Читать книгу LifeLines - Malcolm Doney - Страница 13

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Read the News

Are things getting better? Or worse? Is history going forwards... or backwards?

Your answer may depend on anything from personality type to the headlines you woke up to on the morning news. Or, on who’s asking the question. And where they’re standing. But mostly your answer depends on what you mean by the question. Do you mean: is the world a better place today than last year, or are things better in the twenty-first century than, say, in the nineteenth? Or in ancient times?

For example, in 1980, smallpox, which has existed for 3,000 years and was once one of the most feared diseases on the planet, was eradicated. The polio virus, which as recently as the 1980s, paralysed 350,000 people a year, is now almost gone too.

Or take life expectancy. If you’re a woman in sub-Saharan Africa today, and you are asked if things are getting better and you compare yourself to the life of your grandmother, you may well say, ‘yes’. Today, you will probably live until you are fifty-seven – that’s sixteen years more of life than your grandmother, who might have made it to forty-one.

This kind of news doesn’t make the headlines because it didn’t happen an hour ago, or even yesterday. It didn’t happen with the sickening thud of a bomb blast or the flash of a paparazzi camera. This is not twenty-four-hour rolling news but another sort that we rarely notice until, some time later – years, decades, centuries – someone decides to call it history.

Journalism is sometimes referred to as the first draft of history, but first drafts don’t tell the whole story. In a world of 24/7 news, we can miss the bigger picture.

Each year, Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest people, publishes a letter on behalf of his philanthropic foundation drawing on the latest research, from child mortality to economic growth. Recently Gates wrote:

‘By almost any measure the world is better than it has ever been – by 2035 there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.’¹

That sounds unlikely, but on the other hand, maybe Gates can see a more distant news cycle with a greater circumference.

Stand back a little, adjust your view and some days you might capture the faint outline of a more promising image of history.