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It’s odd that the European response to being abandoned by Donald Trump was bafflement. After all, Trump had long signalled that he admired Vladimir Putin and felt unattached to Nato. Yet his plan for “peace” in Ukraine seemed to shock European officials.
It’s partly because they had hoped for the best so as to avoid preparing for the worst. But it’s also because they didn’t think the world worked this way: an aggressor attacks a country that was minding its own business and is rewarded. Westerners of our generation don’t tend to expect the bad guys to win, because we were raised to believe in progress. That belief gave us a false conceptual frame for reading the world.
Western faith in progress was a blend of Judeo-Christian morality and Enlightenment reason. God smites the wicked, people grow wiser, and scientific advances improve life. My 90-year-old aunt may remain stricken by her brother’s death from measles in 1939, but medicine was eradicating tragedy. Our films and fairy tales reinforced this optimism. Good guys win the shoot-outs, and Cinderella lives happily ever after.
The good-guy theory of history seemed confirmed by actual western history. Our central modern morality tale was victory over Hitler, followed by the west’s historically anomalous 80-year “Long Peace”, based on an international order built by the US, the good sheriff.
As Napoleon supposedly said, “To understand the man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was 20.” When I was 20, a global progressive moment left me with an enduring cognitive bias towards optimism. In three months from November 1989, eastern European communism fell and Nelson Mandela walked out of jail. Freedom had triumphed, because people wanted freedom. It felt like a law of history.
The label “progressive” itself denotes belief in progress. The last great progressive politician, Barack Obama, believed, like Martin Luther King Jr, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” His election-winning slogan was, “Yes, we can.”
Belief in progress remained tenable for a few more years. I wrote in the FT in 2014: “Humans have been getting more educated, rich and internationally connected, and more likely to live in democracies. These factors would tend to reduce violence. Indeed, by some definitions, there have been no interstate wars since 2008.” I wrote soon after: “Perhaps there is progress in history after all.”
I now suspect it was mostly well-off westerners who believed in progress. In unluckier parts of the world and in lower western social classes, a pessimistic view prevails. It’s inculcated early. Studies of Russian and American children’s stories, led by Amy Halberstadt of North Carolina State University and Yulia Chentsova Dutton of Georgetown University, found “the text of Russian books referenced anger and sadness more often than the US books”. Russian illustrations also depicted “anger and fear more frequently”.
Some historical pessimists believe that the world is run by conspiracies of bankers, elite paedophiles, CIA plotters, et cetera. Religious pessimists believe that this world is a vale of tears, with reward coming in the afterlife. Other pessimists conclude, based on their countries’ experiences, that rather than good guys winning, the law of history is might makes right.
Trump became the first successful American politician to voice historical pessimism. He blames elite conspiracies for sabotaging the US. In geopolitics, he disdains the good-guy theory and believes in might. Russia is stronger than Ukraine, and all else follows from that.
I’m belatedly warming up to historical pessimism. Even scientific progress has limited value. We now have vaccines against measles, but also a US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who spreads doubt about vaccines.
As for tech, this century it has probably worsened our lives. We now average nearly seven hours a day online, alone, increasingly atomised, stripped of privacy, absorbing nonsense. And think of other technological “advances”. True, vaccines contained Covid-19, but the CIA concluded that the pandemic probably began with a Chinese lab leak. Processed foods fuelled global obesity. Nuclear proliferation may worsen as the US stops protecting its allies. Above all, the technology of burning carbon has caused a kind of untreated planetary cancer.
Being raised on Russian children’s stories might have helped us grasp all this.
Email Simon at [email protected]
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