Don’t reveal your pessimism in front of children

What are we to tell our children about the world they are inheriting? Obviously that we’re all doomed, that United States President Donald Trump and Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) will finish us off if climate change and the failure of antibiotics don’t first.

It’s hardly the first time parents have had to break the news to children that things are in a parlous state. When I was growing up, I believed the world would end quite shortly in nuclear war. As a result, I became uninterested in the future, lived purely for the present and believed that more or less anything was morally justified as we were all going to be dead soon.

Global pessimism still comes fairly naturally to me — and I’m not alone. But I wonder whether this attitude is fair to our children. For the truth is, I have little idea what will happen. So I’m increasingly convinced I should reserve judgement and not burden my children with a sense of despair.

For those parents who are struggling to find something to be optimistic about so that their children can be inspired rather than discouraged, I can best point them towards three books — The Better Angels of our Nature by Stephen Pinker, The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.

I am not saying how much store I put by these books. But I am suggesting that they might be read and explained to our children for therapeutic purposes if for nothing else. At least it will provide some sort of antidote to the daily drip-feed of crisis that they cannot help but be aware of.

Here’s a quote from Ridley: “The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going ... upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years.” Noah Harari suggests that “war is obsolete — more people are killed by suicide than conflict” and “famine is disappearing — you are more at risk of obesity than starvation”.

The Pinker thesis is that outside of civil wars, the rate of every other kind of violence has been stuck at historically low levels and continues to decline. Democracy remains on the increase. In the US at least, where government statisticians use a constant yardstick, rates of sexual and domestic violence fell enormously from the 1970s to the mid-2000s, and have held steady since then. Each year in the past four decades, between two and three nations have abolished capital punishment. As for institutionalised violence, the global trend towards decriminalisation has continued, from 25 countries in 1960 to 83 in 2009 and 90 in 2015.

I would add that music, film and culture are more available to all than ever before, often free and much of it is of unprecedentedly high quality. Internet connectivity, despite all its downsides, is a tremendous boost for entertainment, information and personal expression. Hitting children is much rarer than it ever was. And children, at least in the West, have more spending power than my generation could ever have dreamed of.

Perhaps everything isn’t so bad. In fact, you could say that, historically, it is pretty good. Would it do us any harm to share that view with our children?

I know people are very passionate about their pessimism. But whatever the truth of Pinker, Ridley and Noah Harari — and none of them are propagandists or fools — they bring sufficient truth to present to our children to act as a counterweight to the sense of gloom that seems to afflict so many adults. Today, the new generation needs, more than anything, hope. We can help to give it to them, and it doesn’t necessarily mean sticking our heads in the sand, or theirs.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Tim Lott is a journalist and author. His latest book is Under the Same Stars.