Political iridescence

Why I’m optimistic, despite everything

The week before last I had the pleasure of being a guest on the Moral Maze. Aside from some technical issues behind the scenes, it was fun to debate some big ideas on a programme I’ve listened to for years.

I was cast to play the role of hope in an argument between optimism and pessimism, so it was also a useful excuse to revisit a question I’ve been asked a lot since I wrote End State: why am I an optimist?

It’s a question that intrigues me too because End State turned out to be a more hopeful book than I’d originally intended. When I started writing, I knew I wanted to explore how we govern a digital society, and I knew that things weren’t exactly going well on this front, so I was braced for the answer to feel like ice cold water.

By the time I’d finished, if anything I felt warmly optimistic. I had a sense that we were entering something of a renaissance of bold policy thinking, and I felt more confident that although the transition to a 21st century state won’t be easy, we’ll get there in the end.

So what changed my mind? I think the simplest answer is that the more I zoomed out from the daily grind of politics the more optimistic I got. As I read more about the history of policy reform, I started to recognise the process by which social change happens over the long-term, and I started to see signs of this process at work today. I also became more convinced that there’s a pretty tight analogy between how we coped, eventually, with industrialisation, and how we might now be able to pull off a similar society-wide transformation in response to the digital revolution.

Still, I admit, politics does feel grim. And so we’re left with a paradox — a sense that politics has a strange shimmering quality, somehow being both hopeful in the long-term and bleak in the short-term.

This leads me to the phrase in the title of this post — ‘political iridescence’ — which I like as a metaphor for the way politics takes on a different hue depending on the angle you look at it from.

If you look at politics up close, day by day, it’s all pretty depressing. But if you zoom out, you see bright colours. Bold new ideas go from seeming impossible to being irresistible, dogma loses its grip, marginalised people secure fresh recognition and rights, and lots of the most important measures of a good society, from incomes to health, get dramatically better over time.

Explaining iridescence

This all starts to remind me of Zeno’s paradox in the sense that each increment of political progress feels impossible and yet we somehow get there in the end. So how do we explain this apparent contradiction?

I’m not sure I have a full answer to this but I have noticed a few interesting things about the way we talk about progress, which I think start to explain political iridescence.

First, there’s a real stubbornness to political pessimism and this seems hard to shake off, no matter what the long-term evidence says. I sometimes think our pessimism bias is so deep-rooted that it might extend back to pre-modern times, before sustained social and economic progress took hold.

You only have to look at the words we use to describe optimism and pessimism to see how deep this sentiment runs. We describe optimists as idealists, utopians, or dreamers, while pessimists are said to be sceptical, sober, or cautious. And of course we act as if the wisest position of all — the sensible middle-ground — is to be a realist, which we tend to equate with believing that things will stay roughly the same as they are now.

It’s really odd when you consider the trends of modern economic history just how upside-down this is. On almost any measure — life expectancy, incomes, even equality (and admittedly carbon too) — a straight line graph, and the safest, most conservative view of the future, goes steeply up. So the pessimist, and even the realist who says progress will flatline, is really going out on a limb. It’s the optimist who’s placing the safe and sober bet about the future. And yet our language makes it hard to see it this way, which locks pessimism in.

Second, although social progress has been sustained quite reliably throughout modern economic history, it’s also been a really hard slog. Progress isn’t a story in which we can lie back and float happily downstream as things get better. It’s more like we’re fighting uphill through a jungle in the middle of a thunderstorm.

I think this helps to explain political iridescence because when you’re doing something hard your mind tends to notice the exertion rather than the gains you’re making.

Imagine if you were pushing a huge granite boulder up a slight incline a very long way. Even if you were inching forward, the main thing you’d feel would be the pain in your shoulders and the sweat on your back. I suspect you wouldn’t have much headspace to stop and marvel at the progress you’ve made since your mind would be understandably overwhelmed by the exertion and the thought of the journey still to come.

This image should feel familiar to anyone involved in the hard graft of social change or reform, where stopping to celebrate progress is hard and, with so much still to do, can feel indulgent or even distasteful.

This takes me to my third point: progressives seem almost scared of optimism — and I can see why.

There’s quite a prominent movement today that subscribes to that ‘float downstream’ idea — i.e. that sees progress in a market economy as pretty much automatic. This view is particularly prevalent in the dominant culture of our times, the tech sector discourse that emanates out of the Bay Area, where the implication is that we can all relax because the tech bros have things in hand. Innovations like carbon capture and storage and nuclear fusion will solve climate change, tunnels will stop traffic clogging our streets, and if things go belly up we can always just move to Mars.

With this flavour of optimism so prominent, I can see why reformers are nervous. It feels like optimism comes with a free dose of complacency, as if simply by being optimistic we’re giving ourselves permission to relax.

For what it’s worth, although I empathise with this concern, I think on this one progressives could afford to relax. It seems distinctly unlikely that social progress will fail in the next decade because of too much optimism. Surely the bigger risk is the opposite; that progressives and reformers will suffer from a deficit of optimism. That the drive for reform will fail either because of a limp kind of fatalism, in which it’s not worth the fight, or because people’s energy will be wasted in an ill-targeted rage — a scream of anger without hope.

This takes me to my final thought, which is summed up in a phrase I used in the Moral Maze debate:

Anger plus hope equals change

The deeper I’ve read into the history of social change, the more I’ve noticed that social change often accelerates when there’s a combination of anger and hope. When the public mood isn’t just characterised by a sense that things must get better but also a genuine belief that they can.

When it comes to politics, it’s quite rare that either the left or right has the full package of anger and hope. On the right, there’s often a tendency, particularly among more libertarian strands of thought, to have hope without anger, sometimes to the point of naivety. You see the techno-optimists celebrating the progress that’s been made and tweeting charts of upward curving lines. And, as they do this, they tend to gloss over the fighting and sweat that it took to make that progress possible.

On the left, meanwhile, there’s the opposite tendency. Progressives often have lots of anger but not much hope. And the brief moments when they do allow themselves to hope, as in 2008 in America, seem to fade pretty quickly, leaving a sense almost of betrayal or of having been fooled, even if progress was made.

It seems to me that this missing ingredient of hope is a first order problem for progressives today, and this is one reason I was pleased that End State turned out to be such an optimistic book. I also think there’s genuinely world-changing upside potential here, if only we could bottle some hope and use it to motivate reform in the context of the digital revolution.

After all, the problem with a digital economy isn’t a lack of potential. It’s that we haven’t yet worked out how to harness the potential of a new technological era for social good. If we’re going to do this it will require decades of hard graft from reformers, just like it did when we built the modern state in response to the Industrial Revolution — and there’s no way we can do that work without hope.

And so the thing about optimism is that it’s not just rational, it’s functional too. From both an intellectual and a pragmatic or tactical point of view, it’s the right position to take.

This is post six in a year-long series exploring how we govern the future. Here are posts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. To read along, follow me on Medium here. Or support this project for £3 a month (and get a free book) on Substack here.

For the big story behind all of this, from Victorian sewers to digital dragons, you can buy my book End State.