Suggested reading

Don’t sweat the small stuff, or why the ‘New Optimists’ are only half right

By Peter Franklin

But it’s not all good news. In fact, as Ashley Fetters reports in the Atlantic, the latest news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in America is not good at all:

“…reported cases of three sexually transmitted diseases in the United States had reached an all-time high in 2017. Rates of gonorrhea rose by 67 percent, syphilis by 76 percent, and chlamydia by 21 percent, to a total of almost 2.3 million cases nationwide. According to the CDC, 2017 surpassed 2016 as the year with the most reported STD cases on record—and marked the fourth year in a row that STDs increased steeply in the U.S.”

Why are STDs spreading when Americans appear to be having less sex?

The answer is that one must disaggregate the figures. If the most vulnerable groups are becoming more likely to engage in high-risk behaviours, then we can expect more of the worst outcomes irrespective of any trend towards greater responsibility in the population as a whole.

A specific factor may be a rise in condomless sex linked to complacency about HIV-AIDS. We now live in an era where we have drugs to treat or prevent infection with HIV. They are saving lives, but unlike condoms, they don’t provide protection against other STDs.

And then there’s the impact of America’s opioid epidemic on sexual health:

“Gail Bolan, the director of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention… [said] that other CDC research suggests a link between STD transmission and the risky sex acts often associated with opioid use and addiction. She cites a soon-to-be-published CDC study that found 15- to 24-year-olds who reported injected drug use in the last year were more likely to be diagnosed with chlamydia, syphilis, and gonorrhea than those who didn’t inject drugs. More importantly, she adds, ‘injecting drugs was also associated with higher rates of forced sex, sex with people who exchange money or drugs for sex, and sex with other people who inject drugs’—which are all ‘high risk factors’ for STD transmission…”

As reported by Margot Sanger-Katz in the New York Times, the latest news on the direct impact of the epidemic is also pretty grim:

“Drug overdoses killed about 72,000 Americans last year, a record number that reflects a rise of around 10 percent, according to new preliminary estimates from the Centers for Disease Control. The death toll is higher than the peak yearly death totals from H.I.V., car crashes or gun deaths.”

Suggested reading

America's other drug epidemic

By Peter Franklin

The progress narrative is remarkably similar to its ostensible opposite – the decline narrative. Both peddle a myth of inevitability.

It’s not that progress isn’t real, but that it’s fragile – and that some unexpected external factor can result in rapid, unanticipated calamity.

Indeed, unexpected factors can be the inadvertent result of our advances. That we now have lifesaving drugs against HIV is undoubtedly-progress, but complacency about unsafe sex isn’t. We should also be thankful for the opioids that allow people to manage painful medical conditions – and yet, at the same time, the over-prescription and misuse of those substances has primed a life-destroying epidemic of monstrous proportions.

The dichotomy between the optimistic and pessimistic narratives is a false one. Progress is real – but so is the human capacity to use the advances we make as a pretext for, or the means of, destruction.

Or to put it another way, things get better all the time, but they can always get worse.

However, in a brave and brilliant column for the Guardian he doesn’t go after the easy targets, but for the cultural elite he’s theoretically part of:

“Back in 2016, it was briefly fashionable to feign interest in at least some of the places that voted for Brexit and Trump and argue that people with so-called progressive politics ought to think about their problems. But in some quarters, the ‘in’ thing is now a sour, dismissive attitude to millions of people and their supposed complaints. The underlying worldview is simple: whatever the economic context, one part of society is seen as racist, stupid, nostalgic, and brimming with senseless emotion, while another is logical, enlightened and forward-thinking and, despite the fact that the era of alleged rationalism that has now been overturned brought us such disasters as the Iraq war and a huge economic crash, the modern nightmare boils down to the fact that the first group are suddenly in charge.”

Of course, the idea that the cultural outgroup is now running the show is absurd. In Britain, both the governing party and the main opposition party are dominated by members of Parliament who campaigned to stay in the EU. As for the EU itself, the Euro-establishment is firmly in control – both at a federal and a national level.

As for America, the Trump administration is a government of billionaires acting for billionaires.

Beyond politics, every locus of power and influence, whether in business, finance, the arts, academia, the media, and so on, is controlled by exactly the same kind of people as before.

In that respect, nothing has changed.

Which is why the elites have been able to drop their “feigned interest” in the people and places that dared to vote contrary to wishes of the establishment.

As for “senseless emotion”, that’s a rather dangerous thread to be pulling on. Consider the metropolitan liberals who dealt Theresa May a near-fatal blow in the 2017 general election. By depriving her of a majority they greatly increased the vulnerability of a remain-voting Prime minister to Brexit hardliners; and by handing Jeremy Corbyn a moral victory, they greatly weakened the position of moderates in the Labour Party.

Of course, they were fully entitled to express their rage over Brexit at the ballot box – but the practical consequences leave them in a weak position to accuse others of irrationality. (Ditto the sentimentalists who picked the worst possible candidate to take on Donald Trump in 2016.)

Clothed in fashionable garb, even the uttermost lunacy can go about in polite society. In various guises from Marxism to social Darwinism to Freudian psychoanalysis, there’s always been a lot of that in progressive circles. At the current moment in time, Harris sees the prejudices of the elites dressed up in the liberal optimism of Steven Pinker:

“The Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has just published Enlightenment Now, a doorstep-sized statement of the case for ‘reason, science, humanism and progress’ against what he calls ‘progressophobia.’”

Therefore, if populists are making headway it is because they have fooled ignorant progessophobes:

“Pinker’s book evokes the same liberal misanthropy now swirling around Brexit. ‘Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options, but basic facts,’ he says. And woe betide anyone who publicly questions the idea that progress is continuing apace, and no fundamental rethinks are required. ‘I believe that the media and intelligentsia were complicit in populists’ depiction of modern western nations as so unjust and dysfunctional that nothing short of a radical lurch could improve them,’ he says, seemingly ignoring the fact that 10 years after the crash there is still rather a lot of injustice and dysfunction around.”

As I’ve said before, the ‘New Optimists’ get a lot of things right. Across the world we do indeed see massive progress against poverty, disease, illiteracy and all manner of other ills. Though most of that comes from the global deployment of advances that the West made decades ago, we should be grateful for it.

Recommended reading

Test article

By Peter Franklin

But if the rest of the world is catching up with us, it’s also because we’ve had at least a generation of standing still – and for many people, going backwards:

“It may fly in the face of the boundless optimism proffered by Pinker, but in a lot of these places, in terms of basic security and a collective belief in the future, life was probably better 40 or 50 years ago.”

Advances like smartphones don’t even begin to make up for the collapse of family, community and the dignity of a respected role in life.

Despite visible symptoms like the opioid epidemic in the US, the liberal elites just can’t admit that something is terribly wrong – let alone do anything about it.

“In Britain and elsewhere, the liberal left has still not found the language to speak to that sense of loss. Even now, a lot of the people who feel it see Brexit as the better of two options: the continuation of the way things were before, or a chance to at least upturn the tables, bring decision-making much closer to home and somehow start again.”

“I feel your pain”, said the first and only President Clinton.

“Feel mine!” say his liberal successors.

Forget the fact that we now use over three times as many antidepressants as we did when Tony Blair first came to power in 1997[1.  ‘Record number of antidepressants prescribed…‘, The Guardian, 29 June, 2017], there are still those who are humming along to that tired old D:ream anthem that heralded Blair’s victory: ‘Things can only get better’. And look how that turned out.

Recommended reading

Test article

By Oliver Kamm

Oliver Kamm’s ‘optimism’ is political, of course. In his head, science, liberalism, capitalism and progress form an unassailable pact, driving the human race inexorably onwards from ignorance and poverty towards knowledge and wealth. It is the dream of the 18th century Enlightenment, but it is also one that borrows heavily – though usually without acknowledgement – from religious ideas about history having some sort of in-built direction. Here, for instance, is a hymn that we often sing in church:

God is working his purpose out,
as year succeeds to year,
God is working his purpose out,
and the time is drawing near;
nearer and nearer draws the time,
the time that shall surely be,
when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God
as the waters cover the sea[2. ‘God is working his purpose out’, Arthur Campbell Ainger, 1894].

Neo-liberal optimism is a secularised version of precisely this philosophy of history. And, as an underlying assumption, it allows neo-liberals to depict those who oppose their philosophy as not just disagreeing with them, but also of standing in the way of history itself – as though such people are involved in a conspiracy against the very nature of things.

It is no coincidence that those most associated with this ideology of progress are also those who were among the loudest cheerleaders of the Iraq war, for instance. For if the project of continual progress is to keep on advancing, then those who stand in its way must be destroyed. That is why Islam is often depicted by neo-liberals as ‘medieval’. To those who believe in constant progress, ‘living in the past’ almost constitutes some sort of moral objection, and certainly as something to be overcome. And here is the source of the real danger of this philosophy of history.

The 20th century was littered with the corpses of those who were deemed to oppose progress. For both Communism and Nazism were influenced by this hideous Enlightenment d:ream, employing pseudo-scientific rationalism as justification for their brutality.

In 2010, the American author and socialist Barbara Ehrenreich published ‘Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking fooled America and the World’. She explains that the book was a reaction to the ideology of positive thinking that was being applied to people who were “downsized from the corporate world”, those who were told that being sacked wasn’t bad; that it was a “growth opportunity”; that they will come out of it stronger if only they had the right attitude.

This is where the oppressive nature of ‘smile or die’ optimism kicks in. Its message is basically this: “Put on a smiley face and don’t complain”. In other words, if you don’t find a job – indeed, if you don’t become a millionaire, says the American d:ream – it’s really your fault because you have set yourself against the very nature of things.

In 1952, Norman Vincent Peale published his book ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’. It was 186 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and sold five million copies. And it was to the Marble Collegiate church on Fifth Avenue, where the Reverend Norman Peale was the Lead Pastor, that the Trump family went for Sunday worship and spiritual guidance. Norman Peale’s “believe in yourself” philosophy found the perfect student in young Donald.

Rule one, writes Peale: “Formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself succeeding” and keep this picture before your mind’s eye “no matter how badly things seem to be going”. In other words, just tell yourself things are going well, even if they are not. At the very least, here is a philosophy of optimistic self-deception that is terrifying as the basis of a world-view for the President of the United States of America[3.  ‘The Power of Donald Trump’s Positive Thinking‘, Politico, 13 October, 2017]. Not just narcissistic but, worse: delusional.

Under the aegis of metaphysical optimism and positive thinking, we can convince ourselves that the climate is doing absolutely fine and nuclear weapons are just for keeping the peace. From this perspective, it matters not that robots have started to take our jobs and that weapons will soon have a mind of their own. Stay positive. Things can only get better.

Instead of listening for the wisdom in these words, and indeed the opportunity in them, the vanguard forces of the Enlightenment d:ream look on death as just another problem to be solved. And the deus ex machina of technology will one day address even this central feature of the human predicament, they predict. One day we will be able to upload our consciousness into software – or something like that. We will become trans-human, better than human, almost mini-gods.

Pah. All is vanity. And striving after wind.

“In response to the question ‘All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?’,  just 10 per cent in Sweden, 6 per cent in the US, 4 per cent in Germany and 3 per cent in France thought things were getting better. Why? Because, it turns out, we are pessimists by nature.”

Tupy – one of a select band of New Optimists – puts forward various explanations for the prevailing mood of pessimism. We start with a Darwinian argument:

“Human beings are constantly bombarded with information. Because our brains have a limited computing power, they have to separate what is important, such as a lion running toward us, from what is mundane, such as a bed of flowers. Because survival is more important than all other considerations, most information enters our brains through the amygdala – a part of the brain that is ‘responsible for primal emotions like rage, hate and fear.’”

Our ancestors were those people who were wary of the sudden sources of danger, because those who weren’t didn’t live long enough to reproduce. We are therefore the inheritors of a somewhat paranoid frame of mind.

Tupy also suggest that bad news is, in general, more noticeable than good news:

“…good and bad things tend to happen on different timelines. Bad things, such as plane crashes, can happen quickly. Good things, such as the strides humanity has made in the fight against HIV/AIDS, tend to happen incrementally and over a long period of time. As Kevin Kelly from Wired has put it, ‘Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of Science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades in to what we might call civilisation … [Progress] is a self-cloaking action seen only in retrospect.’”

I’m not sure that’s entirely true. In the modern world, the biggest threats can be every bit as gradual as the progress we make:

• A key example is climate change, in which man-made global warming is creeping up on us over decades, not suddenly appearing like a lion from the undergrowth;
• Other examples include the growing problem of antibiotic resistance;
• The accumulation of plastic waste in the oceans;
• The build-up of problem debt in the financial system;
• The spread of the opioid epidemic in America;
• The propagation of Islamic extremism on the internet;
• Diminishing returns from once reliable innovation pathways;
• The long-term concentration of market power in the hands of few big tech companies.

These are systemic threats arising from highly complex, large-scale human activities that didn’t exist when we were still emerging as a species. While evolution may have sensitised us to immediate threats to our personal safety, it won’t have done much to prepare us for the big ticket items I’ve listed above. Our prehistoric ancestors were incapable of either creating or solving such problems.

Tupy argues that politicians “have realised that banging on about ‘crises’ increases their power and can get them re-elected.”

That is often true of sudden, dramatic pieces of bad news – in which a particular disaster is spun into a wider threat to the general public (for which one’s political opponents are entirely to blame, of course). However, it usually isn’t true of gradual-but-systemic dangers to the common good.

Time-and-again, the political (and media) response to this second kind of bad news is not overkill, but too-little-too-late.

Well, maybe not. Looking back, future historians might just accord more significance to another recent development – the result of the latest government auction of contracts for new power generating capacity. Compared to Britain’s departure from the European Union, this might not seem that important, but it really is.

An auction is a process of price discovery, and what this auction revealed is that the price of offshore wind power has fallen to a record low. Reporting for the Telegraph, Jillian Ambrose sets out the key numbers:

“The contracts will grant offshore wind developers, including Dong Energy and Engie, a guaranteed revenue of just £57.50 per megawatt-hour of electricity produced in 2022/23. This is a sharp fall from the £74.75/MWh granted to Innogy and Statkraft’s Triton Knoll project, which will start up just one year earlier, and less than half the cost of turbines already producing power at around £150/MWh.”

Costs were always expected to fall, but not as far and as fast as that. The expectation was that offshore wind would remain significantly more expensive than onshore wind, gas-fired power and even nuclear power.

This upsets previous calculations – not least the decision to go-ahead with Hinkley Point C, a new nuclear power station, contracted to provide electricity at a cost of £92.50/MWh. Compared to the new normal for offshore wind this looks like truly appalling value for money.

In fact, it’s much worse than it first appears. Hinkley won’t start generating electricity until the second half of the next decade (assuming no further delays) – and will receive its guaranteed price for 35 years instead of the 15 years given to new renewable capacity (including offshore wind).

Furthermore, this multi-decade commitment of subsidy is propping up an ailing French industry; in contrast to offshore wind which has the potential to be a major export opportunity for the United Kingdom. Even without exports, the scope for domestic expansion is vast: Britain is surrounded by windy, but conveniently shallow, seas.

Offshore wind isn’t the only renewable technology making rapid progress. In America, solar power is surging ahead. Megan Guess for Ars Technica reports on the latest developments:

“On Tuesday, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced that utility-grade solar panels have hit cost targets set for 2020, three years ahead of schedule. Those targets reflect around $1 per watt and 6¢ per kilowatt-hour in Kansas City, the department’s mid-range yardstick for solar panel cost per unit of energy produced (New York is considered the high-cost end, and Phoenix, Arizona, which has much more sunlight than most other major cities in the country, reflects the low-cost end).”

Guess adds that hardware costs have come down so fast that so called ‘soft costs’ like installation now account for much or most of the cost of solar. This would suggest that future developments like the use of robots or the direct incorporation of solar cells into building materials could cut even deeper into the cost of new capacity.

Even as things stand, the best renewable options are now competitive with dirtier forms of energy. One might therefore expect those who opposed green energy on affordability grounds to be happy. Sadly, the soi dissant free marketeers who campaigned so vigorously against green energy have been far from gracious in defeat – despite being proved wrong by the market.

To be fair, they weren’t completely wrong. There are many examples of bad green policy and the sceptics were right to point them out. But while constructive criticism is always justified, the same cannot be said for unrelenting negativity – especially from those who claim to offer an optimistic alternative to environmental doom and gloom.

A while back, I wrote about the ‘New Optimists’ – a loose coalition of thinkers who believe there’s a lot more going right in the world than going wrong. The best of them recognise that we do face serious challenges, including environmental challenges like climate change, but they have faith that human goodwill and ingenuity will win the day.

Quite right too. There is every reason to think that the market forces of competition and innovation (with some judicious support from the state) can indeed find affordable, sustainable solutions to the problems we face as a species.

The rapid progress made on renewable energy should be all the proof we need.