We live in terrible times. And, being human, we shake our heads and wring our hands and swear that never have the times been worse.
Look around. Crime, they say, is completely out of control and that seems true indeed and the thought as well as the fact of it oppresses and frightens people. And so is suicide rampant in Guyana – at world-record levels. And the economy is feeble and fading and joblessness is increasing.
And the accursed politicians are at each other’s throats when they all should be on the same side confronting their common enemies – division, disease, poverty, illiteracy and environmental decline.
Abroad it looks just as bad. The world is in turmoil. Billions of people are lost in never-ending cycles of wars, terrorism, dislocation, poverty, famine and worsening natural disasters.
Refugees flood across frontiers in unprecedented members. In the mature, so-called developed world a ‘post-truth’ era of fake news, religious bigotry, racism and fascist tendencies promise future disaster and despotisms on a monumental scale. Surely the apocalypse approaches.
But wait a minute. The most basic evidence shows a different picture. The number of people in the world living in extreme poverty (US$1.90 per day) has fallen by half in the last two decades. The number of small children dying prematurely has also fallen by 50% ‒ that is 6 million lives saved every year by vaccines, breast-feeding promotion, pneumonia medicine and diarrhoea treatment. This represents an absolutely astonishing reduction in human misery in the last two decades. “This is the best story in the world today,” says Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank.
And that is by no means the only story of extraordinary progress. In the entire history of the human species, until the 1960s, a majority of adults in the world were illiterate. Now 85% of adults worldwide are literate and the proportion is rising – another tremendous victory in the battle against human despair.
I don’t know how to translate such universal progress into Guyana terms. I don’t know if the statistics exist. But I wouldn’t mind betting that compared with 20 years ago the following has happened: infant mortality has gone down; average life expectancy has gone up; the number of doctors and hospital beds per 1,000 population has increased; extreme poverty has been reduced; the number of households with electricity, running water, cars, refrigerators, computers, telephones and smartphones has multiplied; the number of young people receiving high school and university training has grown; and of course we know that per capita GDP has increased significantly even though not as fast as we would like.
So many pluses. So why are we in the world and in Guyana so dissatisfied? It is a huge existential question. I do not know the answer. Indeed, though I know what I have written is accurate, I do not feel it tells the truth. Can someone explain this scepticism in the gut – this sense that the world, and our part of the world, are not at all tilting towards heaven but headed the other way – this perception that in a sky growing steadily more silver the cloudy linings remain predominant and grow darker by the day?
