Promises and perils from 2018 (Part 1)

With all the sound and fury deafening the world this week, you probably missed one of 2018’s best news stories.

We’re sure you heard Donald Trump’s latest railings against migrants, the verbal fusillades China fired Canada’s way and the alarms ringing throughout the planet’s topsy-turvy stock markets.

But we bet this commotion drowned out the happier — and possibly more significant — revelation from British scientists that their breakthrough in treating patients’ immune systems may provide the cure for cancer.

And that yawning gap between overly pessimistic perceptions and a more optimistic reality pretty much sums up what’s happening with humans in the 21st century. Far too often we can’t see the wonderful, marvellous forest growing up around us because we’re obsessed with a few rotten trees.

The problem is that in rightly focusing on today’s serious problems, we forget the often trying circumstances our species came from and the arduous journey over millennia that brought us to the present. Consider that as recently as the 1960s, most humans had always been illiterate and always lived in poverty.

Regrettably, those problems persist. But the number of humans living in poverty and the share of the global population which is poor have steadily declined since the 1970s, according to Oxford University economist Max Roser.

His enlightening website, Our World in Data, also reports that over the same time, both the number of people who are malnourished and the percentage of humanity going hungry have profoundly decreased. So, too, infant mortality rates have dropped while literacy rates, and the absolute number of people who can read and write, have climbed. Every day, hundreds of thousands of more people gain access to electricity and clean drinking water.

Meanwhile, since the end of the Second World War, the number of democracies and the proportion of the world living in a democracy have soared. That remains true whatever stresses some democracies currently experience.

The trouble with the pundits who dismiss 2018 as an unmitigated disaster, and President Trump who wants to “Make America Great Again,” is that they ignore this historical perspective.

Go back to the supposedly golden age of the 1950s and early 1960s. Homosexuality and abortion were illegal in Canada. Indigenous Peoples were denied the vote. Canada’s racist immigration policies made it hard for someone who wasn’t a white European to settle here. Women faced almost insurmountable barriers in the workplace and politics.

Racism, sexism, along with prejudice and discrimination against gays, lesbians and transgender people still exist in this country and this world. But history’s currents are moving in a different direction, toward individual liberty, equality, mutual tolerance and genuine acceptance.

And how can we ignore the technological revolutions that have made life for so much of the planet more convenient, comfortable and enjoyable than ever before? Twenty-first century medical science cures illnesses that were once life-altering or absolute death sentences.

The survival rates of cancer patients have skyrocketed since 1990 and researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in Britain this week reported that treatments using transplanted, donated immune cells could mean future generations will no longer be terrified of cancer.

Life in 2018 is often very good indeed. The world’s not going to hell in a handbasket. And knowing that utopia is possibly within our grasp should inspire us to confront and deal with the urgent problems facing us in 2019.

This is the first of a two-part review of the world in 2018. On Monday, we look at the challenges from the past year.