There's a strange article in today's Times by Anatole Kaletsky. He's taking issue with the idea that we live in especially turbulent times. Compared with 'the chasms of life experience' of his mother's generation, of people who lived through the first half of the 20th century, our lives are marked, he says, by an unprecedented degree of stability and security.
Who would have imagined, in the terrible and wonderful 20th century, almost all of which she [his mother] lived through, that she would end her days peacefully in her own home in London - surrounded by the secure, comfortable family whose prosperity she had created literally from nothing - instead of being carried off by the wars, famines, revolutions, epidemics and state terrors that had dogged the first half of her life? And how could we compare the small changes in our lifestyles caused by the internet or Islamic terrorism or even the rise of China with the upheavals that my parents lived through during their first decades of life?I have no quarrel with Kaletsky's principal claim, but it does seem odd, if a comparsion of this broad historical kind is what he's about, that he should simply bracket out everything that might show a less one-sided picture than his. Kaletsky writes:
Never in human history has life been more predictable, safe and stable - at least for that large minority of the human race who live in the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe, North America and East Asia.The 'at least' clause is rather important, isn't it? Apart from excluding a majority of the human race, it puts to one side recent events in Rwanda, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, the Congo, Darfur, Zimbabwe... - and then AIDS, human trafficking, grinding poverty... Why would you do that? Even if bringing all this into the comparison won't change the overall result, it might save one from a statement like the following:
Compared with the upheavals of the early 20th century, the challenges we face today - whether as families and individuals or as societies and nations - are almost laughably trivial.I don't think so. There are better, less complacent benchmarks.