The world seems to become an ever stranger and darker place every day. Although let me qualify that statement by pointing out the work being done by the words “seems” and “become”. “Seems” alerts us to two different possibilities. How I perceive things to be and how they actually are, may be two different things. My perception is always limited and imperfect. Even in the most immediate and simple of situations it is clearly possibly for me to misperceive. Facts, it turns out, are often slippery and rarely straightforward. This doesn’t mean that I can’t know anything, it just means that I have to accept that I never know everything infallibly. Normally this doesn’t matter. I know enough, and know it well enough, to do the normal things in life I have to do. So do you. But this can be deceptive and can lead us to the erroneous conclusion that we know more than we do, and that we are wiser than we are. So I hope there is always a certain humility with which I approach the topics I discus here. I don’t think I have ever written anything knowing that it was incorrect, or based on incorrect information. That doesn’t mean I haven’t, just that I have to be open to correction because I might have!
That’s all mainly to do with limitations. But it also also possible to be misled by only having certain types and pieces of information available to drive perceptions. We may live in an information age, when we can apparently know almost in an instant about events on the other side of the planet, or where almost every aspect of life is being surveilled by some sort of imaging device attached to the omnipresent interweb. And these days of course I no longer have to find my way to a networked computer to access this apparently bottomless well of information. All I have to do is put my hand in my pocket and take out my smartphone. I confess I am inclined to believe what I see on screens (whether small or large). And yet, very often a particular someone is choosing particular images and not other, alternative images. Choices are being made about their framing and how they are juxtaposed with other images, all before they are presented to, or selected by, me. They are thus never unfiltered, even if they are unedited. Occasionally (always?) such choices are driven by agendas and unspoken prejudices that are rarely revealed along with the images. So not only can I not know the whole story, but the whole story is rarely if ever presented to me, further complicating any interpretation on my part. And to top it all off we now have the twin problems of an allegedly biased and polarised media on the one hand, and the risk of social media echo chambers on the other, both of which poison the information space. One is the problem of other people, the other the problem of me. The truth may be out there, but it is often well obscured by lots of extraneous trivia and non-truth.
But the idea of some situation or another “becoming” also carries a certain amount of baggage requiring a bit of thought. It suggests a change from one state to another state with time. Indeed, usually the idea is a change from a previously good state to a now much worse state. This can become a self-reinforcing narrative that everything is in decline compared to some bygone age, whether long ago or just in our recent past. It’s not that that a decline is not in progress. But is worth pausing and reflecting on whether this really is what’s going on. It’s too easy to be paralysed into inaction by the idea of an inevitable and terminal decline, which is then just fatalistically accepted.
Consider the recent (and awful) antisemitic assaults in London, in which two Jewish men, simply and quietly going about their daily business were stabbed, apparently with the aim of killing them. One particular individual stands accused of what is a heinous crime (a physical assault with murderous intent) made worse by its antisemitic motivation. But more widely, the idea is that this is symptomatic of an increasingly violent society in which order is breaking down, and specifically symptomatic of a recent normalising of hatred of and hostility towards Jewish people. Now it is worth saying (again) that this incident was awful, and if it was motivated by a hatred of Jewish people (ie antisemitism) then this has to be repudiated and combatted by more than words. And for the majority non-Jewish population in this part of the world, we have to ask why and how such attitudes take root among us. This is not someone else’s problem, it is ours. The idea that an identifiable part of our population is under threat (and they feel that they are) says something about us all. But on this occasion it’s the wider narrative that I want to examine.
The psychologist Steven Pinker has been writing for a while (eg see "The Better angels of Our Nature) about the mismatch between how people feel about “things”, and how things actually are. He points to some general trends that are rooted in data. Global life expectancy has been rising steadily for years (<50y in 1950 to >70 in 2026); and according to the World Bank global poverty has at the same time been falling steadily. But of course those are based on gross averages, and may conceal as much as they reveal. If we zoom in on UK crime stats, homicide is generally down over the last twenty years, as are incidents of violence. The general picture from both Police records and the National Crime Survey (which is independent of the Police and more about the actual experience of crime; see here) is an improving one. Most of the population, most of the time is more or less unaffected by crime directed personally at them. But of course this is not news, at least not the sort that gets reported. Not the sort of thing that whips up a social media storm. And there are lots of vested interests involved in persuading us that things are bad and getting worse. Something must be done!
And of course there are things that need to be done. Against a general context of improvement the rise of both anti-Semitic violence as well as that perpetrated on other minorities (“hate crime” remains stubbornly high after rising through the 2010’s) is even starker. Even if the general picture is improving, the fact that various minorities are being attacked again says something about us all. It also remains to be seen how the coarsening of public life observed in Western democracies, the normalisation of lying and scapegoating, the rise in populist simplism, will feed through to the everyday experience of the vast mass of ordinary people. Politicians seem to comfort themselves with the idea is that all they are doing is reflecting a public mood. And in a democracy, plausibly, this is what we should expect. But this is hardly leadership. On the other had it might be argued it was ever thus. Is Trump worse than Nixon, who famously lied, cheated and burgled his way into power? And while the UK population seems noticeably disenchanted with Starmer, who it is claimed is politically and economically inept (although it’s probably too early to tell), no-one except the most partisan could accuse him of the levels of incompetence (Truss) and lying (Johnston) we endured relatively recently.
There is work to do. But let’s not be befuddled into thinking that we’re all heading to hell in a handcart.
