Earlier in the week Geoffrey Wheatcroft treated readers of the Groan to a somewhat dyspeptic asessment of the last two decades and of his - and my - generation. Somewhat? No, more than. It was 20 inexcusable years and (borrowing from Tony Judt) a crappy generation. You can read the details of Wheatcroft's lament, if you wish, here. I dunno: a whole generation, crappy. I have this intuitive notion that crappiness and its opposites are probably distributed in such a way that generations are a bit more mixed. Even when a generation accommodates - to pick an example at random - Nazis, it also includes those who fought them. Anyway, here's an assesment of a different stripe, from Peter Singer. Not that this one's uncritical; but it also contains this sort of thing:
As we reach 65, it is worth asking how our generation has done as stewards of the world we inherited. In several respects we are leaving our children and grandchildren a significantly better world. Progress towards equality, now symbolised by the fact that Australia has a woman prime minister, has been significant. We are also less credulous in our religious beliefs, more accepting of the freedom to have no religious beliefs and less narrow in our sexual morality...
For a generation that can remember when Australia's indigenous inhabitants had no rights to their traditional lands and were not even counted in the national census, Kevin Rudd's apology to our indigenous inhabitants was another important symbol of progress. Needless to say, there is still a long way to go.
The environmental movement that began with Earth Day in 1970 has had many notable successes. In Australia, we lost Lake Pedder, and large areas of old-growth forest that should never have been logged, but the Franklin still runs free, Kakadu has been protected, along with much of our alpine region and many other once-threatened areas of wilderness. Surprisingly, despite the increase in size of our cities, the air is cleaner than when we were young and our wonderful beaches are still a joy to visit.
A new concern for animals shows signs of reversing the habits of past generations that saw them as mere means for our use.
We can also feel some satisfaction in the knowledge that the proportion of the world's people who live in extreme poverty is lower now than it was when we came of age. Far more children go to school - and girls are less likely to stay at home while their brothers go to school. The difference is shown most dramatically in the figures the United Nations Children's Fund provides on the number of children under five dying from poverty-related causes. In 1960 that number was estimated at 20 million. By 2007 it had fallen below 10 million. In the 2010 report, it is down to 8.1 million. That is a remarkable achievement, especially considering that in 1960 the world's population was only 2.5 billion and it is now approaching 7 billion. We must not forget that this still means that 22,000 children die every day and almost all these deaths are preventable. We can and should do much better. Yet if we think about the progress made, we can be encouraged.
So we are passing on to the next generation a world in which the risk of nuclear annihilation has receded, sexism, racism and even speciesism are on the retreat, important areas of wilderness are protected, more children than ever before go to school, and extreme poverty and infant mortality are falling.
The Australian context of some of these remarks cannot obscure a certain difference of temperament here, or is it just mood? Neither, more importantly, can it obscure the highly selective nature of Wheatcroft's gloom.