The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has observed that “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000 since yesterday” is a headline that could have run in every newspaper every day for the past 25 years. Pinker’s celebrated books Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature prosecute a rigorously data driven case that, for all the regular lamentations over imminent civilisational collapse, the human species has never been richer, safer, healthier, freer or longer-lived.
An encounter with Pinker, whom I interviewed for The Times a couple of weeks ago, should be mandatory for all habitual pessimists, although his hectic schedule (and our burgeoning numbers) could never allow it. His critics argue that some of his metrics are creaking (global poverty declines may be slowing and interstate conflicts rising) but it is hard to read his books fairly and deny that, for all the world’s recent travails, we are still living in what would have struck our ancestors as a golden age of unexampled prosperity.
To anyone familiar with premodern social history, that tragic, straggling death march of famine, toothache, fear and disease, no statistics are required to emphasise the superiority of life in 2025. Our tragedy is not that we are wallowing in one of the troughs of history’s line graph but nestling in the dip, imperceptible from the long perspective, after its most exuberant peak.
The problems of the 21st century are overwhelmingly the problems of success. We struggle with the chaotic superabundance of information; our ancestors were haunted by ignorance. We have to cope with the tragic consequences of humanity’s too-efficient exploitation of the planet’s resources. The notion of an obesity “epidemic” would have been laughable amid the diseases that stalked pre-modernity. Most of our ancestors were oppressed by a crushingly hierarchical and conformist social system, not by the infinity of individual freedom reckoned to be the fount of today’s “meaning crisis”.
Infinity of freedom is reckoned to be fount of a ‘meaning crisis’
There is an interpretation of Pinkerian optimism that wafts a hand at such “first world problems” and pronounces them negligible. For others, modernity is invariably selfsolving. The onward march of science crushes the doomsayers of yesteryear under the inexorable tread of progress. New York, we are reminded, was widely thought to be on the verge of drowning in horse manure a few years before the timely invention of the motor car. London smog was cured by central heating; obesity by Ozempic.
But you can believe in today’s golden age and also admit it introduces problems that are intimidating in their novelty. No previous human society has had to face up to the challenges of such formidable success. A civilisation that is as much of an economic and technological anomaly as ours searches history in vain for appropriate lessons.
For instance, ever greater personal freedom and ever greater technological progress have been the most reliable liberal cure-alls for struggling democracies since at least the mid-19th century. But how effective are those old elixirs in a world in which an excess of individualism appears to be driving a collapse of birthrates? Or in which Silicon Valley magnates seem intent on advancing artificial intelligence technologies to the point that they could destroy our species? Must we now oppose liberty and technology? History offers no clues.
Equally, no previous society has had to tackle the mood of decadent complacency that is arguably the most dangerous force in modern politics. Most European populations have eked out a living on the brink of a volcano — a single arbitrary crisis or governmental misstep away from war, rebellion or disease. A terrible but constant reminder of the preciousness of stability and moderation.
A mood of decadent complacency is the most dangerous force
The Enlightenment-era worship of reason and tolerance was a direct product of the bitter and bloody religious fanaticism of the 17th century. The giddy and reckless burn-it-all-to-the-ground mood that pervades today’s politics is a function of more than a half century of peace, prosperity and democratic government.
Indeed crises, according to a more controversial line of argument, can be positively stimulating. Nuclear proliferation has made full-blown interstate conflicts much rarer since the middle of the last century but, as a friend is fond of arguing, the long peace has also robbed modern countries of the most reliable spur to technological innovation and political reform. Few countries in history have had the opportunity to just... drift without ever hitting the rocks. Prosperous stagnation is a new problem.
Perhaps the most unforeseeable problem is that of heightened expectations. Human psychology is more sensitive to relative than absolute deprivation. The historian Peter Turchin has warned that threats to the continued prosperity of the middle class are about the most reliable catalysts for revolution in history. Hell hath no fury like the downwardly mobile. The richer a society becomes, the higher its citizens’ expectations. Nowadays, mere stability requires the maintenance of runaway success. That a generation could be the third or fourth luckiest in history and yet outraged to the point of revolt is remarkable but hardly a psychological mystery.
To acknowledge the problems of success is not to deny our luck. Rather it is to treasure at it all the more. History offers a sense of the extraordinary fragility of the sublime anomaly we call modernity. We can’t mess this up. We are so dauntingly lucky.
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