Disillusion gives birth to demoralization, and a demoralized public is a potentially disaffected one. This is one reason why almost every English novel before Thomas Hardy ends on an affirmative note, even if this runs counter to what it has actually shown about the world. Art must edify as well as entertain. It must raise our spirits as well as feed our curiosity about our fellow humans, show things as they are but also as they might be in some more just, compassionate parallel universe. Fiction makes up for the deficiencies of reality.

Even so, it’s important that optimism isn’t overdone. This is partly because people are quick enough to see through hollow promises and bogus superlatives. But it’s also because, while our rulers may be idealistic, prating of a new Golden Age of peace and prosperity, the populace is spontaneously materialistic, more interested in the price of eggs than the advent of Utopia. The bankers and CEOs are materialists as well, though they’re aware that one needs the odd burst of piety and patriotic rhetoric to mask the naked self-interest of their actual activities. Ruling classes are not always fooled by their own ideology. This is why it’s a futile pursuit to speak truth to power, since power usually knows the truth anyway. Power understands that one occasionally needs to invoke God, the greatness of the nation and the spirit of selflessness without allowing it to interrupt the daily business of screwing one’s competitors. As the wit remarked, it’s when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it’s time to give it up.

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The return of America's Puritans

By Terry Eagleton

The orgy of collective self-congratulation and sham religiosity which was Trump’s inauguration showed all this well enough. The man himself was in Messianic mode, sent by God to save the nation: as though the Almighty’s first attempt at this task, by sending a close family member, hadn’t quite come off. Looking around the world, one feels bound to agree. Trump was in a performative mood as well, which may require some explaining. For philosophers of language, performative statements are the kind of utterance that gets something done. Promising, cursing, blessing, welcoming, instructing, forgiving, forbidding: these are examples of language as action, doing something by saying something, not describing the world but bringing some new state of affairs into existence through the power of the word.

It was in this spirit that Trump decreed on being elected that there were now only two genders in the United States. It was as though all other genders vanished into thin air as the words were spoken, which is to say that performative language is a kind of magic. You can transform the world with a movement of the lips. You can even conjure new geographical features into existence, such as Mount McKinley or the Gulf of America. The same goes for Trump’s declaration that “The Golden Age of America begins right now”, which is less an observation like “What a fine library!” than a creative act like “I declare this library open”. Idealism in the sense of a positive vision of the world begins to merge into idealism in its more philosophical sense, meaning the power of the mind to create reality in its own image. If the truth is inconvenient, you can replace it by legislating an alternative truth into being.

This is all the more acceptable if you live in a world in which everything is in flux. Change and fluidity are hallmarks of postmodern culture, which means that no statement about reality can be definitive. It all depends on who says it, for what reason, at what place and time. There is no single truth about anything. The world exists in a whole spectrum of different ways at any given time, so that almost any description of it is likely to be true from some standpoint or other. Being true to the way things are means acknowledging that things are in no way particular. Hence the emergence of post-truth civilization, in which Trump is a wronged innocent. Since you can’t make an objective judgment between this and the belief that he is a crook and a liar, reason becomes pointless and the two opinions simply have to fight it out. Post-truth leads to violence.

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Is Elon the new Enoch?

By Tom McTague

The mental power that transforms the world is traditionally known as the will, and in American culture the will is infinite. Madonna attributed her recovery from a serious illness to the fact that she “didn’t believe in limitations”. She may be in for a nasty surprise in 20 or 30 years time. What obstructs the will is the flesh, with all of its flaws and constraints, so that the only true freedom would be to de-materialize yourself, escaping from the body altogether. It’s this, not just a prudishness about sexuality, which lies at the root of the Puritan hatred of the body. To be a body is to be finite, and to be finite is to be plunged into permanent conflict with one’s true self, which is the infinite power of God within you. If you were to shuck off the body entirely, however, you would be nothing, so that the ultimate freedom is pure negativity. To act is to shape the world according to your wishes; but it is also to be a prisoner of what you create, since whatever you create is fated to be finite, and finitude is a scandal to the infinity which is the life of God in his creatures.

This is why there can never be an American utopia. The nation is doomed to remain divided — not just between George Clooney and the Proud Boys, but between the flesh and the spirit, which is to say between its actual achievements and the eternally unappeased desire which will always find them lacking. There is always more wilderness to tame, more territories to be colonized, more attempts to plant the Stars and Stripes on Alpha Centauri as well as Mars. All one’s ideals succeed in doing is showing how far reality has fallen short of them. You can call this state of affairs permanent progress or chronic unhappiness. Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that it was both. The only future it can’t deal with is the one we are all forced to confront: death.

Because of their different history, the British are nothing like as idealist as the Americans. A prime minister who claimed that God saved his life, so that he could save the country, would probably be ridiculed rather than applauded. A long heritage of empiricism means that the contemporary British believe in what they can touch and taste, whatever the imperial fantasizes of their ancestors and the chauvinism of the far-Right. Rather than stamping your identity on the world, you allow the world to shape your identity. The past is to be broken with in some respects, but conformed to in others. Gratitude for God’s special interest in the nation is largely confined to the last night of the Proms. Pessimism rather than bright-eyed enterprise sets the cultural tone. Alexis de Tocqueville remarks in his Democracy in America that Americans discourage negative comments about the weather. In Britain, they are well-nigh compulsory.

Optimism and pessimism, however, are for the most part mere temperamental affairs, without much moral substance. It’s no credit to smile at adversity if this comes to you as naturally as sneezing. This is where optimism differs from hope. Trump’s vision of a prosperous United States, supreme among the nations, may sound like hope but is actually just small-boy bragging. Much of what he says about America is really about himself. Genuine hope has to be based on realism rather than fantasy. The frail, tentative hope that sometimes emerges as the final note of a tragic drama is worth attending to because it has been dearly bought. Optimism, by contrast, is for the most part hope bought on the cheap. In the end, the only positive vision that counts is one that has faced the worst: yet still manages to affirm. Donald Trump gives the impression of a man who has never faced anything worse than an overdone cheeseburger.

Performative declarations don’t really work when it comes to culture. You can pardon a convict with a stroke of the pen, but most cultural change moves more like a glacier than a mountain stream. Culture in the sense of everyday customs and allegiances has its roots in a whole complex history. It represents what one might call the collective unconscious, and tends to resist being engineered into or out of existence. It is the stuff of which identities are made, which means that it’s a lot harder to change than your shoes or even your accent. Dismissing certain genders as null and void is like trying to will your hair to change color. The narcissist insists that the world must be pliant to his touch, raging like an infant when it resists his desires. He would rather destroy material reality than allow it to frustrate his schemes. And Trump has his finger on the nuclear button.

I rang their bell, nervously. You never quite know what you will have to deal with, what manner of grief will be present. Here it was raw, angry, and visceral. The family were sitting on the floor in their lounge, eyes red and puffy, Christmas decorations pulled off the wall. Discarded tinsel was piled up in the corner of the room. The house was cold. The tree was bare. Christmas had been exposed as a lie.

Later, I went to a parish Christmas party. Mariah Carey and Jingle Bells filled the air. The party atmosphere bubbled with a generalised bonhomie. “Cheer up, Vicar. It’s Christmas,” someone said, handing me a glass of fizz and ignoring the obvious fact that I wasn’t the slightest bit in the mood. They meant well, of course, but all I could think of was that this party didn’t feel anything like the Christmas that we had been hearing about in church.

There, we had been reading from the book of Isaiah: “The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Everything seemed the wrong way around. The people to whom Christmas was primarily addressed thought it an insult to their pain, and yet those who celebrated it the most seemed quite oblivious to its deeper existential message.

For the last twenty years or so, a new kind of Christmas celebration has been slowly working its way into the mainstream liturgical calendar. Its origins are in the Christian response to the longest night, around December 21, traditionally also the feast day for St Thomas, the patron saint of doubt. It was revived in the Eighties by people putting on Christmas celebrations in hospices. And it’s called Blue Christmas, blue as in feeling blue rather than an Elvis tribute Christmas service. It’s like Christmas except in the minor key, often with jazz music rather than traditional carols — though In the Bleak Midwinter often gets sung.

Blue Christmas is aimed at those for whom this is an especially difficult time, because of loneliness, or bereavement, or being out of work. And at Christmas it’s impossible not to remember those who we love and see no longer.

On top of this, the Covid uncertainty now throws a pall of gloom over all our preparations. So people came to our service last night, finding a dark corner of the church to sit in: those facing a miserable Christmas dinner for one bunged in the microwave, but also the cancelled, the bankrupt, the disgraced, the betrayed, the addicted, the heartbroken, the disillusioned. Some of us wanted to be there simply because life itself is never easy.

This is what the church looks like. It is one of the few places in our culture where we can bring all that messy stuff in our lives that we don’t know how to fix or process. And — if you will forgive me for sounding like a sermon is coming on — these are the gifts we bring to the manger that are more precious than gold, frankincense and myrrh. It is the cracks that let the light in.

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Why the future is Henry the hoover

By Giles Fraser

Every year, Christians struggle to distinguish between the Christian festival that takes place on December 25, and its secular cousin that travels alongside it. Every year, the cultural mash-up between Santa and Jesus, Rudolph and the angel Gabriel, gets ever harder to distinguish. In 1951, French Catholic clergy burnt an effigy of Santa Claus in front of Dijon cathedral. Extreme, yes. But I get it. Christmas has become far too confused.

Some years ago a little boy came to our Christmas nativity play dressed up as Batman. He sat among the kings and shepherds, the Vicar unclear as to his theological role. This cultural fusion has long been with us, of course. Arguably, Prince Albert and Charles Dickens have formatted our celebrations more than the Christ-child in the manger. “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time,” sang Band Aid. Well, there won’t be snow in Bethlehem either (I just checked). It’s the Middle East for heaven’s sake. Snow is not a big part of the weather. Christmas has become a strange jumble of cultural references. And every year, there will always be yet another dreary hot take in the Guardian to the effect that Christmas is a borrowed pagan festival anyway.

Inevitably, then, Christians seek to maintain a degree of distinctiveness to what they do at this time of year. And there are already differences. For Christians, Christmas begins on the 25th and goes on for several weeks. For non-Christians, it ends on the 25th, or a day or two after. This means we sing our carols at different times. Just as the secular Christmas falls silent, full of that having-spent-too-much, having-drunk-too-much ennui, Christians take up the strain. It’s a problem, because by then many of us are sick of all those bloody carols, having been bombarded with them for weeks.

The answer to this need for distinctiveness is to be found in the minor key, in Isaiah’s proclamation, in the blue of Christmas. While secular Christmas goes on with its relentless up-speak, a Christian Christmas can get to the parts that “Merry Christmas” cannot reach. Technically, the difference is between optimism and hope. Optimism is generally fuelled by denial, a refusal to face the darkness. It’s a kind of holiday from reality. Hope, on the other hand, is a much more belligerent emotion. It stubbornly dwells in the darkness yet refuses to be beaten by it. Have you seen that YouTube clip of a classical music band doing a flash-mob performance of Here Comes the Sun in a Madrid unemployment office? This isn’t cheap optimism. It is light in the darkness. It’s hope.

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The myth of 'pagan' Christmas

By Tom Holland

The Book of Isaiah was written several centuries before the birth of Christ but is clearly its inspiration. “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,” the author writes. Then, a few chapters later: “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given … and his name shall be called Almighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace”. When Isaiah promises that the people who have walked in darkness shall see a great light, St John develops the theme: “a light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” Whether you see Isaiah as some sort of prediction — the traditional Christian view — or as something that becomes the basis for a later ‘Christian’ understanding of the incarnation, it matters not so much. Isaiah conceptually organises Christmas.

Which is why the light pollution of the secular Christmas fairy lights must be a worry for those of a more religious disposition. You can only see the star if you are prepared to sit in the dark, refusing cheap consolation. Which is all to say that another Covid Christmas, one where the festivities might be once again a little more muted, could be a much better basis for appreciating what the whole thing is supposed to be about. It is at the funeral services I take at this time of year that I find the real Christmas message is easiest to preach — we stay in the dark and look for the light.

Even amid rising case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths from Covid-19, it’s possible if you look closely to see the first chapters of a new story about Britain and its prospects in 2021 being written. It’s a story of a new Roaring Twenties, a time of national cheer, celebration and even indulgence.

It’s also a story that I find more than a little unnerving.

Ever since the first effective vaccine to the virus was confirmed, optimism about 2021 and beyond has been rising, with financial markets the epicentre of the outbreak. In the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that the closer a person is to the City and financial services, the more likely they are to be looking forward to 2021 as a year when the champagne starts to flow again and the fun resumes.

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Boris can survive a cancelled Christmas

By James Kirkup

That’s a generalisation based on anecdotes, but it’s also borne out by wider evidence from the markets and their related industries. Depending on how you measure it, share prices are now as high as they’ve ever been and the gap between those prices and the actual earnings of the companies concerned as wide as at any point in history.

A lot of that comes down to the most important public policy that almost no politician talks about these days: central banks pouring cheap money into economies to keep businesses and households afloat. All that money has to go somewhere, which means higher share prices, more mergers and takeovers (private equity deals are now at their highest levels since 2007 ). A lot of City types will tell you, in terms, that There Really Is No Alternative to putting money into things like companies and property.

All this will inevitably mean more pay and bonuses for the people involved, money that will, in part and unevenly, cascade out through the economy: UK house prices are up almost 10% in 2020, and London estate agents are full of excitement about next year.

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What Covid stole from Boris

By James Kirkup

Economic exuberance isn’t wholly irrational. After all, as long as mass vaccination programmes go OK, there’s every chance of a return to some sort of normal economic life starting in the second or third quarter of 2021. Companies that have survived the long winter and make it to Easter may find a good number of optimistic customers with cash on hand and a desire to spend it.

Household finances are another thread in the story of optimism and hedonism in 2021. For some people, 2020 has been annoying and inconvenient but also quite financially advantageous: if you have the sort of job that involves sitting at a keyboard and talking to people on Zoom and you’ve kept that job through the pandemic, you’re probably better off than you were a year ago, because your costs have fallen. No more commuting, no more Pret sandwiches, no more drinks after work.

Andy Haldane at the Bank of England reckons that adds up to £100 billion in extra savings piled up, money that could start to flow in 2021 as the Zooming class starts to spend at least some of their week back in the office and start feeling confident enough to go out to dinner, buy a new car, take a holiday.

That’s the economics. The politics of the New Roaring Twenties are more obvious still, and start at the very top.

Boris Johnson is a booster. The Prime Minister thrives on, trades on, optimism. His life and career have been built on telling people — voters, colleagues, friends — stories of how things will be better, if they only just let him have his way. Throughout the pandemic, he has been visibly desperate to tell another story of the sunlit uplands that await us when the darkness finally passes.

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The PM's cabinet of puppets and placemen

By Peter Franklin

So it is no insight to say that the PM will want to tell a story of a new “golden age” for Britain, with Brexit “done” and the pandemic fading in the rear-view mirror. His legacy, his possible re-election and his personality — a war between depression and exuberance — demand that 2021 is a year of celebration that buries the memory of 2020.

My suspicion is that a lot of voters will want to buy what Johnson will be selling next year. As I wrote here before Christmas, a fair chunk of the electorate has given him and his Government the benefit of the doubt during a bad year for Britain. Imagine what his ratings could look like in the summer if growth is rebounding, consumer spending is booking and the sun is indeed shining again.

The other significant players in the narrative of national happiness are found in the media. Fleet Street isn’t what it used to be, but it still matters, and some of its players are itching to tell their readers a tale about a new era of jubilation and consumer spending on stuff their advertisers sell.

So what am I worried about? What’s the problem with a national mood of optimism and good cheer? Well, to be very clear, I’m not making a political point here: I’m a tiresome, equivocating centrist who really doesn’t take sides in contests between parties. I have no view on whether the sun should shine on Boris Johnson rather than Keir Starmer. Nor am I a professional doom-monger, though I accept it’s rarely difficult to distinguish between me and a ray of sunshine.

No, what worries me is that the national story of the New Roaring Twenties won’t actually be a national story. It will exclude and overlook a significant number of people, and in so doing store up more trouble to come.

Simply, the fact that people who read upmarket newspapers, write for newspapers and get written about in newspapers will spend the second half of 2021 going out to dinner in restaurants again isn’t the same thing as a roaring recovery from an economic shock. Yes, it will make those people happy and make them feel like things are getting back to normal. Yes, it will be good for some people who lost their low-wage jobs in hospitality this year, who will find some of those jobs come back into existence. It is in no way a bad thing. But it will be far from enough to address the economic and social harms done by the pandemic and its consequences.

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The PM's cabinet of puppets and placemen

By Henry Wismayer

Those harms include unemployment, some of it structural, thus requiring people to move sectors and places to work again. That means scarring: the older someone is, the greater the lasting damage done to them by unemployment. Women who worked part-time in retail and hospitality, sometimes because they’d secured shift patterns that fitted around children and caring, may face some of the biggest challenges in the new UK labour market.

Low-income households won’t be adding to the release of “pent up demand” next year either. National aggregates for saving conceal big variations: the Zoom classes may have piled up cash, but people at the bottom of the wage ladder ate into their modest savings just to get by.

Poor children won’t see 2021 as a golden year either, even if ministers do the sensible thing and maintain the £20 a week uplift in their parents Universal Credit. Those kids’ educational prospects took a heavy blow during the first lockdown, meaning some will fall further behind better-off peers and never catch up. Some children took physical blows and worse too: some social workers and child protection officials fear abuse and neglect rose largely undetected during 2020.

The importance of place will only grow in an uneven return to “normal”. The experience of previous economic shocks is that bigger, more prosperous places tend to bounce back more quickly than smaller ones with fewer connections and fewer high-skill, high-wage jobs. It’s a statement of the obvious that the pandemic makes those nice-sounding promises to “level up” Britain’s lop-sided economic geography all the more relevant. That also means the cost of failing to deliver on those promises will be all the higher.

Sadly, there is little confidence among officials and expert veterans of regional and industrial policy that this Government has a plan to deliver the rebalancing that has eluded previous administrations. And while it’s perfectly possible that this expert establishment view is wrong, even the PM’s most optimistic fans should concede that his plans are unlikely to smooth out decades of uneven development in a few months, let alone months that fall immediately after the biggest economic shock in peacetime history.

There are all sorts of economic worries that will persist next year and beyond, including some I haven’t even mentioned yet: epic public debt; corporate debt that holds back investment; dismal and uneven underlying productivity; the ongoing search for a post-EU economic model.

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But in the end, my fears about the new Roaring Twenties are social and political, about the way we talk and feel as a nation.

A 2021 where champagne flows in the more expensive bits of London and the PM talks about a new golden age will be a bitter year for a lot of people who feel far, far away from the exuberance of the better-off and better-connected.

In the past few years, such feelings of distance and disenchantment delivered economic and political disruption and outright rupture: Brexit; Corbyn; Trump. Those things, blended with the poison of social media, have created divided and divisive conversations, where both media and political voices take sides and damn those on the other side of the line.

Even from this distance, I find it all too easy to see a post-pandemic Britain where one side cheers and orders another round while scorning the gloomsters who talk Britain down. And between the two imposters of outright triumph and utter disaster, a country that feels less and less like one nation.

Hans Rosling was a Swedish doctor, statistician, “data rock-star” (thanks to the advent of TED talks) and the author of the bestseller, Factfulness. It is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for 2018. In it, he explores why we get so many facts about the world wrong and what we can do about it – encouraging the reader to think beyond the obvious.

Since its publication in April, the book has acquired must-read status among Silicon Valley executives, thanks in no small part to repeated endorsements by Bill Gates. A friend of Rosling’s, he described it as “one of the most important books that I have ever read and an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world”. Gates – as only a billionaire can – then went further than most of us do with our favourite books. He gave a copy of Factfulness to all new graduates of colleges and universities in the USA, if they registered with his website.

It’s not surprising Gates loved it. Rosling’s counter-intuitive optimism is very Silicon Valley. The book recalled the golden age of the high-tech hub – the era when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, could make “Don’t be evil” the motto of their company, and Steve Jobs’s Apple could have as its advertising slogan “Think Different” without (too much) widespread mockery.

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Why the future is Henry the hoover

By Oliver Kamm

Like Jobs, the Swede, who died in 2017 (his children finished the book on his behalf) was part missionary and part showman. His mission was to shake us out of the state of ignorance that convinces us the world is getting worse – when, in fact, it is getting better.

Our overdramatic worldview, in his account, misses the big story of human progress. It manufactures a topsy-turvy reality, a “mega misconception”, whereby global poverty is growing, when in fact it is reducing, levels of education are worse rather than better, and violent crime is going up when the opposite is true. “The world has moved on,” Rosling says. “Our worldview hasn’t.”

He enjoyed playing with his audience to prove this. His preferred set-up was to give his audience of medical students, scientists or investment bankers a multiple-choice quiz to test their level of ignorance. Routinely, they would do “worse than chimpanzees” in answering questions designed to demonstrate his somewhat controversial idea that the “gap” between the rich and the developing world no longer existed. By “worse than chimpanzees” he meant that his audience’s results were worse than random, owing – he believed – to ignorance on a global scale how much the world was getting better. Most of the population, he argues, are somewhere in the middle.

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How to bring the tech giants to heel

By Mathew Lawrence

Even his audience at the World Economic Forum at Davos demonstrated a level of ignorance that was worse than that of a bunch of apes. Global political and business leaders, it turns out, did not know that the average world life expectancy is 70, that 88% of children are vaccinated against disease, or that in 2100 there will be 2bn children below the age of 15 — the same number as today.

To demonstrate his point, Rosling would use animated graphs. Multicoloured bubbles changed in size as they moved across the screen to show that, for example, life conditions in Sweden at the time of his birth in 1948 had similar levels of health and wealth as Egypt today, or that today the life expectancy and income of people in countries as different as China and Egypt are close.

By the end of his life Rosling had become culturally part of the same world as Silicon Valley. He rejected the “lone genius” stereotype, but was a TED talk phenomenon, had his own army of cultish followers and addressed Davos on sustainable development. He even sold the presentation software that he helped design to Google.

That same limitless optimism and energy bursts from the book. Along with a desire to shock. And each chapter starts with a multiple-choice test. In many ways its technological determinism reads like a therapy-cum-self-help book for hassled Silicon Valley executives who just want to be told that they are doing a good job.

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The robodoctor will see you now

By Mark Piesing

Rosling sets out to make these execs feel better about themselves. He shows how ignorance stops us from seeing the amazing story of human progress, largely created by technology. We can’t appreciate its wonders because of human instincts that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Just as our bodies still want to hoard fat and sugar, we still want gossip and dramatic stories, which, in the past, transmitted information that might make the difference between living and dying. This craving for drama then helps to create an overdramatic worldview.

He maintains we are in a systematic state of ignorance about how much technology is making our lives better because selective reporting prevents positive news stories from making the front page. Instead, journalists, activists and lobbyists produce an unrelenting torrent of “bad news” that mislead us into thinking that the number of people dying from disasters is on the rise when it is on the decline, that there are more hungry people in the world when there are fewer, or in reverse, that there are fewer babies being immunised when there are more.

Negative news, he believes, shapes our worldview because our instincts mean that we pay more attention to scary things. The doom-mongers and manipulators he identifies are, of course, the same journalists and activists who frequently have Big Tech billionaires in their sights.

Further reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

The problem is that Rosling’s optimism makes him comparably selective when it come to criticism of the tech tycoons and their products. Strangely, the possible hazards of social media and the other products of his billionaire friends are largely unaddressed, despite accusations that the algorithms they have created are amplifying fake news, widening divisions in society and undermining faith in the very facts to which Rosling points. He once said:

“I use normal statistics that are compiled by the World Bank and the United Nations. This is not controversial. These facts are not up for discussion. I am right, and you are wrong.”

Even if you ignore the messianic tone, Rosling may have been selective about the facts himself. Rather like the journalists or activists he disdained, Rosling, according to some critics, put a positive spin on “big picture stats” to back up his argument, while ignoring evidence that suggests that life is still grim for many.

He also glosses over some inconvenient facts: the population in many countries is growing; world hunger is on the rise; and while more girls are being educated, women with advanced degrees still have higher rates of unemployment than men. Almost half of humanity still lives in conditions that the average American, European, or Japanese would find unacceptable.

Rosling argues that the world is becoming more democratic even though many people don’t feel that it is: China’s economic growth has certainly not been matched by democratic reform. He shows us graphs of the numbers of washing machines in the world to demonstrate human progress, but has material progress made us happier? Others read the same graphs as an illustration of unsustainable growth that is destroying the planet. Some might say we were happier as a species when we lived in small, sustainable village communities – or even as simple hunter-gatherers.

Further reading

Silicon Valley's 'suicide pill' for mankind

By Mark Piesing

Most glaring of all, Factfulness shows no scepticism about the tech billionaires who have helped to create today’s uncertainties – which some might call chaos. Instead, it offers a sop to weary executives who have left it too late to buy a bunker in New Zealand, by assuring them that the apocalypse probably won’t happen. Their ideas and products, he says, are improving everything: technology is bringing our society and species together rather than breaking them apart. And any nagging doubt the techies themselves might feel isn’t their guilty conscience speaking, but down to the media.

Only instinctive, fearful thinking, according to Rosling, would suggest technology is likely to have some negative effects. He studiously ignores any plausible arguments that automation may cause mass unemployment and civil unrest, or that synthetic biology and CRISPR gene editing may create terrifying new artificial life forms and viruses. And he waves aside the idea that AI and body modification may lead to the creation of a new species of uber-humans that will enslave the rest of us.

Rosling could be right, of course, but the jury is still out. What we do know as  fact, however is that terrorism is increasing, more people are dying from war, polar ice caps are melting, and AI is seen by some to pose an even greater danger to the future of humanity than climate change.

At the moment, though, Rosling’s sword metaphor for technology isn’t so much a weapon against falsehoods that seem plausible; it’s more like the sword of Damocles, which hung by a single hair over the throne of Dionysius as a warning of constant peril and foreboding.

If Rosling is right, the “silent miracle of human progress”, as he described it, will continue. If it doesn’t, however, his unbridled optimism looks actively irresponsible. It is not encouraging that earlier this year Google removed “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct.