The second decade of the 21st Century ends in a few days. It has been marked by the greatest advance ever in human welfare, by some of the most benevolent weather of the last seven centuries and by bountiful food crops. It has also been marked by pessimism from the global elite. Is their pessimism a good thing or a bad thing?
Optimism can be dangerous. The greatest horrors of the modern age began on 1 August 1914, with the beginning of the First World War, and ended on 4 August 1945 with the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were 31 dreadful years when one terrible event lead to another. These included WW1 with 15 million deaths, the murderous Russian Revolution of 1917, the horrifying ascendancy of Hitler in 1933, WW2 with 55 million deaths, and then the atomic bombs, so terrifying they held the promise of ending terror. All of this was sparked off by the freakish murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 July 1914. But the spark that could burn down a forest can be extinguished by a cup of water, and the row over his murder could have been stilled by five minutes of sensible diplomacy. Instead it set civilisation ablaze. You can’t help thinking that optimism might have been to blame, and that if pessimism had reigned in 1914 there would have been no world war.
In June 1914, the mood in Europe was buoyant. The previous hundred years had been fairly peaceful; and there was unprecedented prosperity and technical advance. Nations seemed to be getting on well. Youth was cheerful and adventurous, looking for excitement. The mobilisation of troops and the activation of complex treaties was not realised as sinister. Happy young men volunteered to fight. Nobody said, “For God’s sake! Look at the new technology of war! Look at those trains that can move hundreds of thousands of soldiers! Look at the new cannons and machine guns!” Jeremiah wasn’t there when they needed him. Nobody predicted catastrophe and, when it came, it was too late for pessimism.
December 2020 sees unprecedented prosperity across most of the world. It also sees the gloom and resentment that prosperity often brings. Some of the current pessimism is good and useful, some bad and destructive. The topic of the year, Covid-19, is not especially important. It is a mild pandemic compared with most past pandemics, worse than the common flu by deaths, milder by loss of life (Years of Life Lost). This is because it hardly affects the young but affects the old quite badly. Governments are being too pessimistic about it and acting stupidly, doing more harm than good.
By far the most idiotic and destructive pessimism is over “the existential threat” of climate change. This is the idea that rising CO2 will cause dangerous climate change. It is pure nonsense, anti-scientific rubbish. Global temperatures in the past were often higher than now when CO2 was lower than now; weather extremes were worse than now during some times when CO2 was lower than now. Rising CO2, caused by our burning fossil fuels, will do nothing but good. It will have little if any effect on global temperatures, will not increase extreme weather events, and will not cause dangerous rises in sea levels or dangerous polar ice melting. All it will do, and is already doing, is promote plant life, including food crops. All of this is backed up by overwhelming scientific data and historical record. The pessimism over climate change is doing immense harm, corrupting science and inducing a debilitating hysteria. It might lead to calamitous measures such as the “Green New Deal”, which would wreck the environment and bankrupt the economy. Pessimism over climate change is 100% wrong.
Pessimism about Africa, including South Africa, is unfortunately justified. We should study the failure of post-colonial Africa, the corruption, decay, tyranny, and civil strife, and try to learn. The mood when the ANC took power in 1994 was excessively optimistic, causing us to take our eyes off the biggest danger, that we would repeat the mistakes of the countries to our north, which is exactly what we have done. The mood in South Africa now is pessimistic. That is probably good. The Zondo Commission has revealed to us corruption worse than we had imagined, deepening our pessimism. That is certainly good, teaching us suspicion of powerful men, which suspicion is always necessary for a healthy citizenry.
Worldwide the healthiest pessimism is over nuclear war. This is thoroughly good. The atomic bombs on Japan marked the end of 31 years of global horror. For the first time in history, a weapon terrified us into sanity. I believe it is the fear of nuclear weapons that has prevented a Third World War. But we must remain vigilant. World leaders must remain pessimistic about nuclear war and keep watching and speaking to each other, watching and speaking.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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