Why can’t the Left stop whingeing about Britain?
The liberal media has it that Britain is a nightmare of cruelty and deprivation where top-hatted bankers dance on the graves of the homeless. In fact, we are one of the richest, most literate and stable countries on earth. So . . .
AS WE all know, the world is an increasingly dangerous place. We live in an age of growing insecurity. Democracy has been thrown on the defensive, terrorism is a greater threat than ever and the streets have rarely seemed more dangerous.
Social media are dissolving our family ties. Inequality is ripping communities apart. Brexit has turned the generations against one another. And for the first time in living memory, tomorrow’s children will probably lead poorer, less comfortable, more anxious lives than their parents.
If you agree with some, or indeed all, of that, then the Harvard psychologist and bestselling science writer Steven Pinker has news for you. To put it simply, he believes every one of those assertions is wrong.
For as he argues in a provocative new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, the modern world is not going downhill at all. Quite the reverse: for most people, life is better, even if they don’t realise it.
Reading that, you might think the Harvard professor had lost his marbles. Aren’t we supposed to be entering a new dark age of fanaticism and prejudice? Isn’t the world more divided and unequal than ever? Hasn’t something gone desperately wrong with the Western way of life?
No, says Pinker, calmly and rationally. ‘The world,’ he writes, ‘has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human wellbeing.’ And if you don’t believe him, he has the statistics to prove it.
More on those statistics in a moment, because I should admit that when I first picked up Pinker’s book I was a bit dubious about his argument.
Nobody who studies history can be unaware of the fragility of existence. Empires fall; natural disasters strike without warning; order tips into chaos; previously decent- seeming people turn into bloodthirsty monsters.
One reason why I have always been scornful of Left-wing utopianism is that it ignores those basic realities and seeks to tear down the institutions that keep our demons in check. But as the horrors of dictatorships, the world wars and the Holocaust remind us, our capacity for evil is never far from the surface.
SO when I found Professor Pinker telling me everything was splendid and the world was going to get even better, I began to worry about his grip on reality.
But then I thought again. In the past couple of years I have become increasingly weary of hearing bien-pensant intellectuals whining and whingeing about the state of the nation.
Reading Left-wing newspapers such as the Guardian, a visitor might assume Britain was some living nightmare of cruelty and deprivation in which feral dogs roamed the streets while top-hatted bankers danced on the graves of homeless paupers. Our visitor would never know that actually we are one of the most prosperous, stable, literate, sophisticated and safest countries on Earth.
And then, of course, there is Brexit. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard self- consciously highbrow types whingeing about ‘Brexit Britain’, which they never mean kindly.
When David Davis went to Austria last week and told business leaders that Britain would not be some ‘Mad Max style world borrowed from dystopian fiction’, you could barely hear yourself think for the howling of the ultra-Remainers. They never seem to notice that the economy has performed much better since the referendum than anybody, including me, expected.
On reflection, then, I decided to give Pinker the benefit of the doubt. At least it would be good to have a bit of scientific perspective, I thought, in contrast to the confected outrage of the liberal Twitterati.
To cut a long story short, he is right. Not just a bit right but completely, utterly, incontrovertibly right — and his Leftwing critics will never forgive him for it.
In essence, Pinker thinks we are reaping the reward for the colossal advances we have made since the great scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. It was then, in countries including France, Holland and, above all, England and Scotland, that thinkers came up with a new way to understand our world, characterised by reason, science and individualism.
Ever since, the world has been getting better. Yes, of course people have carried on fighting wars, killing each other and generally behaving badly, because human nature never changes. But in page after page of fascinating graphs — two words you rarely see together — Pinker shows that the underlying story has been much happier.
To give merely the most obvious example, the one thing we all want more of is time — and we get more than any generation before us.
In 1701, life expectancy in Britain was less than 40 years. In 1880 it was still less than 45. In 1930 it was about 60. But a child born in Britain today can expect to live to at least 80. Of course, that brings its own challenges — but who would want it to be less?
We are also healthier: we don’t die of smallpox, we have vaccines for mumps and measles, we are better at treating cancer and have even turned Aids from a killer to a chronic disease, managed by drugs.
We are better fed, too. Most
people who ever lived in Britain were terrified of going hungry. Today, despite all the headlines about food banks, the real problem is that we are much too fat — this writer included.
What else? Well, we are far richer. Britain’s GDP has increased inexorably since records began. And yes, each recession feels dreadful at the time, but in the grand scheme of things it is never more than a blip on the graph.
Worldwide, too, poverty is dying out. In 1820 about 90 per cent of the world’s population lived in ‘extreme poverty’, surviving on less than two dollars a day.
In 1900 it was still more than 80 per cent, and in 1950 roughly 70 per cent. But in the past few years extreme global poverty has fallen faster than ever and is now barely 10 per cent.
That fact alone is worth remembering. The next time some hysterical Corbynista starts ranting about the wickedness of Western imperialism and the evils of international capitalism, it is worth reminding them that Western capitalism is doing a pretty good job.
Refreshingly, Pinker also gives short shrift to the idea that inequality is the great scourge of the modern world. Actually, international inequality has declined in the past few decades. And even in Britain, where inequality undoubtedly increased in the 1980s and 1990s, we are much more equal than we were during the centuries before World War I.
In any case, Pinker doesn’t think inequality really matters, because the rising tide has lifted all boats. In most countries, even the very poorest are generally better off than ever before. Indeed, the people who care most about inequality tend — in my experience — to be high-minded academics, festering with jealousy at old friends who went into the City.
Finally, what about the terrible threat of terrorism and war?
When you look at the figures for 2015, they show that 175 people were killed in Western Europe by terrorists, and precisely five — two Britons and three other Europeans — lost their lives in wars. By contrast, more than 19,000 were killed in car accidents.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that some devastating war might not break out and kill millions. But wars are becoming rarer. And although we fret about ‘dirty bombs’ and biological weapons, Pinker points out that these would actually be extremely tricky to build and use, especially in conditions of total secrecy.
So why are we often told that the world is so wretched? Well, Pinker lays much of the blame with precisely those liberal intellectuals whom you might expect to be celebrating our achievements.
‘Intellectuals,’ he writes, ‘hate progress.’ And ironically, self-consciously ‘progressive’ intellectuals hate the idea of progress most of all, because it contradicts their obsessive belief that capitalism is a force for wickedness and division.
What is more, the intelligentsia’s endemic pessimism about the state of the world is a sort of ‘oneupmanship’ which makes them feel superior to the man or woman in the street.
So when the ordinary man delights in buying a bigger television, enjoying a fancy meal or going on holiday to sunnier shores, the intellectual snobs turn up their noses in disdain. ‘What a vulgar little man,’ they say to themselves. ‘What a slave to the consumerist fantasies of Western capitalism!’
Yet as Pinker points out, there is nothing to be ashamed of in these things. Indeed, the television, the meal and the holiday all reflect the kind of technological and cultural progress for which previous generations would have given their eye teeth.
It is much the same snobbery, of course, that has infected the commentary about Brexit. A genuine liberal might see the vote to leave the EU as a sign of a rumbustious but healthy democracy. Instead, the Euro- enthusiasts howl with rage like toddlers having a tantrum.
For Pinker, then, one of the things that most distorts our perspective is the ‘liberal tilt’ in academia, the media and intellectual life. As he puts it, ‘a faction of academic culture’, made up of hard-Left lecturers and a ‘diversity bureaucracy’, has created a false image of the 21st-century world.
Blinded by their own weird prejudices, they see racism everywhere, even though the modern West is more tolerant than any society before it. They are obsessed with inequality, though genuine deprivation is closer to extinction than ever before.
They peddle the myth of the evils of capitalism, even though capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than at any time in history. And in the last resort they try to demonise science itself, with academics in so- called ‘science studies’ claiming Western science is ‘gendered’ and ‘colonialist’ (this is not a joke, by the way. If you dare to disagree with them, they shout you down — as Pinker himself has found, with card-carrying liberals rushing to condemn his book, even though they have no serious answer to his barrage of facts.
What about the future? Well, Pinker is not a blind optimist. He recognises that there may be devastating wars, revolutions and natural disasters. Yet as he sees it, there is no evidence for believing the trends of the past few centuries will be reversed.
EVEN the environmental costs of progress may soon become an anxiety of the past. After all, we are more conscious of our environmental footprint than ever. We spend more time and money on conservation, take more care to preserve endangered species, and worry far more about climate change than any generation before us.
What is more, thanks to the continuing advance of prosperity, medicine and education, most people will not only be ‘healthier, richer, safer and freer’ but ‘ more literate, knowledgeable and smarter’.
When I picked up Pinker’s book, I had my doubts. But by the time I finished it, I was converted.
We don’t have a perfect world, he says, adding that ‘it would be dangerous to seek one’.
And yes, I could fill every page of this newspaper with the woes of the modern world, from the shortage of affordable housing and the weakness of British industry to the perils of social media and the witch-hunts in our universities. But not only is our society better than any before, it is an awful lot better than the dystopian fantasy so often presented by the liberal Left.
The truth is, we are supremely lucky to live where and when we do. And although most of us love nothing better than whingeing about our lot, most of us have never had it so good.
Just don’t tell Jeremy Corbyn, because he’d never believe you.
Enlightenment Now, by Steven Pinker, is published this month by Allen Lane.