Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Four years ago this month, I boarded an eerie, near-deserted flight from Los Angeles to Washington. (A week earlier, it would have been full.) The Uber driver who picked me up from a ghost town calling itself Dulles airport said I was his second fare of the day. (I should have been his 20th.) A medieval silence fell on the capital of the free world that night, and not through coercion. Lockdowns were still a while off.
As the pandemic wore on, I guessed it would be 2025 before cities felt normal again. And I was on the upbeat side of things. In the end, the urban comeback happened in, what, Q2 2022? According to the Centre for Cities this week, London is “now almost certainly” above its all-time peak population, with a figure of 10.1mn people doing the rounds.
I don’t demand show trials or the ritual egging in public squares of people who were bearish on cities. There is no need for a mea maxima culpa from those who doubted if even the handshake, let alone the restaurant, would return. But let’s imagine that things were reversed: that we optimists were the ones proven wrong. We wouldn’t have been allowed to slink off like Homer Simpson into the hedge. There would have been recriminations.
There is an asymmetry in public life. If you err on the side of optimism, it can dog you forever. Ask Francis Fukuyama. Erring the other way incurs much less cost. Ask . . . well, whom? Who is the reference point for incorrect pessimism? If a name doesn’t occur, it’s because we tend to let these things go.
This might be evolutionary psychology at work. On the whole, it is prudent to assume the worst — Europe, had it done so, wouldn’t have taken such a lavish peace dividend after 1989 — so perhaps we incentivise such behaviour in each other without knowing it. Going easy on doomsayers, while making an example of the occasional proclaimer of the end of history, is one way of instilling bleakness as a social habit. It is, in the Richard Dawkins sense, a “meme”, and a useful one.
But it allows a vast amount of nonsense to flourish with impunity. I can’t go out now without someone mentioning, as though pointing out the dampness of water, that Donald Trump is a shoo-in to return as president. He isn’t. He has an even chance, perhaps a tad more. Nothing in logic or data warrants a high degree of confidence about the result in November. It is just that there is no social penalty in wrongly predicting a Trump win. At worst, nobody will remember. At best, one is seen to be taking things seriously.
The same incentive to doom-monger exists in the arts. It is sad when an actor of Michael Sheen’s high grade directs something like The Way, in which a fascist, near-future UK all but declares war on Wales and its angelic steelworkers. It is sadder still when the national broadcaster chooses to air a mini-series of such undergraduate crudity. Leftwing bias? The British Bolshevik Corporation? No. Just an ingrained belief that gloom, however hysterical, equals seriousness. It is a habit of educated people to accord a spurious integrity to the morose. (Finance, where there is cash riding on each prediction, is something of a haven.)
There is an academic called Peter Turchin, a forecaster of social crises, who does the media rounds from time to time on both sides of the Atlantic. Such a vibrant mind. Such clever points about the surplus of graduates in the west. But if someone of a sunnier bent were to merge different academic fields, call it “Cliodynamics”, and make hard-to-pin-down statements about the future, how much shrift would we give them? Turchin believes that America is “without doubt” frailer than Russia. If he is wrong, the penalty will be what? Obscurity, at worst, but not infamy. No wonder it is so chic to be bleak. A pessimist is never disappointed — or accountable.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com