Technology, consumerism and the pope

My Times Thunderer article on the pope's
encyclical:

Why are people so down on technological progress?
Pope Francis complains in his new encyclical about “a blind confidence in
technical solutions”, of “irrational confidence in progress” and
the drawbacks of the “technocratic paradigm”. He is reflecting a
popular view, held across the political spectrum, from the
Unabomber to Russell Brand, that technology, consumerism and
progress have been bad for people, by making them more selfish and
unhappy.

But however thoroughly you search the papal encyclical (a
document that does at least pay heed to science, and to
evolutionary biology in particular), you will find no data to
support the claim that as people have got richer they have got
nastier and more miserable. That is because the data points the
other way. The past five decades have seen people becoming on
average wealthier, healthier, happier, better fed, cleverer,
kinder, more peaceful and more equal.

Compared with 50 years ago, people now live 30 per cent longer;
have 30 per cent more food to eat; spend longer in school; have
better housing; bury 70 per cent fewer of their children; travel
more; give more to charity as a proportion of income; are less
likely to be murdered, raped or robbed; are much less likely to die
in war; are less likely to die in a drought, flood or storm.

The data show a correlation between wealth and happiness both
within and between countries and within lifetimes. Global
inequality has been plummeting for years as people in poor
countries get rich faster than people in rich countries. The vast
preponderance of these improvements has come about as a result of
innovation in technology and society.

So what precisely is the problem with technology that the Pope
is complaining about? He cannot really think that life’s got worse
for most people. He cannot surely believe that the dreadful
suffering that still exists is caused by too much technology rather
than too little, because surely he can see most of the suffering is
in the countries with least technology, least energy, least
economic growth, and most focus on ideology and superstition. Do
Syria, North Korea, Congo and Venezuela have too much
consumerism?

“Obsession with a consumerist lifestyle . . . can only lead to
violence and mutual destruction,” says the encyclical. Really?
Only? If you hear of an atrocity in a shopping mall, do you
immediately think of consumerism or religious fanaticism as the
more likely cause? There is no mention in the encyclical of the
suffering caused by fanaticism, totalitarianism or lack of
technological progress — of the four million who die of indoor
smoke from cooking over wood fires, for example.

Yet the Pope is exercised about the dangers of genetically
modified food, for although he admits, “no conclusive proof exists
that GM cereals may be harmful to human beings”, he thinks
“difficulties should not be underestimated”. This in a world where
golden rice, a genetically modified cereal fortified with vitamin
A, could be preventing millions of deaths and disabilities every
year, but has been prevented from doing so entirely by fierce
opposition from the environmentalists the Pope has now allied
himself so closely with.

The Pope has latched on to the wrong end of the environmental
movement, the reactionary and outdated faction that still thinks
like the Club of Rome, a group of grandees who started meeting in
the 1960s to express their woes about the future in apocalyptic
terms and blaming technology rather than lack of it.

Having been comprehensively discredited by history (their
prediction was that by now we would be mired in ecological horror),
they are still dispensing misanthropic gloom.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber was the only scientist at the launch
of the papal encyclical. He is a member of the Club of Rome.

Technological progress is what enables us to prevent child
mortality; to use less land to feed the world, and so begin
reforesting large parts of the rich world; to substitute oil for
whale blubber and so let whales increase again; to get
fossil-fuelled electricity to people so they don’t die of pollution
after cooking over fires of wood taken from the rainforest.

“Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need
to slow down and look at reality in a different way,” says the
Pope. Personally, I would rather speed up the stunning and
unprecedented decline in poverty of recent decades.