The Rational Optimist (34 page)

Pessimism has always been big box office. It plays into what Greg Easterbrook calls ‘the collective refusal to believe that life is getting better’. People do not apply this to their own lives, interestingly: they tend to assume that they will live longer, stay married longer and travel more than they do. Some 19 per cent of Americans believe themselves to be in the top 1 per cent of income earners. Yet surveys consistently reveal individuals to be personally optimistic yet socially pessimistic. Dane Stangler calls this ‘a non-burdensome form of cognitive dissonance we all walk around with’. About the future of society and the human race people are naturally gloomy. It goes with the fact that they are risk-averse: a large literature confirms that people much more viscerally dislike losing a sum of money than they like winning the same sum. And it seems that pessimism genes might quite literally be commoner than optimism genes: only about 20 per cent of people are homozygous for the long version of the serotonin transporter gene, which possibly endows them with a genetic tendency to look on the bright side. (Willingness to take risks, a possible correlate of optimism, is also partly heritable: the 7-repeat version of the DRD4 gene accounts for 20 per cent of financial risk taking in men – and is commoner in countries where most people are descended from immigrants.)

As the average age of a country’s population rises, so people get more and more neophobic and gloomy. There is immense vested interest in pessimism, too. No charity ever raised money for its cause by saying things are getting better. No journalist ever got the front page by telling his editor that he wanted to write a story about how disaster was now less likely. Good news is no news, so the media megaphone is at the disposal of any politician, journalist or activist who can plausibly warn of a coming disaster. As a result, pressure groups and their customers in the media go to great lengths to search even the most cheerful of statistics for glimmers of doom. The day I was writing a first draft of this paragraph, the BBC reported on its morning news headlines a study that found the incidence of heart disease among young and middle-aged British women had ‘stopped falling’. Note what was not news: the incidence of heart disease had until recently been falling steeply among all women, was still falling among men, and was not yet rising even among the female age group where it had just ‘stopped falling’. Yet all the discussion was of this ‘bad’ news. Or note how the
New York Times
reported the reassuring news in 2009 that world temperature had not risen for a decade: ‘Plateau in temperature adds difficulty to task of reaching a solution’.

Apocaholics (the word is Gary Alexander’s – he calls himself a recovering apocaholic) exploit and profit from the natural pessimism of human nature, the innate reactionary in every person. For 200 years pessimists have had all the headlines, even though optimists have far more often been right. Archpessimists are feted, showered with honours and rarely challenged, let alone confronted with their past mistakes.

Should you ever listen to pessimists? Certainly. In the case of the ozone layer, a briefly fashionable scare of the early 1990s, the human race probably did itself and its environment a favour by banning chlorofluorocarbons, even though the excess ultraviolet light getting through the ozone layer in the polar regions never even approached one-five-hundredth of the level that is normally experienced by somebody living in the tropics – and even though a new theory suggests that cosmic rays are a bigger cause of the Antarctic ozone hole than chlorine is. Still, I should stop carping: in this case, getting chlorine out of the atmosphere was on balance the wise course of action and the costs to human welfare, though not negligible, were small.

And there are things that are getting worse, without doubt. Traffic congestion and obesity would be two big ones, yet both are the products of plenty, and your ancestors would have laughed at the idea that such abundance of food and transport was a bad thing. There are also many occasions on which pessimists have been ignored too much. Too few people listened to anxieties expressed about Hitler, Mao, Al-Qaeda and subprime mortgages – to name a handful of issues at random. But pessimism is not without its cost. If you teach children that things can only get worse, they will do less to make it untrue. I was a teenager in Britain in the 1970s, when every newspaper I read told me not just that oil was running out, a chemical cancer epidemic was on the way, food was growing scarce and an ice age was coming, but that my own country’s relative economic decline was inevitable and its absolute decline probable. The sudden burst of prosperity and accelerating growth that Britain experienced in the 1980s and 1990s, not to mention the improvements in health, lifespan and the environment, came as quite a shock to me. I realised about the age of twenty-one that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me about the future of the human race – not in a book, a film or even a pub. Yet in the decade that followed, employment increased, especially for women, health improved, otters and salmon returned to the local river, air quality improved, cheap flights to Italy began from the local airport, telephones became portable, supermarkets stocked more and more kinds of cheaper and better food. I feel angry that I was not taught and told that the world could get much better; I was somehow given a counsel of despair. As are my children today.

Cancer

By now this generation of human beings was supposed to be dying like flies from cancer caused by chemicals. Starting in the late 1950s, posterity was warned that synthetic chemicals were about to create an epidemic of cancer. Wilhelm Hueper, chief of environmental cancer research at America’s National Cancer Institute, so convinced himself that exposure to small traces of synthetic chemicals was a big cause of cancer that he even refused to believe that smoking caused cancer – lung cancer came from pollution, he believed. Rachel Carson, influenced by Hueper, set out in her book
Silent Spring
(1962) to terrify her readers as she had terrified herself about the threat to human health caused by synthetic chemicals and especially by the pesticide DDT. Whereas childhood cancer had once been a medical rarity, she wrote, ‘today, more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease’. This was actually a statistical sleight of hand; the statement was true not because cancer was increasing among children (it was not), but because other causes of childhood death were declining faster. She expected DDT to cause ‘practically 100 per cent of the human population to be wiped out from a cancer epidemic in one generation’.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that an entire generation of Westerners grew up expecting Carson’s cancer epidemic to strike them down. I was one of them: it genuinely scared me at school to know that my life would be short and sick. Influenced by Carson and her apostles I set out to do a biological project. I would walk the countryside and pick up the dying birds I found, have their cancers diagnosed, and publish. It was not a great success: I found one corpse, of a swan that had hit a power line. ‘Individuals born since 1945,’ wrote the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich in 1971, ‘and thus exposed to DDT since before birth may well have shorter life expectancies than they would if DDT had never existed. We won’t know until the first of these reach their forties and fifties.’ Later he was more specific: ‘The U.S. life expectancy will drop to forty-two years by 1980, due to cancer epidemics.’

What actually happened is that – excepting lung cancer – both cancer incidence and death rate from cancer fell steadily, reducing by 16 per cent between 1950 and 1997, with the rate of the fall accelerating after that; even lung cancer then joined the party as smoking retreated. The life expectancy of those born after 1945 broke new records. The search for a widespread epidemic of cancer caused by synthetic chemicals, relentlessly and enthusiastically pursued by many scientists ever since the 1960s, has been entirely in vain. By the 1980s, a study by the epidemiologists Richard Doll and Richard Peto had concluded that age-adjusted cancer rates were falling, that cancer is caused chiefly by cigarette smoke, infection, hormonal imbalance and unbalanced diet – and that chemical pollution causes less than 2 per cent of all cases of cancer. The premise on which much of the environmental movement had grown up – that cleaning up pollution would prevent cancer – proved false. As Bruce Ames famously demonstrated in the late 1990s, cabbage has forty-nine natural pesticides in it, more than half of which are carcinogens. In drinking a single cup of coffee you encounter far more carcinogenic chemicals than in a year’s exposure to pesticide residues in food. This does not mean that coffee is dangerous, or contaminated: the carcinogens are nearly all natural chemicals found in the coffee plant and the dose is too low to cause disease, as it is in the pesticide residue. Ames says, ‘We’ve put a hundred nails in the coffin of the cancer story and it keeps coming back out.’

DDT’s miraculous ability to halt epidemics of malaria and typhus, saving perhaps 500 million lives in the 1950s and 1960s (according to the US National Academy of Sciences), far outweighed any negative effect it had on human health. Ceasing to use DDT caused a resurgence of malaria in Sri Lanka, Madagascar and many other countries. Of course, DDT should have been used more carefully than it was, for although it was far less toxic to birds than previous pesticides, many of which were arsenic-based, it did have the subversive ability to accumulate in the livers of animals and wipe out populations of predators at the top of long food chains, such as eagles, falcons and otters. Replacing it with less persistent chemicals has brought otters, bald eagles and peregrine falcons bouncing back to relative abundance after an absence of several decades. Fortunately, DDT’s modern pyrethroid successors do not persist and accumulate. Moreover, sparing, targeted use of DDT against malarial mosquitoes can be done without any such threat to wildlife, for example by spraying the inside walls of houses.

Nuclear Armageddon

There were very good reasons to be a nuclear pessimist in the Cold War: the build-up of weapons, the confrontations over Berlin and Cuba, the gung-ho rhetoric of some military commanders. Given how most arms races end, it seemed only a matter of time before the Cold War turned hot, very hot. If you had said at the time that you believed that mutually assured destruction would prevent large direct wars between the superpowers, that the Cold War would end, the Soviet empire would disintegrate, global arms spending would fall by 30 per cent and three-quarters of all nuclear missiles would be dismantled, you would have been dismissed as a fool. ‘Historians will view nuclear arms reduction as such an incredible accomplishment,’ says Greg Easterbrook, ‘that it will seem bizarre in retrospect that so little attention was paid while it was happening.’ Perhaps this was just a stroke of luck, and admittedly the danger is far from over (especially for Koreans and Pakistanis), but nonetheless notice that things have got better, not worse.

Famine

One of the hoariest causes for pessimism about the fate of humanity is the worry that food will run out. The prominent eco-pessimist Lester Brown predicted in 1974 that a turning point had been reached and farmers could ‘no longer keep up with rising demand’. But they did. In 1981 he said that ‘global food insecurity is increasing’. It was not. In 1984, he proclaimed that ‘the slim margin between food production and population growth continues to narrow’. Wrong again. In 1989 ‘population growth is exceeding farmers’ ability to keep up.’ No. In 1994, ‘Seldom has the world faced an unfolding emergency whose dimensions are as clear as the growing imbalance between food and people’ and ‘After forty years of record food production gains, output per person has reversed with unanticipated abruptness.’ (A turning point had been reached.) A series of bumper harvests followed and the price of wheat fell to record lows, where it stayed for a decade. Then in 2007 the wheat price suddenly doubled because of a combination of Chinese prosperity, Australian drought, pressure from environmentalists to encourage the growing of biofuels and willingness of American pork-barrel politicians to oblige them by sluicing subsidies towards ethanol producers. Sure enough Lester Brown was once again the darling of the media, his pessimism as impregnable as it was thirty-three years before: ‘cheap food may now be history,’ he said. A turning point had been reached. Once again, a record harvest followed and the wheat price halved.

The prediction of global famine has a long history, but it probably reached its apocaholic shrillest in 1967 and 1968 with two bestselling books. The first was by William and Paul Paddock (
Famine, 1975!
). ‘Population-food collision is inevitable; it is foredoomed’ was the title of the first chapter. The Paddocks even went so far as to argue that countries such as Haiti, Egypt and India were beyond saving and should be left to starve; the world’s efforts should, on the Verdun principle of triage, be focused on the less desperate cases. By 1975, with the world not yet starving, William Paddock was calling for a moratorium on research programmes designed to increase food production in countries with high population growth rates – almost as if he wanted to bring about his own prediction.

The following year saw the publication of an even bigger bestseller that was even more misanthropic in tone.
The Population Bomb
allowed Paul Ehrlich, an obscure butterfly ecologist, to metamorphose into a guru of the environmental movement complete with MacArthur ‘genius’ award. ‘In the 1970s and 1980s,’ he promised, declaring a turning point, ‘hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.’ Ehrlich not only argued that mass death was inevitable and imminent, that human numbers would fall to two billion and that the poor would get poorer, but that those who saw that population growth was already beginning to slow were as foolish as those who greet a slightly less freezing day in December as a sign of approaching spring; in later editions, he added that the Green Revolution then transforming Asian agriculture would ‘at the very best buy us only a decade or two’. Four decades later, Ehrlich had learnt his lesson – not to give dates: in his book
The Dominant Animal
, co-written with his wife and published in 2008, he again foresaw an ‘unhappy increase in death rates’ but this time mentioned no timescale. Without a word about why his previous predictions of mass starvation and mass cancer had never happened, he remains confident in calling the top of the human happiness market: ‘The world in general seems to be gradually awakening to a realization,’ he regretted to say, ‘that our long evolutionary story is, through our actions but not our intentions, coming to a turning point.’