more likely to reach retirement age than his forbears were to reach their fifth birthday.
Malta has made more progress over the last 50 years than in the first 7,000. We are well fed, longer lived, better housed, better educated, healthier and wealthier. We have pensions, free health services, higher incomes, among the highest home ownership in Europe, a social security safety-net and an overall higher standard of living than ever.
So why does everybody remain convinced that the world is going to the dogs? Because that is what grabs our attention. The more memorable an incident, the more probable we think it is. And what is more memorable than doom and gloom? What do you remember best: the story about a decent restaurant which serves an excellent meal, or a friend’s warning about the restaurant where he was poisoned and threw up all over his friend’s wife?
Human beings are hardwired to be suspicious and pessimistic. Fear and worry are tools for survival. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were the ones who survived cataclysmic upheavals and predators. They passed their stress genes onto us. This is why we find stories about things going wrong more interesting than stories about things going right. It is why books that say the world is doomed sell well, bad news sells and newspapers are full of it.
I have just been reading a book by Johan Norberg called Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. It is about humanity’s triumphs. He has written it partly as a warning that when we don’t acknowledge the progress we have made, we begin to search for people to blame for the problems that remain.
As Malta would attest, perhaps contrary to what many believe, world progress – and especially Malta’s progress – over the past few decades has been unprecedented. By almost any index you care to measure, life is markedly better now than it has ever been for almost everyone alive.
While it is true that not all our problems have been solved, we do now have a good idea of the solutions and we know what it will take to ensure this progress continues.
The fact that things have been getting better does not, of course, guarantee progress in the future. Although life is improving for most people it does not mean it is improving for everyone. Relative poverty still exists in Malta for some pensioners and lower-paid workers. The slippage in their status is real and painfully felt.
A large-scale financial crisis is still possible. Global warming will threaten eco-systems. Large-scale wars between major powers are possible. Terrorists could wreak havoc on a major scale. Progress is not automatic.
All the progress which Norberg writes about is the result of scientists, innovators, thinkers, entrepreneurs with new ideas, and brave individuals who fought for the freedom to do new things in new ways. If progress is to grow, knowledge which is cumulative, and freedom, western values, fresh thinking and innovation, the openness that progress depends upon, must continue to be fostered.