In a review for the new installment of Mad Max Dana Stevens in Slate writes:
The way the world ends, for Miller, is not in overpopulated high-tech megacities slicked with film-noir rain, but in something like the polar opposite. Miller’s nightmare of the future posits the planet as a parched desert landscape against which the world’s few remaining humans scratch out a meager, violent existence, equipped only with the salvaged remains of mid-20th-century technology. It’s that future that, 36 years after Mel Gibson first put the pedal to the metal as Max Rockatansy, is looking more like the one we may be leaving to our own survivors….
I understand this is a movie review, and that line was probably thrown in there for artistic effect. But facts matter, and there is no way that you justify the position that the world is more like that of Mad Max today than 40 years ago. Paul Ehrlich has definitely lost his bet, and even the peak oil worry has abated. The data show that a smaller proportion of the world’s population is undernourished and and poor. The total fertility rate is declining and life expectancy is increasing. Yes, the situation of the middle class in much of the developed world has been in relative stagnation by many metrics, but enormous increases in human well being have occurred throughout what was once termed the Third World.
The Right and Left have particular hobbyhorses. Young people today are more secular and tolerant of sexual diversity in lifestyles, but they are also less sexually promiscuous (we were blogging about this at Gene Expression seven years ago by the way). Similarly, despite worries about income inequality in the developed world, billions are rising out of poverty in places like China and India. Yes. Billions. Though environmental threats exist, the world is healthier and wealthier than it was a generation ago.
It’s not very important that Dana Stevens’ editor didn’t remove a rhetorical flourish which was just factually unfounded (though I it’s insulting to the people of places like the Sahel who suffered through privation a generation ago, and no longer do so). But, it does suggest a mental weakness that these sorts of slips get through, to influence the public, and continue to distort the perceptions of the way the world is. To prepare for the exigencies of the future we need to see the present clearly.
Comments are closed.