#rationaloptimist

History repeats itself as a spiral not a circle, Wilder implied, with an ever-growing capacity for both good and bad, played out through unchanging individual character.

Human nature will not change. The same old dramas of aggression and addiction, of infatuation and indoctrination, of charm and harm, will play out, but in an ever more prosperous world.

Imagine if the globalised world of the twenty-first century allows a globalised retreat from reason... Already lords don boiler suits to destroy genetically modified crops, presidents scheme to prevent stem-cell research, prime ministers trample on habeas corpus using the excuse of terrorism, metastasising bureaucracies interfere with innovation on behalf of reactionary pressure groups, superstitious creationists stop the teaching of good science, airheaded celebrities rail against free trade, mullahs inveigh against the empowerment of women, earnest princes lament the loss of old ways and pious bishops regret the coarsening effects of commerce. So far they are all sufficiently localised in their effects to achieve no more than limited pauses in the happy progress of the species, but could one of them go global?

It is just possible that the predators and parasites will actually win altogether, or rather that ambitious ideological busybodies will succeed in shutting down the catallaxy and crashing the world back into pre-industrial poverty some time during the coming century. There is even a new reason for such pessimism: the integrated nature of the world means that it may soon be possible to capture the entire world on behalf of a foolish idea, where before you could only capture a country, or perhaps if you were lucky an empire. (The great religions all needed empires within which to flourish and become powerful: Buddhism within the Mauryan and Chinese, Christianity within the Roman, Islam within the Arab.)

Chiefs, priests, thieves, financiers, consultants and others will appear on all sides, feeding off the surplus generated by exchange and specialisation, diverting the life-blood of the catallaxy into their own reactionary lives. It happened in the past. Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the price of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers. The online world will attract parasites too: from regulators and cybercriminals to hackers and plagiarists.

Moreover, in recent years much aid has been granted on condition of free-market economic reform, which far from kick-starting economic growth, frequently proves damaging to local traditions, undermining the very mechanisms that get enrichment started. As William Easterly puts it while criticising the shock therapy that did such harm in both the Soviet bloc and Africa, ‘you can’t plan a market’. The top-down imposition of a bottom-up system is bound to fail.

If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize. The bookshops are groaning under ziggurats of pessimism. The airwaves are crammed with doom. In my own adult lifetime, I have listened to implacable predictions of growing poverty, coming famines, expanding deserts, imminent plagues, impending water wars, inevitable oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, mad-cow epidemics, Y2K computer bugs, killer bees, sex-change fish, global warming, ocean acidification and even asteroid impacts that would presently bring this happy interlude to a terrible end. I cannot recall a time when one or other of these scares was not solemnly espoused by sober, distinguished and serious elites and hysterically echoed by the media. I cannot recall a time when I was not being urged by somebody that the world could only survive if it abandoned the foolish goal of economic growth.

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.