The future is not as bad as it looks

WITHIN the next century, a 300-foot-high (100-metre-high) tsunami triggered by the collapse of the western side of La Palma island in the Canaries into the Atlantic Ocean is likely to drown everybody on the east coast of the United States, but by then it won't really matter. The environment will already be wrecked, democracy will have fallen to globalised corporate power, biotechnology will have turned our children into Frankensteins eating 'Frankenstein foods', and all our familiar human institutions and values will have been perverted or destroyed by the twin solvents of rampant capitalism and post-modern relativism. If you think that the world is falling apart, that you are living closer to the bitter end of the story than the bright beginnings -- then you are in good company. Most people have always thought that. But they were usually wrong, and you may be too. Perspective is everything, and viewed from the present the future always seems dark to most people. Why? The reason, suggests Oliver Bennett in his new book Cultural Pessimism, is not so much logical as psychological. Bennett does not deny that many terrible things will happen in the future. What he questions is the great weight that we give to negative news about both the present and the future, despite the fact that never before has such a high proportion of the human race lived in freedom, security and dignity. There is always some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. The dystopias are often mutually exclusive -- you cannot have the universal triumph of ruthless capitalism AND total environmental collapse (though you could perhaps have them one after the other) — but true enthusiasts tend to pile them up into a single gory heap. So one of Bennett's real achievements is to provide a clear and reasoned taxonomy of the rival versions of pessimism about the future. There are all the theories of decline that revolve around environmental collapse. From Thomas Malthus to James Lovelock, most people who compare the behaviour of human beings with the dynamics of natural systems have come to deeply pessimistic conclusions about the long-term future. Their analyses may ultimately be right, but what is striking is how popular their views are with people who, on closer questioning, do not actually understand their arguments about bio-diversity or climate change or population growth. The same goes for the growing loss of faith in the ability of science and technology to create a better world. This world is clearly vastly better in material terms than the world of 1500 for most of the people in it, and it is mostly the application of scientific principles to technology that made the difference, but the enterprise of science is now viewed by a large part of the public as more likely to bring doom than development. And so on. There are those who predict the imminent collapse of the hyper-capitalist global economy (both old Marxists, and radical capitalists like George Soros), and those who believe that business is taking over the world, leaving only the facades of democracy and free media, and those who fear that modernisation equals rampant individualism equals social disintegration. There are elements of truth in all these analyses, and maybe one of them will really come fully true. But none of them has the tangible reality and predictably ghastly consequences of the global nuclear war we lived on the brink of for much of the latter 20th century. Yet these fuzzier disasters command a much wider audience of enthusiasts. What makes the current disaster scenarios so popular? Bad news is more exciting, and it feeds people's self-importance to believe that something extra-special is going to happen in their own historical era. But Oliver Bennett also perceptively suggests that it's because many people are mildly depressed. Turning their anxieties outwards lets them cheer up in their personal lives. The happy environmentalist ought to be a contradiction in terms, but many activists are amazingly optimistic about their private lives. They are also serious people worthy of respect, and they may be right. But it is remarkable how pessimistic we all manage to be about a world where the risk of large-scale war is lower than at any time in history, where freedom and democracy are spreading into the most unlikely places, and where a vast majority of people live better, longer lives than their grandparents. It's human nature to worry. There will almost certainly be a 25th century that's fit to live in. But you may be sure that the people who are alive then will be deeply worried about the 26th century. Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist