The real good news

All religious fundamentalists, but Christian pastors in particular, continually bewail the decadent and declining state of the world. Indeed, this is an attribute that bad religious leaders have in common with good journalists: a vested interest in bad news. In journalism, bad news sells. In fundamentalism, bad news makes believers fearful so that they put more money into the pastors’ collection buckets. But the crucial difference is this: the good journalists’ bad news is usually factual. The pastors’ dire diatribes, however, are never supported by hard evidence. As is always the case, religious fundamentalists think that quotes from their holy texts are sufficient to prove any argument. Fundamentalist Christians’ favourite doomsday text is, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven” (Luke 21:10-11).

The trouble is, there are always nations rising against nations and there are always earthquakes and comets and so on. So this kind of “prophecy” is quite meaningless. But what about the fundamental point: that the state of the world is becoming worse? In fact, the evidence suggests that this is far from being the truth. Take nation rising against nation. In 1986, there were about 18 large wars in the world (“large” meaning at least 10 people killed a day). Guatemala, Lebanon, Namibia, Eritrea, and Cambodia had been fighting for over a decade, and wars had recently begun in Sri Lanka, the Punjab, Afghanistan and El Salvador. But, even then, most of these wars were internal: the one exception was Iran and Iraq. Other wars were happening in the southern Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique and Nicaragua.

Ten years later, all but four of these wars were over (though new ones had started in Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia and Sierra Leone). Today, there is only one major war: if the occupation in Iraq can even be called that. But the fact is that over 95 percent of the world’s population today have never even experienced a war. “The world is not falling apart,” noted historian Gwynne Dyer in his syndicated newspaper column in 1996. “It is more peaceful than at any other time in the past half-century.” Ah, but is that “half-century” a fudge? Surely when you consider that the 20th century experienced two world wars in which millions of people were killed, it is irrefutable that the world has become more evil. Actually, no. Dyer pointed out that in the past 100 years, the ratio of persons killed by the deliberate actions of other human beings is one in 40. “That is certainly no worse than any previous century, and a great deal better than most. When you add in the fact that the technology for killing has become so much more efficient, indeed, it is a remarkably low toll,” he says.

Moreover, nations are now less likely to go to war than at any other time. There are many reasons for this (George W Bush, of course, not being among them) but two fundamental ones are trade and democracy. In his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, journalist Thomas Friedmann observed that no two nations with a McDonald’s franchise have ever gone to war. Democratic political systems existed in only 35 countries in 1975, but this number had risen to 84 nations by 1995: and, unlike rulers, citizens and businessmen rarely welcome war. So what about famine and pestilence and so on? The statistics show that growth in food production is now greater than that of population. Between 1961 and 1999, the average daily food supply per person increased 24 percent. In developing nations, it rose by 39 percent. The number of people suffering from chronic undernourishment fell from 35 percent of developing country populations in 1969-1971 to 17 percent in 1997-1999.

Only when it comes to disease might the prophets have a toehold. Although life expectancy in the developing world rose from 55 years in 1970 to 64 years in 2000, it fell in 32 countries in the 1990s. This, says economist Martin Wolf in his book Why Globalisation Works, was “mostly because of the AIDS epidemic, or the gross incompetence (or worse) of governments, as in North Korea and Zimbabwe. It also fell because of western hysteria about DDT, which removed the only effective way of controlling that dreadful curse, malaria.” Sub-Saharan Africa is, in fact, just about the sole exception to the general good news of the world. But even the AIDS crisis in that continent is due more to incompetent governments than any other factor (which is why Uganda, with a reasonably efficient government pushing its ABC programme, is the only African country which has controlled the disease). However, in the large picture, the sub-Saharan region contains only a tenth of the world’s population. Overall, the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined over the past 10 years (estimates range from nine percent to 25 percent, according to who you ask).

The United Nation’s 2003 Human Development Report says that the middle three-fifths of the world’s population are not poor and are making solid economic progress. These facts skewer the gloomy scenarios of religious and political fundamentalists. Yet all the data are irrelevant to the ultimate belief of the doomsayers. So the final question we must tackle is this: How likely is the end of the world? Well, in 1997 British bookmakers William Hill offered odds on various scenarios which might decimate the world population to 1,000 persons. Pollution comes in at a million-to-one against; drought at 100,000-to-one against; and climate change at 75,000-to-one against. The shortest odds are given to mutant diseases, meteor strikes, or war: and, at 500-to-one against, those are still pretty unlikely. Of course, no true believer is going to believe a bookie over God. But, as a true sceptic, the stats make me pretty optimistic about the world: it’s Trinidad and Tobago I’m not too sanguine about.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com  Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh