“[I]n spite of evidence, many will still image to themselves the England of the Stuarts as a more pleasant country than the England in which we live [in 1848]. It may at first sight seem strange that society, while constantly moving forward with eager speed, should be constantly looking backward with tender regret. But these two propensities, inconsistent as they may appear, can easily be resolved into the same principle. Both spring from our impatience of the state in which we actually are. That impatience, while it stimulates us to surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate their happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful in us to be constantly discontented with a condition which is constantly improving. But, in truth, there is constant improvement precisely because there is constant discontent. If we were perfectly satisfied with the present, we should cease to contrive, to labour, and to save with a view to the future. And it is natural that, being dissatisfied with the present, we should form a too favourable estimate of the past.
In truth we are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveller in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and bare: but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of refreshing waters. The pilgrims hasten forward and find nothing but sand where an hour before they had seen a lake. They turn their eyes and see a lake where, an hour before, they were toiling through sand. A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilisation. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity.
It is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana. We too shall, in our turn, be outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that labouring men may be as little used to dine without meat as they now are to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medical discoveries may have added several more years to the average length of human life; that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty working man. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited the few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when all classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did not grind the faces of the poor, and when the poor did not envy the splendour of the rich.”
Thomas Macaulay, History of England (1848), Chapter I, “On the State of England in 1685”.
http://www.margaretmorgan.com/wesley/state.html
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay PC (1800 – 1859) was a British poet, historian and Whig politician who wrote extensively on British history. Space and time do not permit this man’s accomplishments in support of the Anti-Slavery Society, the widening of the franchise, and his work as an historian.
Two things bring Macaulay to mind. The first is a recently written screed against this fine and good man (Robert E. Sullivan, Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power (Belknap/Harvard)) and the second is the constant whining about the state of the world economy and its prospects for the future.
On the man, Macaulay is accused by Sullivan of being a hypocrite and a liar, at once a man of faith and a skeptic, and a stern moralist in an incestuous relationship with his sisters. Suffice it to say that all the so-called evidence assembled against this man reeks of contemporary judgments imposed on a man who lived in a very different world from today. Macaulay was tolerant and liberal at a time when few were tolerant and liberal, he suffered not from a weakness of faith but from an expansive view of it, and he was imbued with upper-middle-class Victorian sentimentality that showed in a deep love for his family. If the average man today were half as good as Macaulay, the world would be a much better place.
On the world economy, we live at a time when there is almost no understanding of the tremendous progress that has been made over the poverty and squalor that defined earlier times for all people. Only a few centuries ago it is literally true to say that almost every man, woman and child on this earth lived a precarious existence in which every day was fraught with the possibility of starvation and injury leading to death.
The dimensions of the economic progress mankind has made since 1750 are reflected in the enormous gains recorded in population, production and productivity across the entire globe. The Earth can now support a much higher population at a much higher level of living than any previous epoch in human history. Its habitable area has been extended greatly and huge new areas have been opened to the cultivation of food and the extraction of raw materials, of which there seems no limit. The exploration of the moon, planets and stars has begun and, in an answer to dreams from time immemorial, Man walked on this planet’s nearest celestial neighbor. The study of space and contribution it can make to improving human welfare has begun in earnest and promises great benefits to mankind. The deep oceans now contribute greatly to meeting Man’s everyday needs. Most importantly, there is not one area of the world that has not gained from the progress mankind has made during this extraordinary period of world history.
In longer-term perspective, all this progress has taken place without any direction by government and without any single individual person or people coordinating or directing the economic affairs of mankind. For practical purposes, our past economic rise has been spontaneous. All that has been necessary is to leave people free to conduct their own affairs as they wish and they, in their own way and subject to a sensible and equitable rule of law, made the connections one to another that were required to advance their own welfare. In doing so, they advanced the common welfare of all of us by increasing the bounty that comes when each one of us raises his own productivity. That is how free markets work, and it is the lesson learned by the fall of the Soviet Union and the abandonment of central planning by other socialist countries.
Yet right now a meeting takes place in Copenhagen where speeches are given that deny the progress anyone with eyes can see. They challenge the idea that progress can continue when they know a huge swath of the world’s poorest countries continues to grow rapidly in the midst of a deep downturn in the rest of the world economy. Those countries performing best are precisely those that adopted the market mechanism after decades of mounting problems traced to centralized planning.
Here at home there is the insistent cry that some people lag and do without that which there is every indication will become available to all by a continuing prosperity linked to the economic freedoms this country has enjoyed since its founding. Blind to the source of our prosperity and progress, some issue loud and insistent calls for greater concentrations of power Washington and stronger leadership by small groups of people, namely them, who constantly complain they do not have enough power to deal with problems many of us simply do not believe are real problems to be solved by government. If we were to vest them with greater power through government, what reasons do we have that they will perform better than generations of free individuals acting on their own? Why should we believe that government will work selflessly and smartly to improve our lives if we turn over our future to them?
A free people acting through free markets have lifted the stark poverty of the past off our shoulders. As Macaulay tells us, the past was one of great privation and short life. We should not look back upon it with nostalgia. Nor, as we consider the difficulties and challenges of the moment, be it the possibility of global warming or the need for wider access to health care, should we abandon the market-oriented and limited government principles that have served us so well in the past.
No comments:
Post a Comment