The Case Against This Book

I have been walking you through what I think is happening. I owe you the other walk. The one where I am wrong.

There is a case against this book. It is not weak. I have held it in my hands for a long time, and I have not been able to put it down entirely, and I want to try to give it to you as honestly as I can, because you deserve to hear it from someone who has taken it seriously rather than from someone who is waving it away.

It goes roughly like this.

Every generation believes it is living at the hinge. Most have been wrong.

The Victorians were sure that industrial modernity would destroy the family, the village, the soul. They wrote books that read, if you squint, very much like mine. The family did change. The village did change. The soul, whatever it is, turned out to be more durable than they thought. The thing they were mourning was not the last form human life would take. It was one form, being replaced by another, which their grandchildren came to feel about the way the Victorians had felt about theirs.

The people who lived through the 1930s were sure the democracies were finished. Some democracies were. Most were not. The ones that survived were not the ones with the strongest arguments at the time. They were the ones that kept going, and adapted in ways nobody had predicted, and came out the other side into a half-century that their 1930s selves could not have imagined.

My parents' generation, in the 1970s, was sure that the West was finished. The oil had run out, the cities were burning, the birth rate was collapsing, the Soviets were winning, the climate was cooling, and the young were a lost generation. My father kept some of the books. I read them, later. They are serious books, by careful people. Almost none of it turned out the way they said it would. The cities came back. The oil kept coming. The climate was not cooling. The young were fine. The books were not stupid. They were describing real pressures, seriously. They were also, mostly, wrong about the shape.

My own adult years have had their versions. The end of history, which did not end. The financial collapse, which was going to reset everything and mostly did not. The pandemic, which was going to change us permanently and changed us less than we expected. Each time, I remember grown people I respected saying this one is different. Each time, mostly, it was less different than they said.

A reader a hundred years from now may read my book the same way. A careful person, they will think, who looked hard at her moment, and saw some of it clearly, and missed the thing that actually happened next, because the thing that actually happened next could not have been seen from where she sat.

That reader might be right.

There is also a problem with the measurements I have leaned on.

When I say trust has fallen, I am mostly citing surveys. Surveys are not the thing itself. They are a record of what people say when a stranger asks them a question. What people are willing to say has changed. The language of distrust has become more available. You can report feeling unsafe, feeling lonely, feeling unheard, in words that did not quite exist when my parents' generation was surveyed. Some of what looks like a change in the world is a change in what the world has learned to name.

Loneliness is the one I am most uncertain about. The surveys show rising loneliness. The surveys also show that older people, the most reliable respondents, have always reported loneliness at rates their children find surprising. The rise in loneliness among the young is the newer finding, and the newer finding is not yet old enough to know. It may be a real change. It may be a reporting change. It may be a phase of a specific cohort that the next cohort will not repeat. Honest researchers argue about this. I have presented it as settled. It is not entirely settled.

Birth rates are a real fall. I am sure of that one. But I have presented the fall as a crisis, and the fall has another reading. It is the first time in the history of our species that women have been able to choose. What they have chosen, given the choice, is fewer children than the people who made the choices for them would have produced. That is a fact about freedom as much as it is a fact about collapse. The shape of the fact depends on which story you are telling.

There is the technology argument too, and it cuts both ways.

I have written about the machines as if they are the new thing that changes everything. There is a long history of people saying this about every new machine. The printing press was going to end the Church, and then did not exactly. The railway was going to dissolve the nation, and then did not. The radio was going to make war impossible, and then did not. The television was going to rot the mind of the young, and rotted some of them and not most. The internet was going to flatten all hierarchy, and did some of that and reinforced others.

The historical base rate, when someone says this machine is different, is that the machine is less different than they thought, and the society absorbs it with more mess and less transformation than the people alive at the time expected.

This may be the exception. I think it is. But I have to admit that the people alive at the time of every previous exception also thought theirs was the exception. Most of them were wrong. Some of them were right. I have no reliable way, from inside my moment, to tell which kind of moment it is.

There is, finally, the thing that is hardest to admit.

Most of what has been getting worse for the people I know has been getting better for a very large number of people I do not know. The world outside the rich countries has been lifted, in my lifetime, out of conditions I would not have believed possible when I first read about them. Children who would have died are growing up. Girls who would not have been taught to read are becoming doctors. Villages that had one doctor between four thousand people now have a clinic. Diseases that disfigured generations are gone, or going. Hunger, which was the default state of most humans for most of history, is now rare enough that when it happens we give it a name and send food.

My book is about a street in a rich country. The street is real. What is happening on it is real. But a book written from a street in Bangladesh, or Ethiopia, or Vietnam, by someone who had watched their grandparents grow up in conditions I would not wish on anyone, would be a very different book. It would describe the same forty years I have been describing. It would describe them as the best forty years their family had ever had.

I am not saying my street is wrong to feel what it feels. I am saying my street is not the whole world. The grief of a place that has grown softer is a real grief. It is not the only grief. And it is not the largest story of the time I have been alive. The largest story of the time I have been alive is that the poorest half of the world has had, by almost every measurement, the best half-century any large group of poor humans has ever had.

If my book leaves you with the impression that our time is uniquely terrible, my book has told you something false. Our time is, for most humans, uniquely good. It also contains, I think, the pressures I have been describing. Both things are true. A book that gives you only one of them has lied to you by omission, including mine, which has mostly given you the first.

There is one more version of the case against this book, and it is the one I hold most lightly — and which I think may yet prove the strongest.

It goes like this. The machines we are nervous about are the same machines that may, within our children's lifetimes, help us solve things we have spent the whole of human history not solving. Disease, maybe. Ageing, maybe. The energy problem, probably. Food that costs less land. Minds that, if we are careful, help us think better rather than less. The abundance that follows from even a part of that — if any meaningful part of it comes off — is the kind of abundance that previous generations could only gesture at with large words.

A reader who believes this thinks the small griefs I am describing are the trade. The closing shop, the thinning friendship, the emptier kitchen — these are the costs of passage to a world that will look back at ours the way we look back at the world before anaesthetic, and wonder how we bore what we bore.

I find this reading half-compelling and half-frightening. Half-compelling because the direction of the technology is genuinely extraordinary. Half-frightening because the passage from here to there runs directly through the decade in which the machines are being shaped, and I am not certain that the humans doing the shaping, in the rooms where it is being done, are the humans I would want writing the instructions for what comes after.

So. Here is where I still disagree with the case I have just made.

I think the pressures I have described are real, and I think the combination of them — birth rates and trust and institutions and the climate and the machines, all at once, in countries that are ageing — is not something that has happened before in quite this combination. I think the historical base rate for this time is different is low, but not zero, and I think the reasons to believe this time might be one of the real ones are better than usual. I think the rising good for the poorest half of the world is real and enormous, and I also think it does not cancel the loading pressures in the rich half, which has disproportionate influence over what the machines learn and what the century looks like.

I could be wrong about any of this. I have tried to be honest about where.

If the optimist turns out to be right — if the pressures ease, if the measurements were partly artefact, if the institutions hold, if the machines are absorbed the way every previous machine was absorbed — then this book will read, to the reader a hundred years from now, the way the declinists of the 1970s read to us. Earnest. Wrong in the direction that cost nobody anything. A small embarrassment in a good library.

I would be glad to be that embarrassment.

But we walk on, because I do not think I am. And because, even if I am, the small specific things this book ends with are worth doing anyway. They were worth doing in the 1970s, when the declinists were wrong. They are worth doing now, whichever way the century turns.