Come Friendly Meteor and Fall on Earth ....

(With apologies to John Betjeman)

Thinking in a time of Monstrous Chimeras and Evil Dreams and Criminal Follies.

We live in difficult times. So says a vast list of newspaper articles, magazine think pieces and contributions to academic journals. But do we really live in a particularly tough moment or are all times challenging? Between 1939 and 1945, 60 million people died and another 60 million were forced from their homes across Europe alone.[i] Hundreds of thousands of Jews, Roma and Sinte emerged from concentration camps to find their families and communities erased, more than six million people exterminated. Tens of millions of families had lost loved ones, homes, countries. In Java, Bengal and Vietnam around 5 percent of the population died of starvation, some of the 25 million people outside Europe killed by mostly man-made famines during that war.[ii]

In victory, Allied governments faced an almost paralyzing array of challenges: the occupation of Axis nations; their own broken economies; Stalin’s domination of Eastern Europe and his growing hostility; civil war in China; and the new nuclear age. The suffering did not cease when the war ended. A million people died in the Soviet famine of 1946-1947, including five percent of the population of Moldova.[iii] Nearly 150,000 Jews fled pogroms in Poland after the end of the war there. Somewhere between 600,000 and 2.5 million Germans died in the process of being expelled from Eastern Europe. A million German prisoners died in Soviet camps, and there are allegations that a similar number died under the Allies after the war. Misery drifted on long after Japan’s surrender, made visible in the dark burned skin of hibakusha, the victims of atomic bombs.

What came out of that bleak moment is an extraordinary display of optimism and idealism. Nations came together to create a set of global institutions that persist to this day: the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and soon afterwards NATO and the beginnings of the European Union. Newly freed populations demanded better lives, better healthcare and better education in Europe. Across the rest of the world, people fought for the end of colonialism and the right to determine their own futures.  On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared independence in Vietnam, beginning his speech with the words: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." The notion of universal human rights was soon enshrined in a United Nations declaration, as was equal suffrage. Refugees were given the right to seek a place of safety when threatened. Fifteen years after its obliterating defeat, Japan was hosting the Olympics in buildings remarkable to this day for their Modernist exuberance. There really was a city on a hill, even if it was sometimes barely visible on the horizon.

We live in less challenging times than World War II by any measure. War deaths declined steadily from 1946 onwards. Violence in the United States fell by 30 percent since 1998.[iv] The number of people living in poverty has shrunk at a faster rate in the past 20 years than ever before, with 120,000 people escaping from it every day.[v] The child mortality rate – a good indicator of how well governments perform and how much they care about their people – has halved in this century. Since 1998, global GDP has grown 50 percent and life expectancy is up seven years. Even the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the world’s amazing capacity to tackle disease; nine billion effective and safe doses of vaccine were produced in a year. The Swedish physician Hans Rosling started an industry of professional optimists, gathering data on all the ways the world is better now than in the past.[vi]  “An American in 2015, compared with his or her counterpart a half-century earlier, will live nine years longer, have had three more years of education, earn an additional $33,000 per family member and have an additional eight hours a week of leisure,” wrote the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.[vii]

Despite all of this, around 70 percent of people in developed economies believe their children will be worse off in terms of living standards than they are now.[viii] Pessimism has a certain stickiness to it. When people sense a problem, they tend to believe it is getting worse even when it is getting better. People often do not perceive even very steep declines in crime, for example.[ix] The future is a source of wonder but also dread, perhaps for the first time in nearly 300 years when the idea that we live in a world of constant advancement and progress became widely accepted in the West. Before that, the future was mostly seen as being more of the present and the present was very much like the past. People mostly believed their societies had emerged more or less fully formed in some process organized by higher powers and that nothing much would change, except the occasional drought or pestilence. Science, technological progress and the Enlightenment changed that.

That’s not to say we haven’t had fears before. As Joseph Conrad wrote in 1911: “We live in difficult times, in times of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies.”[x] But this fear coexisted with the idea that things could only get better. But pessimism has taken hold in some deeper way. This seems to have been shaped by environmentalism and the stark reality that we are living in an unsustainable way, pushing past the planetary boundaries in our consumption, our emissions, our harm to other species and our dumping of toxic chemicals. This pessimism of the Anthropocene is less about a dyspeptic nature and more about alarm about such facts as the pace of plant and animal extinctions is not just faster than an expected background rate but also more rapid than during the planet’s five previous mass extinction events. Man is now shaping the world in way we could not imagine even 50 years ago. The disappearance of bird song ties a knot of fear in us.

The environment and climate change, are now “wicked problems,” unlike those we have faced in the past. Alongside the linked issues of globalization, migration, vindictive populism, artificial intelligence, transnational crime and pandemics, they don’t have clear definitions and they certainly don’t have definitive solutions. There are only slighter better or worse outcomes depending on what you measure and when you measure it. They require major changes in behavior by vast numbers of people with widely divergent interests and it all needs to be agreed upon yesterday. Solutions are likely to be contradictory and no single vision of the problem or possible solution is likely to dominate. In many cases, we don’t even know what a good outcome would look like.

No wonder our minds are reeling. Definitions of wicked problems sometimes include the idea that each one is a symptom of another. Migration is a symptom of climate change and globalization, as are the scale of transnational crime and the speed at which diseases become pandemics. Artificial intelligence may savagely cut employment in many areas. Will that spark more migration, more crime, more shifting populations bringing violence and disease. Climate change is already an accelerator of conflicts and migration. Will all these add up to more crime, more corruption, more populism, more decay in the institutions we need to guide us out of this mess? Are we facing a critical mass of wicked problems?

Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound.

Cosmic Pessimism. Eugene Thacker.[xi]

Nobody likes a pessimist. Voters mostly want optimists, politicians mostly want to be sunny warriors, and public policy experts mostly want solutions, after all, what is the point of their work if nothing gets better? Populism challenges this –its practitioners tend to paint a very dark picture of a world that only they can save. But in most times, It is a basic rule in politics to have your principal – your minister, your ambassador, your special envoy – announcing good news while the lower rung officials dole out the gloomier items. If you persist in your negative views, you will be shunned. You need to snap out of it, get a coffee, have a nap. Your weltschmerz is an irritant to those around you trying hard to keep their spirits up.

Most people prefer to always look on the bright side of life, indeed some believe there is a cognitive bias towards positivity.[xii] The gloomy Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe looked into this, concluding that people deployed four mechanisms to avoid pessimism.[xiii] Isolation involves just avoiding pessimistic ideas; distractions come in a myriad forms from reality TV to baking; anchoring can involve religion, patriotism or any other deeply ingrained structure that stops you from thinking too much or too darkly; and finally sublimation, that part of the mind that welcomes pain but channels it into the creation of poetry, music or art.  Maybe it is no surprise that Zapffe, who died in 1990, was a pioneering environmentalist. And maybe it is also no surprise that political messages that include pessimism can struggle to overcome these mechanisms of resistance.

A general view in politics is that the public should not worry its pretty little head about the big fears: new bioweapons; rising sea levels; tactical nukes, what will spin out of Nigeria when its dry soil has to support 700 million people; the defrosting of the doomsday seed bank in the Arctic; and the growing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics, many of which are fake anyway. Unfortunately, this attitude means we do not discuss serious issues in serious ways. In the 2020 US Presidential debates, the moderator did not initially include climate change among the subjects to be discussed although it eventually came up, before descending into allegations that Joe Biden was planning to wipe out the oil industry. Migration is discussed in the United States in terms of Mexican rapists and the mythical spread of leprosy; not the vast array of issues that are affected by whether people can cross borders. Transnational crime is more often entertainment than political concern. The drug trade has led to the disappearance of tens of thousands of Mexicans and the near collapse of the state; Mexico was not discussed in the presidential debates.

Nevertheless, pessimism pervades life. A Misery-Industrial-Entertainment Complex bathes in the aphorism from the even gloomier German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer that life is nothing more than “constant dying.” To live is to suffer, to swing endlessly between pain and boredom. Better not to be born. None of us enjoy that choice and most of us seem to have what Schopenhauer admitted was a “will to life.” We’ve long had pessimism in high culture: Kafka; Eliot; Orwell; Beckett. But there seems to be pleasure in popular pessimism now. Lars von Trier, the Danish filmmaker, portrayed a woman on her wedding day welcoming an on-coming asteroid that will wipe out the planet. A genre of video games prevents players from ever winning, trapping them in an endless cycle of failure and rejection. TV shows shun the sunny ending, if they bother to wrap up their story lines at all. Nirvana has sold 75  million albums, Morrissey 15 million. Heaven knows we’re all miserable now.

Pessimism is a challenge to politics and policy. Democracy requires that we do not over-indulge in it. If we see everything in the world as a flaming dumpster fire, we may find ourselves more susceptible to demagogues and resistant to take any actions for a better future.

But we do have reason to be gloomy now. We are in an unprecedented moment in which man’s influence on the state of the planet is profoundly negative and cannot be reversed. Climate change is already causing worse storms, heavier floods and longer droughts. It is changing the patterns of disease, altering plant and animal life and reducing crop yields. Each rise in average temperatures causes more physical and mental illness, more suicides, more food shortages, more soil erosion, bigger wild fires and more forest loss. Even if we stopped all greenhouse emissions today, temperatures would probably carry on rising for thousands of years.[xiv] Climate change is irreversible in any human time frame.

Political philosophers and others have distinguished between optimism – a blind faith that things will get better propelled usually by some metaphysical belief – and hope – a sense that humans will work to make things better even when they face inevitable setbacks.[xv] We need to accept deeply pessimistic ideas about the world in order to reduce the harms that will come to our descendants but we also need to be hopeful enough to believe that change is possible. Each year, governments gather at the Council of Parties (COP) meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This is followed by annual expressions of disappointment and exasperation about how little is achieved. Even when agreements are reached they are riddled with caveats and exceptions and often ignored as there is no mechanism to enforce climate policy. It is becoming increasingly difficult to see a path to reduce carbon emissions when almost every temporary upset in global affairs – the COVID pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine – is used as an excuse to delay action. COP meetings reveal just how wicked the problem is and reinforce pessimism and yet there is hope in the persistence of all those working to address climate change.

Optimism can be positive or it can be a blind spot. Pessimists are less prone to cognitive distortions, less likely to see the best in people who don’t warrant a positive assessment. Social workers are often cautioned in their training to avoid being too optimistic. Politics, psychotherapy, parenting  and the world of technology are imbued with cultures of unalloyed optimism; it is almost regarded as shameful to be pessimistic about the prospects of a child or not to embrace the infinite expansion of democracy or the endless potential of technology.

This is despite our very real experience in these areas, which is not always positive. Encouraging optimistic workplaces full of positivity about the future has become a key mechanism through which human resources managers control workforces. The less-than-optimistic are weeded out despite their tendency to spot signs of trouble ahead. Pessimists are not just bad at parties, they are shunned at the office. No career has ever been made by suggesting that AI or Big Data might not be the cure to all our problems or that 5G seems to be a damp squib. Such is the pressure to be optimistic that organizations have to bring in professional pessimists to do scenario planning to anticipate inevitable setbacks or to “red team” ideas by picking them apart. How can we address the very real difficulties we face without adopting Pollyana-ish tech fantasies of Mars missions or succumbing to a doom-laden sense that it is all worthless given the challenges ahead?

Firstly, we need to do more to understand  and communicate those challenges. What does the climate future look like? Our capacity for computer modelling of climate grows by the year and therefore we have a better sense of what needs to be done. Do we have the resources for an energy transition and if not how would we get them? Who are the most vulnerable to climate change and how can we protect them? The mechanisms that exist to address these problems are by their nature cumbersome but we could do far more to build a consensus through citizen councils and new forms of policy engagement, long-term policy planning and better education.

Secondly, we need to move away from policy by slogan. Putting “End Racism” on a soccer shirt does not end racism. Just Stop Oil will just stop nothing. Defund the Police is a truly ridiculous idea that deserves scorn. Those societies without law and order are the worst places on the planet, particularly for women and children. The oil industry is never going to be abolished whatever Extinction Rebellion likes to think. We could however remove hydrocarbon subsidies and spend them on a carbon transition. Less snappy but also more likely to succeed. The creation of the concept of “modern slavery”, a catchall that seemingly includes all forms of labour exploitation, is a modern invention that seems driven more by marketing than any reality. Policy by slogan might rouse people but it drives also polarization and negativity, serious problems in the age of social media amplification.

All we can really do in many areas of public policy is reduce harms. We should have realistic assessments of what can be achieved with the resources available. Fewer histrionic assertions that all problems can and must be solved might reduce the sense of disappointment and mistrust that abounds in the public realm. As the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand told his officials, “Toujours, pas de zéle.” “Zeal”, he added, ”is three-quarters stupidity.” Did the leaders of the University of Michigan consider that when coming up with DEI policies that cost 250 million dollars but did not change the share of minority students?[xvi]

Thirdly, we should all build in skepticism to our thinking about all policy. Red teaming, an idea developed in militaries, involves developing a group that challenges all the assumptions and planning of any scheme to understand potential risks and pitfalls. Many policies are developed with assumptions that do not hold up but are never really examined: failure comes about for many reasons but taking wild leaps of faith about general buy-in and available resources are two of the most common, and they can be picked up ahead of time through a careful examination by a group mandated to be critical.

Fourthly, we should be mindful that the digital world does not upend the rules of physics. No digital technology will pull carbon from the atmosphere. No AI system will remove micro-plastics from our food chains. Big Data might help model climate change but it won’t change it. Advancing digital technology will mean a new understanding of the physical world, new ways to design materials and better ways to maximise our consumption but to survive we have to change the way we engage with the physical world. In short, we need to consume less and use what we have more effectively and realistically. Likewise, we need to engage with our social problems in similar ways. We are not going to end miserable working conditions or racism, nor will we abolish carbon or the police, but we can and mostly do take steady, small steps forward.

Climate is a global existential problem that could change everything. AI will benefit some but harm others. How will they react? Will economic dislocations undermine tolerant and open political systems? Migration will continue to shape the world; how it is managed will make an enormous difference to stability. Transnational crime undermines governments, costs hundreds of billions in losses and lends itself to atrocities such as the slaughter of women in Mexico. In Russia, it is hard to distinguish among the mafia, the government and big business; the impact on the world has been dire. But we can steadily reduce the harms these problems cause even if we cannot eliminate them.

[i] Old Wine in New Bottles in Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch. Refugees in Europe 1919-1959. A Forty Year Crisis? Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.

[ii] Cormac O Grada. The Famines of World War II https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/famines-wwii 2 September 2019.

[iii] Ibid

[iv] Max Roser, Joe Hasell, Bastian Herre and Bobbie Macdonald (2016) - "War and Peace". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace' Gregg Easterbrook. It’s Better than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear. Public Affairs. 2018.

[v] Max Roser, Most of us are wrong about how the world has changed (especially those who are pessimistic about the future). 2018. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/wrong-about-the-world

[vi] Rosling, H.; Rosling, O.; Rosling Rönnlund, A. (2018). Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Flatiron Books.

[vii] Steven Pinker. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

[viii] Pew Research Center. Research on Inter-Generation Finances. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/08/11/large-shares-in-many-countries-are-pessimistic-about-the-next-generations-financial-future/ 11 August 2022.

[ix] Ipso MORI and WEF Most People Around the World are Overly Pessimistic.  2016 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/12/you're-probably-too-pessimistic/

[x] Joseph Conrad. Under Western Eyes. 1911.

[xi] Eugene Thacker. Cosmic Pessimism. University of Minnesota Press. 2016.

[xii]  Alan Carr.  Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and Human Strengths. Psychology Press. 2004

[xiii] Peter Wessel Zapffe. The Last Messiah. Philosophy Now.

[xiv] The Royal Society Policy Briefs. https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/question-20/

[xv] Oliver Bennett. Cultures of Optimism. Palgrave MacMillan 2015.

[xvi] Nicholas Confessore. The University of Michigan Doubled Down on DEI. What Went Wrong? 16 October 2024. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/magazine/dei-university-michigan.html