Page 30      HOME         Contact me

Hope

Text of sermon given at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Catskills (UUCC), Kingston, NY, July 21, 2002, by Dave Belden, President, UUCC. Some of this was cut in the actual delivery.

What I want to do this morning is to share some excellent news with you about this world we are in and the direction it’s headed.

Damn! You think, what drugs is he on?

Well, usual time, after the service, behind the barn, I can sell you whatever drugs you need and then we’ll ALL be happy.

Actually, I don’t do drugs, am perfectly serious and reasonably well informed. What I want to explain is how my own view of the world has changed in the last ten years.

We all know the daily news is bad.

To set against it, here is one kind of good news. An old friend of mine wrote in April:

I’ve had two phone conversations with an Israeli friend. She has organized carefully structured discussion groups between Palestinian and Israeli women. Last week she told me that she expected to go ahead with a scheduled meeting … despite the war situation. I shouldn’t have, but I expressed doubt. Her boss had said the same - no Palestinians can, or will, turn up.

Well, nine West Bank Palestinian women somehow managed to get to the meeting in Israel. But then one of the Israeli women began by announcing that a cousin of hers had died as a result of the Seder restaurant suicide bombing: that she couldn’t go on with these discussions anymore.

Then some of the Palestinian women offered to come to the shivah, or wake. The Israeli woman was deeply touched. She stayed.

Through her contacts on the West Bank, this same Israeli friend was phoned by the head of the Jenin hospital begging for help. She was able eventually to arrange for two truckloads of medical supplies to get through to Jenin hospital. She received a phone-call from the head of the hospital, a man she has yet to meet, with an emotional thank you.[1]

You hear this news, and you think, that is great, this is what gives hope. But then you think: it is so small, what is it against the bad news? I think all of us here know it is not nothing. It is vitally important. Every good action builds possibilities. The man who told me this story is someone I have known since I was a teenager. He has spent his life working with the religious movement my parents were in. I was brought up with stories like this. People getting together, enemies apologizing, reconciling. Although all these stories were inspirational, they did not stop me from feeling the world as a whole was just getting worse. These stories were like straws in the wind. My childhood hero, a great man in the movement, thundered, “Mankind must grow up morally, or perish!” As I grew up, the chances of the world growing up morally seemed slimmer and slimmer.

As a child I had terrible nightmares of the world blowing up. Perhaps a response to Hiroshima. Or to the bombsites all over my home town – London, after the blitz. I was born in 1949. As a child, I was convinced that when I grew up I would have to go to war, and would be tortured. It didn’t happen. Yet. Friends of my parents had been tortured. I heard about the Holocaust first from the mother of a friend of mine, who had lost many relatives to the gas ovens. At 17, I went to India for six months, and discovered poverty of a depth and scale I had not dreamed of. After college I worked in Ethiopia and Eritrea for a year and had close personal contact with more poverty, war, massacres.

Faced with all this horror, I lost my faith in God, and more than that, my faith in humanity. I declared I would never bring a child into this world. I talked about this before here in a sermon which I called, My Faith as an Agnostic. Faith is maybe your last chance when you have no hope. I started to find faith before I had reasons to hope. The curious thing is that there were many reasons to hope all around me, but I couldn’t see them.

Instead, in my 20s I listened to the extraordinary warnings of doom that were then current. I believed them all. Nuclear war, leading to nuclear winter was scary enough, but there was a chance we might escape it. It appeared there was no chance of escaping other fates. The oil was going to run out by the year 2000. Lots of minerals, metals and other raw materials would also run out. There just wasn’t enough. The scariest thing was the world’s population. It was going to double and then double again. Like lemmings, we would overpopulate and die. The population chart was my worst nightmare. You remember it? It goes along at a low level, starts to rise around 1800 and then suddenly around 1950 shoots up like a rocket, almost straight up, without end.

This is what Paul Ehrlich wrote in a bestseller The Population Bomb, in 1968 when I was in college: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," he wrote. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” In his next book he and his wife wrote, “Due to a combination of ignorance, greed, and callousness, a situation has been created that could lead to a billion or more people starving to death.... Before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity" in which "the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be nearing depletion."

So that’s the background. That’s how I came to adulthood.

In the last ten years I have come to understand a different kind of good news, different from the story I told you about the Israeli and Palestinian women.  This good news is not a straw in the wind. This is the wind itself. Now I see the world almost in reverse: it’s not that there are a few good things happening in a world that’s getting steadily worse. Now I understand that there are many terrible things happening in a world that is getting steadily better.

This change of opinion happened for me when I started to teach sociology to social work students at Marist College. That’s why I wore this tee shirt. See? The naked running blue man is Archimedes, who has just discovered an amazing scientific principle in his bathtub. Someone told me that the butterfly in his hand has some relevance, but I forget what it is. It’s also me, running out of the Marist library shrieking, Eureka, the world isn’t as bad as I thought. It was over 20 years since I had got my PhD in sociology, I had spent those years as a carpenter, and I had to catch up on my reading. One course I taught was on social inequality. I thought I had better see what has been happening to inequality worldwide. That is not good news: the world has been getting much more unequal, as the rich nations continue to draw away from the poor nations. (Note 03/15/06 : This is actually highly contested). But an extraordinary amount of other trends were good news. All over the world we are living longer, our babies are dying less, we are getting more literate, wealth and income are growing, people are being lifted out of poverty. It absolutely astonished me that there was so much good news, when you look at long term trends. The daily papers are full of bad news, but the United Nations long term statistics are full of good news. I want to give you some of this good news.

For example, what happened to the dire warnings of  the Ehrlichs and others of 30 years ago? Did a billion starve to death? Did resources get scarce?

No. World population doubled but there are less starving. The percentage of the world’s population who are starving dropped from 35% in the 1960s to 18% today, and is expected to go to 12% by 2010. Those are percentages of a population doubling. But the actual number of starving also dropped. Calorie intake per person has increased by 24% globally, and in developing countries by 38%.  All resources are more plentiful and cheaper now than they were 30 years ago. This is not theory – it is fact. An obscure college professor called Julian Simon challenged Paul Ehrlich to a bet: choose any raw materials not under government price controls, and they will be cheaper at any point in the future Ehrlich wanted to name. In 1980 Ehrlich and his associates chose the five minerals they were convinced we were about to run out of, and he bet they would all be much more expensive in 1990. In 1990, Ehrlich had to pay up to Simon – all the items were now cheaper, some dramatically so. In fact, any raw materials he could have chosen apart from one mineral so rare I can’t recall its name would also have been cheaper. This has continued to be true. As the price of a raw material starts or threatens to go up, we make bigger efforts to find new supplies, or to substitute something cheaper, and then the price comes down again. World population doubled and food is cheaper, materials are cheaper. In 2000, food on average worldwide cost less than a third of its price in 1957. I don’t mean Hungry Man frozen dinners: processing the food is how Western food companies keep making money. I mean the food basics – wheat, rice, corn, beans. This is a genuine longterm trend – wheat has been getting steadily cheaper since 1800.

In the same year he lost the bet, 1990, Ehrlich got a Macarthur genius grant but Simon never got one: I think we are happier with warnings of doom to come, than we are with past doom warnings not coming true. For some reason, good news makes us even more uneasy than bad news. But this morning I want to celebrate that Ehrlich’s warnings did not come true.

Let’s look more closely at one or two issues. When we think about human welfare and poverty, it’s hard to come up with objective measures. One really basic and rock bottom one is how long we each can expect to live.

Through most of human prehistory and history, as best as we can tell, life expectancy was in the range of 20–30 years. That means a newborn baby could expect to live 20-30 years on average.

100 years ago, even in the most advanced countries, such as England or the USA, it was only about 45 years. Now the average for developed countries is 77 years. From 45 to 77 years in one century. Stunning! If you had predicted that in 1900 you would have been called a utopian.

But that’s the rich world. What do you think it is for poor countries? Here’s some audience participation to make sure everyone’s still awake. If you have a pen on you, I want you to jot down on your order of service what you think life expectancy is on average in developing countries today. Here are some clues. 100 years ago life expectancy worldwide was still around 30. I said it was 45 in a few rich countries, so it had to be less than 30 in poor countries. In India in 1900 it was 24 - 25 years. For China in 1930 it was 24 years. Today[2] – look at what you wrote down – the average for poor countries was 65 years. [There were gasps of surprise from the congregation]. In China in 2002: 70 years. These countries’ progress has been more rapid than the rich countries.

The biggest contribution to this longer life expectancy has come by lowering infant mortality.  From what we know of prehistory until around the year 1400, about half of all babies born alive were dead before their 5^th birthday. Half. (It gives you a different angle on sibling rivalry when you think that only half the siblings used to survive. No wonder kids squabble for food and adult attention. We are all descended from the kids who did that successfully enough to survive).

They measure infant mortality in the number of deaths per one thousand live births. So 500 per 1000 was the average. In Sweden today, it is less than 4 per 1000. From 500 to 4. It can’t go much lower. If you go to the UN statistics on the web, they measure infant mortality as the number of deaths in the first year, not the first 5 years. Sweden and Switzerland – 3. The UK – 6. The USA – 7. Interestingly, there is one poor country with infant mortality as low as 7: Cuba. We are a thousand times richer than the Cubans – if we had their dedication, we could be best in the world at infant mortality. Instead, we are one of the worst among the rich nations. I’m not saying we should become communists – I am very deliberately staying out of politics, because this good news is much bigger than our politics. Our political disputes are about whether the rate could go down from 7 to maybe 5 or 4 per 1000: this translates into a lot of babies in a country our size, and it’s extremely important and any one of us dedicating our whole life to that one issue. But I am talking about the rate having come down from 500 to below 10. All of us, whatever our political differences, can take time out to celebrate that. China is already down to 32. From 500 to 32. India to 69.

A number of countries are still over 100, mostly the lower 100s: all are in Africa except for Iraq and Afghanistan. Sierra Leone is the worst in the world at 180 per 1000. AIDS is having a terrible effect. But to put it in a long term perspective: even a rate in the 100s is a whole lot better than George Washington’s America knew, or Napoleon’s France. Only a hundred years ago, Chile, one of the leading developing countries, was at 300 deaths per 1000 live births. 300 for the best poor country then; 180 for the worst today. There is real hope in Africa. Uganda used to have one of the worst AIDS rates in Africa, but it has brought it down quite dramatically through public education: there is hope. AIDS is setting African progress back. AIDS is our biggest, most urgent current challenge. Both rich and poor countries need to make a much bigger effort than we are making. But even with AIDS, Africa’s long-term trends are still amazingly good. From 500 per thousand to 120 or even 180 per thousand is still dramatic progress.

Let’s think about this in our own lives here. There are graveyards that show that colonial families sometimes gave the boys the same name, the father’s name. They expected some to die, they hoped that one would live to carry on his name. This was when the rate in this country was around 300 per 1000. Can you believe, some families did not give each child a separate name. Enrico Caruso, the great singer well known in the early 20^th century, was the only one of 17 siblings to survive to adulthood. There are many other examples. It was hard to feel the full tenderness that you might want to feel for your children, when you expected half of them to die. You have to protect yourself emotionally. Also, they had to go to work as soon as possible at age six, seven. In certain ways, they were treated as little adults from about 7. 200 years ago in England a 7 year old girl was publicly hung in the town of Norwich, where my ancestors came from: she had stolen a sheep. The whole story of how tenderness for children and babies has increased in the last 200 years is an extraordinary one. A related issue is how long parents of babies could expect to live: the average marriage in colonial America lasted 12 years: because of death not divorce. If you think people you know are insensitive, messed up by their parents, who were messed up by their parents, a part of the reason is this weight of grief that our ancestors bore, and against which they hardened themselves, and which will take a long time to dissolve from our culture and psychology.

This good news about infant mortality is why there has been a population explosion: as a UN official once said, rather bluntly, it’s not because people started breeding like rabbits, it’s because they stopped dying like flies. Now the United Nations tells us that that terrifying graph is turning the corner. The rate of population increase had already turned the corner when the Ehrlichs published their book, in the 1960s. Sometime soon, very possibly within the lifetime of children alive today, and before world population doubles again, the population of the world will start declining. If current rends continue. In fact, they keep bringing forward the date when they expect that to happen, because women in poor countries are catching on faster than expected: they are reducing their birthrate faster than expected.

If I had time, I would talk about the poor in America. It is particularly lousy to be poor in a rich country, and to be blamed for your poverty, as happens here. I don’t mean it’s worse than being poor in a poor country, but it has its own quality of pain. The reason Sweden’s infant mortality rate in the first year is down to 3, while ours is still at 7, is because we don’t have the same programs for the poor. Health insurance. The infant mortality rate for blacks in the US is almost twice that for whites. This is an absolute outrage. Why is it so? That’s not what this sermon is about. Instead, I want us to step back and look at the long term trend. Over 200 years the rate for black Americans has come down further than for whites: it started out worse, and the gap has been steadily narrowing: it still is narrowing. We should be doing a LOT better, but the long term trend is still good. Few large ethnic groups in the whole world have progressed as fast economically as African Americans have since the Civil War. Still a long way from parity with whites, but the trend is good. As with a huge number of things, when you look at the snapshot of today, the news is bad; when you look at the long term trend, the news is good.

When the GIs went to war in the Second World War they were surveyed thoroughly. They formed a cross section of the whole country: the average American male. We know their average height. Today in America, the young men of families below the official poverty line are on average one inch taller than those GIs: the poor American today is taller than the average American 60 years ago. Why? Who can claim credit? That gets us into politics. For a moment, let’s forget politics and just celebrate. An inch taller!

I could bore you all day with good news, just using the UN and other mainstream statistics. And I’m going to! No, you’re safe. The last good news I want to touch on is, believe it or not, the environment in rich countries. We know the Hudson is being cleaned up. In New York Harbor people are fishing and bathing again. You wouldn’t catch me doing it, but we’re on the way. In the early 1970s fish could not survive there. Biodiversity has increased sixfold in the Rhine since 1971. The number of fish species in the Thames has increased 20-fold since 1964. It seems now that a pattern is emerging: As poor countries start to grow their economies, pollution of all kinds gets bad, forests get cut down. As they get rich, pollution starts to get cleaned up, forests regrow – look out the window: much of the Northeast is going back to forest. In the US the number of car miles traveled has more than doubled over the last 30 years, the economy has more than doubled, the population increased by a third, but harmful emissions of air pollution have decreased by a third. Air quality is improving. I’m not saying everything is good. I’m saying we have achieved many victories. We are so concerned all the time about what is still bad, but we need to celebrate what is good.

So, enough of the good news. If you want reams more, I can point you to books that will give your heart a lift (see booklist at end). I don’t expect you to believe this from one sermon, but I have come to see that if only long term trends in health, food, energy, resources continue, in about 200 years everyone in the world will be at the standard of living of the rich countries today, and the environment will be in better shape. That is, if we continue to struggle for justice, for the environment, for productivity and for scientific advance as well as we have in the last 200 years. The long-term trends INCLUDE our proven ability to solve problems, invent new solutions, campaign against injustices. Global warming, war, plagues could slow those trends down; but it will take a lot worse than anything we have yet seen to reverse them. I want to ask, why does this idea sound so outrageous, so against the prevailing wisdom. Why are we so sure things are getting worse?

There is a famous Christian saying, by St Paul: Faith, Hope and Love, but the greatest of these is Love. Who could disagree. Love is the greatest. But to be consistent, to keep going, love needs faith and hope. When you love, when your heart is open, you are always open to the bad news. The most compassionate are in danger of being the most heartbroken. It is right, that we focus on the huge numbers who are starving, over 700 million today according to the UN, and not on how many would have starved to death by now if the Ehrlichs had been right.

I don’t know if it’s right to exaggerate how bad things are: almost all campaigning groups do that. It seems to work for them. But does it really, in the long run? If we don’t take time to celebrate the good news, if we don’t stop and say, we must be doing something right because less people are starving now and the world population doubled; we must be doing something right because the rich world is cleaning up its environment; if we don’t celebrate these, then we can feel so heavy, so exhausted, so despairing, that we actually accomplish less.

I think it’s a spiritual issue. Part of the impetus for me to give this talk was a sermon by our minister Linda Anderson earlier this year, on the subject of negativity. She talked mainly about negativity towards other people, negativity on the personal level. It is so much clearer that that is counterproductive. I’m talking about negativity on the global scale. I think it is equally debilitating, spiritually. It’s hard to love without hope, without celebrating success. With our children, we celebrate every success they get. I would love to see a meeting of environmentalists when nothing is done but celebrate environmental achievements. It would give us energy for the next struggle.

But we are afraid that instead it would let the bad guys off the hook. For a moment, let’s forget the politics of it; let’s forget who is to blame for things that are wrong. There is good news here to encourage right and left and center. Each can say, ‘I told you so.’ But let’s forget that, and just celebrate. This is a human celebration. Despite all the wars, famines, genocides of the 20^th century, life expectancy more than doubled. With hundreds of millions still starving, with species going extinct, there is no danger of complacency, for people who care. But each of us could take five minutes a day, while brushing our teeth perhaps, to feel joyful that so far, so many long term trends are going in the right direction.

For every hour we spend with our hearts breaking, let us spend five minutes in joy at humanity’s victories. May it be so.

Some Sources, with comments. Politics has crept into the comments below, but the main point for this sermon is that some people on both right and left are capable of seeing that huge progress has been made, whoever they claim can take the credit for it.

Julian L. Simon, The State of Humanity, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 1995. 694 pages in paperback.

Classic quote from Simon: "This is my long-run forecast in brief. The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.

"I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse."

Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Measuring the Real State of the World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2001.

The controversial Bjorn Lomborg http://www.lomborg.com/ has laid out a huge mass of research in his recent book, which shows improvement in all kinds of spheres of human and environmental welfare. As I understand it, after reading the book and some of the debates about it, e.g. in Scientific American, the statistics he quotes are mainstream, and have been rather little questioned or gainsaid. It's his conclusions that people disagree with, myself included. His basic conclusion, that we should be working to end world poverty first, and that the environment gets cleaned up when people are wealthy enough to do so, is a sort of truism that means little, because if you take away money for cleaning the environment, it doesn't somehow automatically go to ending poverty. The thing Lomborg seems to ignore, and the reason conservatives love him, is that an enormous amount of the improvement in US and European pollution is due to activism and government interventions. (I would love to see someone try to calculate how much is due to activism, how much to the market: a great topic for some major research). Lomborg's conclusions would seem to argue against continued environmental activism - but in my opinion this would alter the trends that he convincingly shows are currently in the right direction. Take away the activism, and the trends won't look so good.

But I think it's impossible to read Lomborg and the debate around him carefully and not conclude that environmental trends in the US and other rich countries are in the right direction: another set of (interim, partial) victories for the people! Why are people on the left so committed to defeat that they can't recognize good news? Success so far should energize us to get more scrubbers on coal fired power stations, a massive government effort to reduce energy needs, promote windpower, enforce tighter emissions standards nationwide etc. We're winning! Keep up the pressure! Give hope to poor nations, that their turn will come! I recall an Ethiopian saying to me he wished for more pollution - it would mean more factories, cars, development, less starvation, misery, death. OK, but the more we develop clean power generation, clean cars, low resource alternatives (such as satellite phones or glass fiber lines, instead of stringing copper wire all over the world) the more those will be available to poor countries as they industrialize: they don't have to mess up their land as badly as we did ours. Cleaning the environment and tackling poverty actually have to go hand in hand.

John H. Coatsworth, Welfare.  Coatsworth’s presidential address to  the American Historical Association 1996. Published in The American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 1. (Feb., 1996), pp. 1–17. It sums up a lot of data about human welfare.  Text on web at http://www.theaha.org/info/AHA_History/jhcoatsworth.htm

An antidote to Lomborg. Equally glowing about humanity’s progress, but with different political conclusions. Quotes from Coatsworth: “Civilization, we now know, stunted growth, spread disease, shortened life spans, and set people to killing and maiming each other on an unprecedented scale. Moreover, we now know that until relatively recently—until the twentieth century in most parts of the world—the cities where science and high culture achieved so much were such unhealthy places with such high mortality rates that none came close to reproducing, let alone expanding, its population by natural increase. The populations of cities as diverse as ancient Teotihuacan and industrial London grew in population only by luring or forcing people to move in from elsewhere. … The progress of our species out of these ancient cycles of rise and decline and into an era of sustained increase in levels of physical well-being is the unique achievement of the twentieth century. … The twentieth century has witnessed unprecedented improvements in the welfare of human populations, finally translating the increased productivity of the industrial age into measurable achievements in nutrition, health, and thus life expectancy. Without greater productivity, little could have been accomplished to improve living standards. At the same time, as the examples I have cited amply demonstrate, human societies have frequently found it difficult or even impossible to convert productivity advance into improvements in physical well-being. Resolving this dilemma, economic historians are now discovering, awaited the discovery of an appropriate and effective mechanism for addressing it. That mechanism, deployed with increasing impact over the past century, is the “welfare state.” … The remarkable improvements in physical well-being we have experienced over the course of this century were achieved mainly as a result of massive growth in government spending and regulation.”

Robert Wright, Non Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny, Pantheon Books, New York, 2000. 435 pages. Totally brilliant survey of how non zero sum relationships (also known as win-win relationships) underlie the growth of all biological life and of human history. Very encouraging about our chances for further progress.

Gregg Easterbrook, A Moment on the Earth, The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism, Viking, New York, 1995, 745 pages. More balanced than Lomborg, better survey of why environmental pessimism constantly wins the day.

Charles Leadbeater, Up The Down Escalator, Why The Global Pessimists Are Wrong, Viking, London, 2002, 371 pages. Just started reading it day after I gave the sermon. Looks good.