Many things about the modern world are a really big improvement on previous centuries. Antibiotics and immunisation, for example, are just brilliant. The printing press and the internet both get a big tick. The combination of food security, medicine, and good global communication and transport have led to high levels of peace, freedom, and tolerance for a greater proportion of the world’s population than perhaps ever before.
Science and technology are such powerful tools that for the first time there is no technical reason why every human being should not have a safe, happy, and fulfilled life. This is the great disappointment of the modern era: that the greed, vanity, intolerance, and general selfishness of mankind make this great promise impossible to fulfil. Instead increased population and capacity for rapacity are taking a dangerous toll on the natural environment, and starvation, genocide and war are still common.
The lives of the world’s rich are wasted watching mindless television and pursuing consumer trinkets, in an increasingly plastic and anonymous culture. The lives of the world’s poor are subject, as throughout history, to hunger, insecurity, and the arbitrary cruelties of the corrupt and powerful. Compassion, love, and the overwhelming beauty of the world make it all somehow seem worthwhile, but the scale and pace of change bring a eschatologic urgency.
To me the key to this is a disjunction between what we desire and what in fact makes us happy. So many people have the mindset of a small spoilt child. They want food, comfort, and shiny toys, and they want control over others to assuage their terrible insecurity. Like that child they will use anger and cruelty to achieve their selfish ends. Of course there’s a level of instant gratification in fast cars, mistresses, and obsequious servants – but such hollow pleasures usually give way either to ennui and madness, or to the wisdom to pursue life’s true satisfactions.
Because real happiness exists in family, community, friendship, creativity, learning, and most of all in what we can contribute to the benefit of others. As Nature Boy said,
the greatest thing we’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
It sounds soppy, or a truism, or too simplistic to fit a complex world of real human beings. It’s a subject somehow embarrassing to talk about so directly. I think that feeling represents society’s defence mechanism our individual defences to acknowledgement of this truth, because we collectively and personally are afraid of its consequences for our lives.
We don’t need what we in the west spend our lives striving for. We and the world as a whole desperately need to engage every member of the human race in the provision of nutrition, healthcare, shelter, and liberty for all. If we can reach that starting point we will be in a position to find out what mankind is really able to achieve.