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

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.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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