Apocalypse? Free markets to the rescue!

Leaving aside troops on the front line, mountain climbers, sky divers, Formula One racing car drivers, and others engaging in similarly life-threatening pursuits, life just isn’t adventurous or risky enough for a lot of us. At least that is what I assume because it makes sense of the apocalyptic doomsayers among us who clearly have the role of imparting that sense of adventure and risk otherwise absent from humdrum lives.

These doomsayers come in many different guises. One pops up as another temporarily disappears; depending perhaps on sun spots, but I could be wrong about that.

Armageddon cults lie at one extreme. However, ‘the end of the world is nigh’ predictions have definitely lost their mojo in the modern scientific age. No-one takes them seriously outside of the cults’ inner sanctums, so they fail to generate even a microscopic shudder of apprehension among the populace at large. This is not the age of priests, magic and hobgoblins. That’s why we need scientific and medical experts in touch with the modern world to scare the bejesus out of us; or at least some of the more credulous of us.

Tim Flannery and Al Gore, among others, do a fine job conjuring images of searing heat, parched earth, and rising tides inundating islands and coastal plains, swallowing towns and cities in their wake. That surely keeps many people on the edge of their seats and beyond. Sure they may be working nine-to-five in clerical jobs or slaving away on the factory floor, but they’re also living out their very own Poseidon Adventure.

We needed Tim and Al because the Club Of Rome’s dire predictions of resource depletion turned out to be a crock of exaggerations. OK, they really turned out to be a crock of fertilizer, but I was too polite to say. And Paul Ehrlich’s population bomb turned out to be a fizzer. Jenny Craig must have been shaking in her boots (or high heels) at the thought of starving billions. Thankfully for the dieting business, Ehrlich was wrong. Billions more of us rapacious humans are better fed than ever and growing fatter by the day. But, never say never, he is now trying to reprise his portentous role by the well-tried technique of time-delaying his population bomb.

Then there was swine flu, then bird flu, or was it the other way around? In any event, we survived them both. What made my mind wander into this apocalyptic menagerie and other doom-laden scenarios threatening to wipe our species off the map? It was the BBC News of March 11 and a Mr James Gallagher writing, under the title of “Analysis: Antibiotic apocalypse”, about yet another apocalypse, in this case an antibiotic one.

“A terrible future could be on the horizon”, he wrote. “This is now a war, and one we are in severe danger of losing … The most basic operations…could become deadly … Childbirth could once again become a deadly moment in a woman’s life … A simple cut finger could have you fighting for your life.” I grazed my finger only the other day when clearing out the garage and felt a shiver of apprehension.

Other phrases, too many and too frightening to repeat all of them, sprung from various experts quoted in the article. Here are a few examples: “the emergence of nightmare bacteria” (US Centers of Disease Control) — “many common infections…could kill unabated” (WHO) — “It’s a pretty grim future” (Prof Richard James) – and, according to a Prof Neil Woodford, “the greatest threat in the UK is Enterobacteriaceae”. When you think about it, the possibility of this unpronounceable malady could scare people quite a lot, even if they don’t live in the UK.

And, back again to the Prof Woodford, who warns that in “the worst case scenario” we would become “like the world in the 1920s and 1930s”, when apparently you could be gardening, “prick your finger on a rose bush” and suffer deadly consequences.

I thought on reflection that Hercule Poirot did his work in the 1930s and it didn’t seem too bad, at least as portrayed on the telly. My Dad also lived in the 1920s and before, and in the 1930s, and he survived. Though he complained about the state of dentistry in his childhood and youth, I can’t recall him complaining about a near-death experience with a cut or pricked finger. It may have been one of those stories he preferred not to tell in case he frightened us children.

Bad things do happen in the world; we know that. Despotic regimes cause suffering and wars. Governments in the enlightened West cause despair by engendering dependency to win votes. Bad people do bad things. Morbidities of various kinds stalk the land as they always have. Nature can be capricious and cruel. That should be enough to give everyone a frisson to enrich their lives without the need of experts to warn constantly of one impending doom after another.

I don’t want to belittle the challenge of beating down the march of bacteria in a world where it is difficult to escape a doctor’s surgery, when suffering from any kind of mild infection, without a prescription for an antibiotic. But I have faith in the capitalist system. Major drug companies are beavering away, spending billions, and using the best medical and scientific minds that their money can buy to find the latest cure to boost their bottom lines. Nothing much can stand in the way.

Where there’s a will there is often a way, and there is usually a way when free market capitalism holds sway. That’s why agricultural productivity has outstripped population growth; and why technology has been, and will continue to be, applied to find, and better use, more resources than we will ever need.

I sleep better at night knowing that rapacious, competitive, capitalism is at work. For me apocalyptic nightmares are not the stuff of global warming, population bombs, rampant infections, but of socialism and greenism and the dead hand of government. Now that’s really scary stuff.

Peter Smith, a frequent Quadrant Online contributor, is the author of Bad Economics