This article was compiled from a series of posts on Livejournal I wrote in 2009. To those who say it sounds like recycled Steven Pinker, I’d like to point out that this is way before Better Angels of Our Nature came out, let alone Enlightenment Now, but I’m reprinting it more-or-less unchanged because most of my points still stand. A few things have changed since, though, notably …
This was written before the 2020 pandemic, so the figures on modern infectious diseases are of course way out, but the general point remains: so far Covid has killed under 8 million people; we don’t have exact figures for the 1918 influenza pandemic, but estimates start at 50 million and go up to 100 million. And taken as proportions of the world population, the difference is even more striking.
After writing the original version, I learned about “food deserts” in the US, where unhealthy food is the only food you can get, and of course thse days in the UK you might have to be content with what’s been left in the food bank. But still, the vast majority of people in developed countries have more choice about what they eat than humans have ever had in the past.
I’m coming round to the view that the mental health crisis among young people is real and cannot be entirely explained by rising expectations and increased reporting. But if true, that warrants treatment in a separate article after I am better informed.
Part 1: The Non-existent Crime Wave
In the past few days I’ve read around sixty exam papers dealing with the question of restorative versus retributive justice. Of these, I’d guess around twenty start off with a sentence like “All over the world, crime rates are soaring.” This piqued my curiosity. All of these students are studying social sciences, so we might expect them to know that in most developed countries, crime rates, while continually fluctuating, have in general fallen over the last two decades (crime rates in Third World countries vary wildly because there are so many factors involved, from endemic corruption to civil war). I am not saying that this is something to be jubilant about: the US homicide rate is still higher than it was in 1960 while in some European countries, crime in general has fallen but violent crime has risen. In Japan, street crime is now widespread; a common scenario is for an elderly person to approach a group of street-toughs to ask for directions, only to find that they give him the wrong directions. Moreover, reasons for the fall are obscure; even decreased lead levels in the atmosphere have been credited. But whatever the reasons, one thing is clear: crime rates are not soaring. The interesting part is why people believe that they are.
The simplest explanation is just that it takes a while for information to spread; by the time most people have noticed the fall in crime, crime will probably have started rising again. However, I shall lay Occam’s razor to one side for a moment in order to contemplate another hypothesis, which I call the MOMS syndrome, MOMS here standing for “malaise of modern society”. The idea that crime is increasing is attractive not just because for a while it did increase, but because increasing crime is part of the MOMS: modern society has a high crime rate because modern society is fundamentally flawed. You can choose one or more of many aspects of the malaise to explain crime: decline in religious belief, rampant consumerism, single mothers … take your pick. Any of these can be pulled in to say why, for about thirty years, crime rose to almost nineteenth-century levels. Ah yes, that’s the problem. The murder rate in Britain was 1.7 per 100,000 in 1850. By 1900, that had dropped to 0.8, whence it fell slowly to an all-time low of 0.7. It’s true that it then climbed quickly to a high of 1.4 in 1990, but — and this is the part people forget — it then started to fall again. [Source](Figures for the USA are similar but higher overall, and have a spike around 1920–1930 because of prohibition.)
Furthermore, when we look at crime on the basis of centuries rather than decades, crime is not soaring but plummeting (if you can talk about something plummeting over centuries). As I mentioned previously, the murder rate in thirteenth-century England was 20 per 100,000, which is around four times what it was in 1700 and fourteen times the last peak of 1990. Whatever disadvantages modernity may have brought in its wake, crime is not one of them.
Part 2: Diseases of Affluence — Why Cholesterol is Better Than Cholera
Having established that modern society not only is not more violent than traditional societies, but is actually much less violent, I would like to talk a bit about health. I’ve always been a fellow-traveller of the alternative health movement. The blame (or credit) for this goes partially to my parents and even more so to my grandfather (an antiquarian book dealer), who exposed me to books written during an earlier wave of alternative health movements: the first yogis, vegetarians, hikers, carrot juice addicts, naturists, practitioners of eurhythmics and advocates of perfect eyesight without glasses. Add my hippie friends in the 1970s and you have wholefoods, t’ai chi, orgone accumulators and all the other holistic razzamatazz. These days I’m in Turkey watching the process of health anarchy repeat itself, and jumping in with a peculiar mixture of nostalgia and skepticism. Anyway, from all of this, you’d think I’d be highly critical of modern society with it’s “diseases of affluence” and modern medicine with its magic bullets, invasive surgery and other military metaphors.
In fact, I’m not. I admit that there are diseases of affluence. Americans raised on junk food are in just as bad a position as eighteenth-century aristocrats with their gout brought on from pheasants and port, or Roman patricians suffering the ill-effects of gorging on larks tongues in aspic. And that, dear readers, is the wonderful thing. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the developed world, those considered poor have diseases that for most of history were limited to a privileged few. Now I admit that this in itself would not be a powerful argument in favour of modernity, but bear with me. Millions of people in rich countries suffer from obesity, heart disease and so forth because of their diet and lifestyle. Given that they have the alternative of living healthily, this is obviously not good, but let’s not forget two things. First, they do have the alternative of living more healthily. Second, they have these diseases of affluence because they are affluent, and believe me, diseases of affluence are better than diseases of poverty. I live in a country on the fringes of the developed world, which means it still has some pretty undeveloped bits. I know people from these undeveloped bits, and the first thing I notice about them is that they’re short, they look older than they really are, and a lot of them aren’t too bright. There are several reasons for this, but an important one is childhood malnutrition. Peasants on the Aegean coast of Turkey generally enjoy good health because the geography favours fruit, vegetables, olives and fish; the same goes for the Black Sea coast, which is the world’s main producer of hazelnuts (and also has plenty of fish), but move into central Anatolia and we’re talking bread, onions, the odd legume, bread, meat on a good day, and more bread. This is also how most of Europe lived until recently.
Of course, there are many things wrong with the modern Western diet. However, we are making the mistake of comparing what the average person eats today with what a highly fortunate person (e.g. an Aegean peasant) ate a century or two ago. If we compare the diet of an industrial worker in Manchester today with that of an industrial worker in Manchester in 1850, then I think we have to admit that the evils of saturated fats, sugar, salt and esoteric food additives pale into insignificance when compared to a diet of bread and gin. And speaking of additives, we shouldn’t forget that two hundred years ago, people put chalk in flour to make it look whiter and sulphuric acid in beer to give it more of a tang.
Modern diseases may be bad, but would you really want to swap them for pre-modern diseases? I’ll admit that the onset of modernity — i.e., the industrial revolution — brought terrible diseases in its wake, such as cholera, or the influenza epidemic of 1918 that killed more people than the war that preceded it. But really, we’re over that now. Nowadays, people panic when a few hundred deaths happen as a result of some new kind of flu. If less than a thousand deaths is news, times are good.
Finally, there’s the fact that although many alternative therapies and lifestyle practices are based on traditional methods, the phenomenon as a whole is recent. Using Turkey as an example again, there have always been traditional spiritual healers, bonesetters and herbalists here, plus a wealth of health-related folklore. But until comparatively recently, that was all there was. Then along came modern medicine, first restricted to the urban elite, but now available throughout the country. Whatever the disadvantages of modern medicine, you have to admit it’s good for some things, such as painless, infection-free surgery, vaccinations, antibiotics and, in general, stopping people dying. Now, thanks to globalisation, Turks not only have modern medicine, but also traditional therapies of other countries (plus traditional-modern hybrids) and are now enthusiastically embracing yoga, acupuncture, reiki and pilates. We could argue about whether this is a modern or a postmodern phenomenon, but whatever it is, it’s new.
Part 3: The Pursuit of Unhappiness
This leaves the big question: are we happier? And if so, is it real happiness or some Brave New Worldly pseudo-happiness?
Both questions are important, because those who believe in the Malaise of Modern Society argue both sides: some say that we are less happy than our ancestors; others lament the fact that our lives are so comfortable we have lost our sense of tragedy and succumbed to the anodyne, superflat happiness of contented pigs when we should be discontented Socrateses. Let us examine these one at a time.
It is hard to say whether we are more or less happy than our ancestors, given that in the Middle Ages, no one was wandering around with clipboards and microphones asking members of the public how happy they were. In fact, the sum of human happiness — meaning the ordinary happiness of ordinary people, not the beatitude of a few saints — wasn’t even much of an issue until the nineteenth century. My guess is that people were pretty happy in the Paleolithic era since they were living in the kind of environment they had evolved for, but even then, life probably wasn’t completely untroubled: watching your kids getting eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger can’t be much fun. I would also guess that people in nineteenth-century Europe were somewhat less happy than we are, but this is only a guess, based on the fact that the nineteenth century had a lot of the things that generally make people unhappy, such as poverty, high infant mortality, cholera etc. What we do know is that most people in developed countries today think of themselves as happy. We could tell them that they’re lying and in fact they’re totally miserable, but what would this achieve? You could just as well tell someone with depression that deep down, they’re positively joyful.
Speaking of depression, I am a little suspicious of all the talk about an “epidemic” of depression. Again, I’m not sure, but I suspect that this apparent mushrooming of misery is largely due to two factors: one, depression is now recognised as an illness, so people go to their doctor and get diagnosed with it; two, suicide is more acceptable in Western societies than it was in the past. On the other hand, I have to admit that loneliness is a major factor in depression, and modern societies provide more opportunities to be lonely than, say, a medieval village. Try feeling lonely when you have to share a bed with three siblings. It is also possible for a society to have both a high rate of depression and a high average level of happiness (hence the famous Scandinavian suicide paradox). We should also not forget that there is considerable variation between developed nations: “Around a quarter of British people, and more than a quarter of Americans, experience mental problems in any given year, compared with fewer than 10 per cent in Japan, Germany, Sweden and Italy.”
So really, we can’t know for sure, but I’d still say that your chances of happiness are higher in modern society. If someone asked me if I’d be happier living at a time before universal suffrage, the welfare state, antibiotics, sexual freedom and painless dentistry, it wouldn’t take me long to make up my mind. For this reason, I’ll go with the assumption that we are, on the whole, at least as happy as, and probably a little happier than, our ancestors.
Part 4: My Rich Inner Life, Your Spiritual Malaise
What, then, of the objection that our supposed happiness is a fake? We’ve seen that telling someone that they don’t feel happy is absurd (unless we are simply accusing them of lying). However, it may not be absurd to tell them that even though they feel happy, this doesn’t mean that they really are happy. Certainly a fair number of philosophers would do just that, because the distinction between happiness as a feeling and happiness as living well has been around since Aristotle. There is plenty of empirical evidence to tell us that most people seem pretty happy, but it’s mainly based on variations on two types of question: “How often do you feel happy?” and “How happy are you with your life in general?” People could answer positively just because they have low standards. A heroin addict feels happy and may well be contented with their life so long as they have a reliable supply of heroin, but this is obviously not the kind of life we would recommend, and most people would not describe this state as “true happiness”.
The MOMS argument is that we have substituted feeling good for living well (or if you prefer the Greek, hedonia for eudaemonia). This is a harder claim to disprove, not least because there is less than complete agreement on what it means to live well. For Homer’s Greeks, living well meant, as Tad Williams wonderfully put it, “sticking a spear in you then writing a poem about it.” Aldous Huxley in Brave New World expects us to be horrified that Shakespeare is banned but thinks nothing of rewriting Oedipus Rex to give it a happy ending in Island. Attempting to answer the dual question “What is it to live well, and how well are we living?” smacks of hubris, but I’m going to try anyway.
When people say that there is an epidemic of violent crime, you can show them the statistics that show how crime has actually fallen. When they claim that people in the West are unhappy, you can show them statistics that show that in fact, most of them are pretty happy. But when they say that we have lost our spiritual bearings and are wallowing in a false contentment, then it’s not so easy to come up with a counterargument. We can’t quantify virtue or measure meaning.
Another reason why it is hard to oppose the idea of spiritual malaise is that the very fact that the question gets raised implies that something has gone wrong, especially when some of the people raising it are, by all accounts, very clever people. Something happened in the middle of the twentieth century to make some of the best minds of Europe and America decide that we had taken a wrong turning: T.S. Eliot, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Hermann Hesse, J.R.R. Tolkien … all very different people, but all united in a conviction that Western society had gone off the rails. Of course the twentieth century also had its complacent and self-congratulatory intellectuals, and modernism has famous apologists, but here I’m more interested in the nay-sayers. Why, after the optimism that opened the twentieth century, were so many intelligent people saying that everything was getting worse?
It is a feature of the best of times as well as the worst that a lot of people will think that things are getting worse, and in particular, that people are getting worse. But in the middle of the twentieth century, it really did seem like Western civilisation was destroying itself. No sooner had society started to recover from “the war to end all wars” than Europe started gearing up for another one. World War I threw the old values of patriotism and tradition into question in a way an army of nineteenth-century intellectuals could not; the rise of Nazism, though, threatened the new values of science and social progress. Some intellectuals rallied to their defence, some rushed headlong into Stalinism, some journeyed to the East, some returned to the Church, some even flirted with fascism. Like any period of rapid change, it was a mess, with more people cursing the dark than lighting candles. With half the world going crazy, it is hard to blame them.
If this intellectual nausée had been merely a reaction to the ugly state of Europe from 1914 to 1944, though, it would have dissipated, but if anything, it became stronger in the second half of the century. Whether the criticism comes from progressives or conservatives, mystics or existentialists, there is enough disillusionment with modern society to indicate that some things really did change in a serious way. Whether these changes are all that bad, though, is a matter of debate. I would say that the criticism focusses on four closely related areas: the decline of religion, estrangement from the natural world, consumerism and mass society.
Some critics of modernity, such as C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot and a host of Catholic converts, see the decline in religion as the main source of the malaise of modern society. Even those with no particular religious axe to grind have misgivings about the “disenchantment” (to borrow Weber’s term) that modernity brought. And yes, there has been a decline in religion in Europe (and to a lesser extent, America), and yes, this does mean we’ve lost some good things, like the way a shared faith can give purpose to a community. On the other hand, we shouldn’t forget that religion often gives us bad purposes, and if we want all the warm fuzzies that come with a strong religious community then perhaps we shouldn’t complain when they burn the occasional heretic. My personal view is that there’s a kind of ideal ratio of faith which occurs when a third of the population have definite religious beliefs, a third have some vague notions of spirituality and the rest are either committed atheists or apathetic agnostics. In any case, what we definitely do not have in today’s society is the “spiritual vacuum” that religious anti-modernists complain about. If modern society were so materialistic, how come books on spirituality sell so well? Usually what these people are complaining about is that people are getting interested in other people’s spiritual beliefs and practices. There’s a double standard involved: if someone goes to church, they are spiritually fulfilled, but if they go to a reiki class, they’re trying vainly to fill the spiritual vacuum inside them.
Estrangement from nature and the evils of industrialism have been a theme of anti-modernists on both the right and left since William Wordsworth and William Cobbett, and to be fair, they often make some very good points. The industrial revolution made life hell for a lot of people, and even after the living standards of the working class rocketed in the twentieth century, it left us with a lot of ugliness and the likelihood of a global catastrophe of Biblical proportions. (There again, we shouldn’t forget that they had Biblical catastrophes in Biblical times too, and they were much less equipped to deal with them.) It’s a major theme of my favourite anti-modernist, J.R.R. Tolkien, whose hobbits live in a rural utopia, while Saruman and Sauron go all out for industrialisation. Tolkien was influenced by his childhood, when he moved from a Hobbiton-like village to Birmingham, which in those days was a pretty good model for Isengard. Even my own childhood visits to Birmingham in the 1960s were enough to put me off big cities for a long time. But we shouldn’t forget two things: firstly, while English village life may be idyllic, it is only possible because it is (and was even before Tolkien’s day) supported by industry; secondly, technology has advanced a long way since the industrial revolution. The centre of Birmingham, which used to be black with soot, is now a pleasant place to wander around.
Even if we concede that technology can be made clean, comfortable and eco-friendly, though, will we ever regain the bond with Nature that the industrial revolution cut? Or did we really have such a bond? I’m quite happy to admit that hunter-gatherers have a relationship with their environment which is so spiritually intense I can’t really grasp it. I’m not so sure I’d grant such a holistic vision to a sixteenth-century peasant. Sure, my forebears spent a lot more time in the open air than I do (most of them were farmers, after all) but did they look at Nature any less instrumentally than we do? If anything, I’d say they had a more instrumental attitude, since for them, Nature was not something to commune with, but a way of making a living. They might not have been estranged from Nature in the way that modern city-dwellers are, but Olde England was no Findhorn. In those days, people who talked to nature spirits tended to come to nasty ends.
The loss of spiritual values and the disenchantment of Nature lead to a preoccupation with acquiring material goods. Well, that’s what we’ve been told, and I suppose it’s true to an extent. Somebody who has no spiritual life to speak of and doesn’t get off on daffodils is more likely to spend their time at the mall. But as I’ve said, the fact that we don’t all believe in the same things doesn’t mean we’ve all lost our spiritual values, nor is material greed unique to modern societies. People have probably been lamenting human acquisitiveness ever since the combination of agriculture and pottery gave us the means to acquire things. Take the Vikings, for example. Do you think they rampaged across Europe just to take in the scenery? They were after gold. OK, gold and slaves, who could later be sold for gold. And maybe a bit of amber, too. Henry VIII didn’t dissolve the monasteries because he was a pious Protestant, but because he was a greedy bastard. History is one long, sad story of people killing each other out of greed.
Now I dislike consumerism as much as the next lefty, but I have to ask myself if it is any different from normal human greed. We are told that it creates artificial desires for things we don’t really need, but then did Erik Skullsplitter really need that goblet he looted from Lindisfarne? Consumerism is bad because it places what may become unbearable strains on the planet’s resources, makes people work harder than is good for them and encourages exploitation of poorer countries. But the only thing that makes it new and different is that it allows almost all of us to do this. In the past, you really had to be somebody to pillage the world’s wealth; now any Joe Proletarian can go down to his local department store and do it. I admit I’m playing the Devil’s advocate here, but doesn’t part of the disdain for consumerism come from elitism? After all, it’s all about mass-produced junk for the masses, and the masses are never us.
This brings us neatly to the last cause of our supposed spiritual malaise: mass society, and with it, popular culture. I already (in the poetically titled “Mass Society, My Arse”) debunked the notion that the twentieth century saw the individual crushed by mass society. The forces of collectivism did their utmost to create a conformist mass society and failed; the twentieth century was the first time ever that ordinary people were able — and were sometimes even encouraged — to think for themselves. Even openly conformist mass movements like Fascism were only able to come to power because the masses had become a potent political force. Political propaganda and advertising, obnoxious though both of them may be sometimes, only arose because, again for the first time ever, ordinary people were forming their own opinions, and those opinions were making a big difference. Before the modern age, people didn’t need to manipulate the masses so much because the masses didn’t matter all that much — you might want to give the yeomanry a stirring speech before sending them to be mowed down by enemy cavalry or egg on a mob to lynch one of your political rivals, but you didn’t need a full-time propaganda machine because most of the time nobody gave a lark’s tongue what the plebs thought.
Does this render all criticism of mass society invalid? Not entirely, because even though it’s preferable for ruling classes to control the masses through TV than torture, manipulation is still not nice. But all too often, criticisms of mass society are really just criticisms of popular culture, which like criticisms of consumerism, often have elitist overtones. To say everything I want in defence of pop culture would take far too long, so I’ll just stick to one simple but often overlooked point. When people have a bone to pick with modern pop culture, they generally compare it with what they know of the culture of bygone days, so that they compare, for example, Madonna with Mozart. In other words, they are comparing someone who appeals to the masses with someone whose music was listened to by an aristocratic elite, and whose genius was recognised by a handful of them. If you want a fair comparison, you need to compare what ordinary people today listen to with what ordinary people listened to a few hundred years ago. Let no one complain that pop music is banal and repetitive until they’ve listened through all twenty-nine verses of Mattie Groves.
Taking all of the above points into consideration (as my students love to say) is there a malaise of modern society, or have we never had it so good? The people who claim that crime is skyrocketing, that we are less healthy than we were a hundred years ago or that people in the West are less happy than people in the East are simply wrong, and there is plenty of evidence to prove them wrong. The philosophical objections to the modern world are more complicated and less easily dismissed, though as I think I’ve shown here, all of them are problematic in one way or another. For me, though, the real clincher is that I am sitting at a computer writing about the malaise of modern society, and millions of people can (should they so wish) read what I write. My great grandmother couldn’t read anything anyone wrote, because she’d never learnt to read. And sure, Paradise Lost may be better written than The Da Vinci Code, but I’d still rather live in a world where the masses get to read Dan Brown than one where a handful get to read Milton.