Human optimism survived the Cold War, but will a hot planet kill it off ?

Iwas a child and a teenager in an era that was suffused with optimism. I know it’s a cliche to talk about the Swinging Sixties but it was a good time to be alive. The Beatles, rock ’n’ roll, the explosion in youth culture and a general growth in material well-being meant more and more people never had it so good. Everything seemed to be getting better every week.

I remember the queues of farmers at the local creamery and how, month by month, you could see the changes in prosperity as tractors and cars replaced donkeys, ponies and horses. Milking machines took over from hand-milking and herd numbers grew exponentially. Washing machines led to the redundancy of washing boards, television aerials sprouted from chimney tops, car ownership ballooned, and exotic drinks like vodka, rum and lager found their way on to the shelves in the local pub, where the pint and the small one had reigned supreme.

People began to take holidays and some even went abroad. Free secondary education meant university became an option for many rather than the preserve of the few. American factories in places like Shannon and Raheen in Limerick employed hundreds of people and paid wages that farmers could only dream about.

When it came to borrowing money, if the banks wouldn’t talk to you, the Credit Union would.

Although all was not well, optimism remained undaunted. The Cold War was in full frost, Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain and the threat of nuclear destruction hung over us. The Vietnam War was consuming the US and dividing the world, and closer to home the North was about to explode.

However, the prevailing atmosphere was one of hope, crowned by the moon landing in 1969 and exemplified by West Berlin, an enclave where bohemians danced and sang and wore flowers in their hair in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and at the heart of the austere East.

On this island, even after the Troubles broke out into open warfare, optimism prevailed. Joining the EEC in 1973 connected us psychologically, culturally and economically with the European continent while a massive cash injection into rural Ireland took farming from subsistence to business.

The 1980s might have been a dour, recessionary decade which saw the return of mass emigration, but it ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ushering in a new era.

In his novel Lessons, author Ian McEwan’s main character, Roland, finds himself in Berlin as the Wall falls and, joining crowds streaming across the old frontier, he has a vision of the future:

“Russia a liberal democracy, unfolding like a flower in spring. Nuclear weapons negotiated downwards to extinction. Then mega-tides of spare cash and good intentions flowing like fresh water, cleansing the dirt of every social problem. The general well-being refreshed, schools, hospitals, cities renewed. Tyrannies dissolving across the South American continent, the Amazon rainforests rescued and treasured — let poverty be razed instead of trees.”

Nine years later, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement was our Berlin Wall moment. Indeed, things looked as good as they could until greed ruined it. The Tiger years saw more money than sense wash around the country, leading to a bonfire of the vanities. Nothing has been the same since. While we might have recovered materially, we have not recovered our confidence and our optimism. Uncertainty and fragility have become the characteristics of our time.

International warfare is back in all its ugliness, climate change is contributing to environmental and societal breakdown, and to surging migration. Even the openness and tolerance that have marked much of the cultural change in Western society are under threat from a new self-righteousness.

Looking back, we see that many of the things we regarded as signs of progress bore the seeds of our destruction, like the mass ownership of cars, increased dependence on fossil fuels, low-cost air travel, our addiction to cheap and processed foods, and technological advances that have gone from the television aerial to the dubious blessing of the smartphone.

I remember how our parents used to look at us with a mixture of satisfaction and envy and say, “Haven’t you great lives nowadays, isn’t it well for you all.” I’m afraid we can’t say the same to our children; neither can we turn back the clock and recreate what we had. Much of it and its optimism were built on the false premise that more and bigger are better.

It’s time to sit with them and discuss how we can all resize and reimagine.

‘In the 1960s, month by month you could see the changes in prosperity as tractors and cars replaced donkeys, ponies and horses’