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The end is nigh
Most of us are transfixed by the idea that the world is heading towards doom and disaster
Madeleine Bunting Monday August 27, 2001 The Guardian
The Edinburgh festival has been thriving on pessimism. The most successful festival in years, and the big buzz is all about decline. David Liddiment, ITV's director of channels, warns that the "soul of British television is in danger" as creativity is eroded in a vicious ratings war.
Meanwhile, an unlikely candidate takes up the cudgels against dumbed-down Hollywood - Sean Penn complaining of a "monoculture" in the studios that militates beyond having more than two ideas in any one film. Americans don't want interesting films, claims Penn, echoing comments by Gore Vidal, who bemoaned the stupidity of his countrymen last week. Ticket sales in Edinburgh may have boomed, but the story everyone loves to tell and hear is that, culturally, we're all going to the dogs.
I'm a sucker for theories of decline - just love 'em. I find it almost impossible to come to an optimistic conclusion in any argument; optimists always strike me as blindly Pollyannaish, whereas the true realists are those Cassandras who bemoan how we are heading for a multiple catastrophic collapse. (By the by, why are women's names used to label the poles in this debate?)
Gradually I've noticed that the people with whom I have the least intellectual sympathy are optimists - those who still, unbelievably, believe in progress. In the end we always have to agree to disagree; the gap between our viewpoints too vast to even explain, let alone persuade. Increasingly, I see the faultline between Cassandras and Pollyannas as much more important ideologically than the old divisions of left and right, which it completely undercuts on issues such as the environment or social cohesion.
Fondness for theories of decline make me a child of my time. One would be hard put to find a time since the Enlightenment when we have been as transfixed by future catastrophe; the intellectual energy of the late 20th century has been poured into powerful treatises on disaster. Part of this is millennial anxiety - a trawl through Amazon turned up more than 20 books on the "End of ..." from The End of British Farming to the End of Human Rights, the End of Innocence, to the End of Work. And this millennial sense of being at the end of something is underlied by a conviction that what comes after is going to be pretty unpleasant, even if the fear of nuclear apocalypse has receded. The Pollyannas are close to being an endangered species.
What is unprecedented is the sheer reach of our pessimism, as charted in a new book, Cultural Pessimism by Oliver Bennett. There are at least five powerful theories of decline. The first is, of course, the environment - climate change, population growth, destruction of biodiversity. Most environmentalists are deeply pessimistic. For example, Bennett quotes James Lovelock's belief that humanity is on a slippery slope to catastrophe with no brakes and all it can do is take its foot off the accelerator.
Second, global capitalism. A host of pessimists from both left and right broadly agree with George Soros's prediction of an "imminent disintegration of the global capitalist system" because it is inherently unstable, unregulated, out of - and beyond - control.
Third, theories to explain the "end of politics" such as the rise of corporate power and voter apathy. Fourth, a range of fears about social disintegration from rising crime figures to family breakdown, from Robert Puttnam's decline of social capital to Oliver James's explanations for rising rates of depression. Fifth, Bennett tracks the loss of faith in science and technology. For every problem it has claimed to solve, it has created many more, from BSE to the overuse of pesticides, runs the contemporary critique.
In comparison to these Big Five, theories of cultural decline are much less persuasive though there has been no shortage of those from right and left. And then there are the treatises on national decline. Britain, France and America have all had their pessimists. In this month's issue of Prospect, Ferdinand Mount defends Britain against the Martin Amis view of its boring, bland decline - topical for the annual August post-holiday blues on the inadequacies of British food, climate, service and transport.
One obvious consequence of our cultural pessimism is its paralysing grip on politics, since the first thing a successful politician has to sell is an optimistic vision of a better future. The Blairites came up with young country and new this, new that, but it was cosmetic. Blairism is at heart pragmatic - avoiding things getting worse - and the left is still bereft of a credible utopia after the disasters caused by the most optimistic political vision ever, Marxism. Conservatism is no better off. How can it celebrate a future of free enterprise when that is precisely what is destroying all that conservatives value, from hedgerows and nation states to families. It's hard to find an optimistic politician and, when you do, they sound as credible as a Millbank pager.
The most passionate and heartfelt optimists are in business. Building a better future is no longer a political but a corporate project, and its most recent manifestation was the promise of a technological utopia through the internet. The sheen on that dream now looks tatty, but many are still seduced by the self-belief of business and its power to generate wealth and achieve efficiency into thinking that perhaps it really can deliver a utopia of good-quality healthcare and schools.
Are you a pessimist or an optimist? Bennett argues that what makes you a Cassandra or a Pollyanna is not so much intellectual judgment as emotional predisposition. That chimes with the old chestnut that if you had an unhappy childhood, you're much more likely to be leftwing. You may like to think you are being coolly objective; in fact it's the glass half-empty/half-full conundrum.
What gets missed out in the cultural pessimists' accounts are facts such as billions of human beings living free of the kind of material scarcity and disease that blighted previous generations, or the number of democracies around the world reaching more than 60.
One of Bennett's most intriguing suggestions is that pessimism could be a consequence of mild depression, which we prefer to project out on to the world rather than inward on to the self. The curious thing about environmentalists is how many of them are sunny optimistic characters about their own lives.
The flip side of our cultural pessimism is an unprecedented faith in the individual's powers of self-transformation, self-improvement and self-expression. It's the classic New Age combination, now mainstream, of environmental concern and the quest for personal enlightenment: you can't change the world but you can change yourself. That adage suits consumer capitalism perfectly, since the illusion of changing ourselves is successfully maintained through shopping (all those makeovers), and it's a task which can never be completed. But for as long as we prefer to keep our utopias personal, our doom and gloom about the world at large will hold sway.