There’s no time like the present

The world is, we are told day after day, week after week, going to hell in a handcart. After the most brutal, catastrophic and inhuman century in history, the new millennium has kicked off in the way it clearly intends to go on. War, famine and pestilence stalk the savannahs and forests of Africa. The Middle East is turning into a charnel house. And the planet itself is under a human onslaught the likes of which we have never seen before.

Every day, it seems, there is new and ever-more persuasive evidence that the age of doom, if not quite upon us, must surely be very nearly nigh. Last week we learned that the North Atlantic’s population of seabirds was under grave threat: global warming was heating the sea and killing off their fish prey. The Day After Tomorrow, a profoundly silly disaster movie, managed to get itself splattered over the august pages of Nature, Science and New Scientist — thanks entirely to the fact that it dealt with global warming, enemy not only of seabirds but of clear thinking. Common wisdom says the 20th century was the worst in history. Think of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot — the ‘Great Bastards of History’ as Clive James once memorably called them — the African famines, Hiroshima, Chernobyl. And, most people seem to think, the 21st is likely to be more unpleasant still, getting off to a spectacular start just eight months and ten days after it began.

The doom extends across the political spectrum. The Right points to our inexorable moral decay, promiscuity, the ravages of Aids and drug addiction, the decline in manners and standards. The Green Left berates us for our profligacy with resources, our rape of the environment, our failure to right the inequalities of wealth that are leading us to meltdown.