Doomism and the doomists

The greatest change in politics in my lifetime has been the replacement of hope and fear by gloom and despair. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, there was fear of imminent nuclear war. But set against that was a hope that a better society could be created, with a comfortable life for all people, free from the fear of poverty and free from the cruelty and humiliation suffered by many. This idea that people could hope for a better world was a creation of the 19th Century. Before then (and still in some parts of the world today), the lives of most people were short and hungry, at the mercy of the powerful, and with the probability of watching half your children die. Not surprisingly, most people believed that their only hope for a better existence would be after their death.

Yet despite living in an appalling century of war and mass murder, many people in Europe in the middle of the 20th Century voted for political parties that held out hope. This was true of the right as well as the left. The left held out the promise of personal security against illness and poverty through the creation of a welfare state, government action to maintain full employment, and restraining the economic power of the wealthy. The right promised to achieve more or less the same aims by facilitating home ownership and rewarding economic enterprise. One side emphasised social solidarity: the other personal responsibility.

Both these routes to a better world now seem blocked. It is proving increasingly difficult to fund the welfare state because of population change. Most people now join the labour-force five or six years later than was the case in the 1960s, while greater life-expectancy has produced an increasing proportion of elderly in the population. As a result, there are fewer people in work to fund a comfortable retirement for the elderly, whether this be through public provision (taxation or social insurance) or private means (personal savings or annuities). The right-wing promise of a property-owning society is also threatened. Rapid rises in house prices make purchase out of the reach of most people, particularly since many young people are also paying off student loans.

This has led to two typical responses. One is to abandon politics altogether and resort to fantasy. The fantasy is that wealth and happiness will be achieved by winning the lottery, being recognised as a new singing star on the X Factor, or having a son talented enough at football to be signed for the Premier League. An alternative fantasy is that the purchase of some new consumer good will transform your personality and very identity. This is exploited by advertisers, who now offer mystical experiences or at the very least utter bliss as the result of buying a new car. Driving a BMW or an AUDI has now become the modern equivalent of attending mass.

The second typical response is ‘doomism’. This is the belief that our current way of life will end catastrophically within our lifetimes, and that only a few will find shelter in some distant retreat. There have, of course, always been people who predicted the imminent end of the world based on their reading of the Bible, with survival in paradise available only to the select few who joined their particular version of Christianity. While awaiting the apocalypse, believers often gathered in Godly communities here on earth, perhaps so that they could be easily identified when the end came. They attempted to make their Godly communities very models of the just society or heaven. Some became cruel habitations of conformity. But others, like Rhode Island or Pennsylvania, became tolerant and progressive societies.

Belief in an imminent apocalypse is still strong in parts of the USA, but in Europe it has been supplanted by a new secular doomism, based on the belief that the natural life of the planet is fatally imperilled by over-population, pollution or, alternatively, by the excessive consumption of natural resources. Doomists attribute these problems either to capitalism (now labelled as ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’), or just to the innate greed and stupidity of human beings. For this kind of doomist, shelter is found in small self-sufficient communities away in the hills. And so they gather to await eco-doom in towns like Totnes, Stroud, and Machynlleth. Like the earlier religious doomists, they try and implement their ideas, in this case with local currencies, community gardens, recycling exchanges and cycleways. In the process, they turn their shelters into some of our most desirable and innovative communities.