No wonder artificial intelligence is making such strides: humans are hopelessly flawed. Our myopia is extraordinary, and our propensity to fall foul of manias never fails to amaze. When all goes well, we succumb to irrational exuberance: we convince ourselves that the stock market is bound to double or that eternal peace is inevitable. Yet as soon as the going gets a little tougher, or the people vote the “wrong” way, it’s U-turns galore. We recall, suddenly, that civilisations fall as well as rise, and assume that this must be the moment when we locked ourselves into a spiral of terminal decline.
Nuance, perspective and balance are nigh-on impossible in a society plagued by such cognitive biases, one that yo-yos from Panglossianism to extreme self-doubt. This pathological inability to take the long view — paradoxically, most prevalent among the most educated — is key to explaining the return of declinism in Britain and America, one of the most worrying developments in decades.
For the first time since the Seventies, much of our establishment has started to despair of our society. Instead of trying to fix problems, they shrug and accept defeat. The financial crisis rattled many, of course, but the real trigger was the Brexit vote, which instantly transformed relaxed, prosperous people into “no can do” pessimists; Donald Trump’s election triggered a similar psychological reaction among liberal elites in the US.
The old enthusiastic attitude, honed in the Thatcherite Eighties and Blairite Nineties, is nowhere to be seen; and Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” campaign chant has been replaced by an angry negativity. Not everybody has been contaminated: many ordinary voters are upbeat, hopeful that their concerns have been heard at last, and plenty of entrepreneurs are getting on with forging the digital age.
Yet there is evidence of this rampant defeatism everywhere. As far as the bien-pensant elites in Westminster are concerned, Brexit is technically impossible: it cannot be done, such are the depths of our entanglements with the EU. The idea that we could still, with a proper strategy and better political leadership, negotiate a good deal, leveraging our many strengths and assets, or simply go it alone, is met with a mixture of mirth and fury. We are David, we keep being told, they are Goliath, and unlike in Biblical times we are doomed. Thanks for refusing even to try, chaps.
As to the economy, the outlook is equally hopeless. Ben Broadbent, a deputy governor of the Bank of England, believes that the economy has entered a “climacteric” or — to use his translation — “menopausal” moment: the forces preventing productivity from growing are so immense, so bound up in technological cycles that policymakers can’t even hope to make a dent in them. The Treasury agrees: it doesn’t believe that anything can be done to kick-start our sluggish economy, apart from cancelling Brexit, of course. The Chancellor is nowhere to be seen, and doesn’t believe that tax cuts or deregulation would make any difference. There are few better illustrations of our new culture of defeatism than that.
The rot has spread everywhere. The police believe nothing can be done to tackle the explosion in knife attacks and other crime. A debilitated Foreign Office’s only answer to Iran or North Korea is appeasement, and condemnation of those who seek genuine solutions. The Tory centre-Right and Labour centre-Left have bought the lazy trope that demographics is destiny: the suburbs are shifting leftward as graduates move in; and the working class is turning blue as a result of Brexit. There is little room for trying to shift opinion. Even free-marketeers are giving up: the public loves the NHS and nationalisation — not least of train franchises such as the East Coast main line — so what’s the point of fighting a battle that cannot be won?
None of our past five prime ministers would have put up with this nonsense. Margaret Thatcher was responsible for rescuing us from our previous declinist period in the Seventies, but John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron all believed in the power of leadership to change the course of history. They were right, and their policies, for better or worse, transformed Britain.
Yet their 25 years in office were not exactly typical. Declinism has had an especially long history in the UK, perhaps because we were once the world’s most powerful country. As the historian Robert Tombs has argued, it is also a sign of parochialism: we obsess about our own faults while turning a blind eye to everybody else’s, often greater, problems.
It all started in the 1880s, when many in Britain panicked at the rise of Germany as an industrial powerhouse; then the Great War shattered more illusions, and Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was read almost as closely in Britain as it was on the continent. In the late Forties and Fifties, the end of empire, combined with rationing and the Great Smog of 1952, fuelled a sense of a country in freefall. But it was the Suez crisis in 1956 that shattered what was left of our ruling class’s self-confidence and the culture of deference that helped to support it.
After that, the establishment decided that our only hope was to join the Common Market. When we finally did in the Seventies, the received wisdom was that high inflation, strikes and rising unemployment were inevitable features of late-stage capitalism. Decline was unavoidable, and perhaps also full socialism: the best that could be done was to manage the process. Declinism also took other forms, with a fearful acceptance of hard Left, IRA and Middle Eastern terror.
It was from this intellectual cesspit that Thatcher emerged. She believed that unleashing capitalism would bolster growth and that terrorists could be defeated, as with the siege of the Iranian embassy. She took on Argentina and won. Then there was no looking back — until two years ago, that is.
Only three groups continue to resist the ambient declinism. The Corbynites remain relentlessly optimistic, a key component of their appeal. Then there are the real Brexiteers: they still want to reboot Britain but have been sidelined. The final group are the technology entrepreneurs: as far as they are concerned, their inventions will make all of our lives better.
All three groups have performed near-miracles over the past few years, which should come as a warning to the establishment: declinism is an elite phenomenon, and its electoral appeal is suicidally narrow. The public will not tolerate a political class that has given up.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2018
Allister Heath is the editor of City A.M. and a columnist.
