Slipping into darkness

Italy’s tottering prime minister (The Economist)

How much longer can Silvio Berlusconi go on?

SILVIO BERLUSCONI and his coalition ally, Umberto Bossi, look increasingly like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the last scene of the 1969 Western: wounded, doomed, yet seemingly unaware of the sheer numbers ranged against them.

Already rocked by thousands of pages of evidence detailing his alleged whoremongering, Italy’s prime minister took a more serious hit on September 20th when Standard & Poor’s, a ratings agency, downgraded Italy and expressed grave doubts about the government’s ability to respond effectively to the crisis in the euro zone. Such views are widely shared in Italy. Most Italians seem to have realised that their prime minister is a liability. His approval rating has slumped below 25%. He lost the unions a long time ago; now employers have lost faith in his right-wing government’s handling of the economy.

After S&P’s downgrade Il Sole-24 Ore, a business newspaper owned by Confindustria, the bosses’ federation, said it was time for Mr Berlusconi to go. Italy, it argued, was now the euro-zone country most likely to follow Greece into turmoil. It blamed, among other things, “the fragility of its governing coalition, the embarrassing chain of scandals that directly affect the prime minister, his ministers and their immediate associates, [and a] persistent inability to take painful but necessary decisions.”

Even this is not the end of Mr Berlusconi’s troubles. He is a defendant in three trials: one on charges of embezzlement, tax-dodging and false accounting, one in which he stands accused of paying an under-age prostitute and one for alleged bribery. (He denies all the charges.) The third, in which he is accused of corrupting his former legal adviser, David Mills, is the one he is said to fear most. On September 19th the judges overseeing the case shortened the list of witnesses, making it more likely that a verdict will be reached before Mr Berlusconi is saved, as he has so often been before, by a statute of limitations.

Just as damaging are two investigations in which the prime minister is not a suspect. One involves claims that he was blackmailed by Giampaolo Tarantini, a businessman from the southern city of Bari who is alleged to have supplied more than 100 women, including numerous prostitutes, for parties at Mr Berlusconi’s homes. The other, which focuses on Mr Tarantini’s alleged pimping, led on September 15th to the release of some 5,000 pages of evidence. Besides plenty of titillation, these included claims that the prime minister had acted in ways that were not just unseemly but illicit. It was already known that one of his guests was the girlfriend of a gangster—but not that he had put an official plane at the disposal of his alleged pimp, that he had obtained a visa for him to visit China, that he had found work for one of his shapely young guests on the publicly owned RAI television network and that he had arranged for Mr Tarantini to discuss juicy contracts with senior executives of Finmeccanica, a defence firm partly owned by the state.

In most democracies any of these allegations would surely be enough to remove the prime minister. Yet although Mr Berlusconi’s position has become untenable, the manner and timing of his departure remain unclear. A recent editorial in Corriere della Sera, a daily, suggested he might follow the example of his Spanish counterpart, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and call an early election at which he would not stand, clearing the way for co-operation between government and opposition.

If the prime minister refuses to budge, he could be removed by President Giorgio Napolitano (although the head of state has said he will do this only if the government loses the confidence of parliament). Or he might be deserted by his coalition allies in the Northern League (but Mr Bossi has vowed to remain loyal). Or he might fall to a rebellion in his People of Freedom (PdL) party. But with many of its members owing their positions and livelihoods to Mr Berlusconi, that will be difficult.

This week brought signs of a possible movement in the logjam. On the day of the rating downgrade the government lost five parliamentary votes, largely because some PdL deputies failed to turn up. On the same day Mr Napolitano held meetings with senior political figures that looked like a sounding-out of opinion in anticipation of a possible government crisis.

A new government would be no panacea. As S&P’s analysts noted, resistance to the structural economic reforms that Italy so desperately needs is rife among trade unions, professional bodies, incumbent monopolies and the public sector. Ditching Mr Berlusconi might be a good start. But it would be no more than that.t would be no more than that.

I migliori libri 2010 dell'Economist parlano della Cina e dell'America di Obama

I migliori libri del 2010 parlano di Barack Obama e della Cina, di come il surfing si è diffuso nel mondo, della prosperità e del dominio dell'Occidente, di una lepre dagli occhi d'ambra e di molto altro ancora. L'Economist pubblica nel numero in edicola oggi la sua scelta dei più avvincenti libri dell'anno: sono 44 titoli tra saggistica, narrativa e poesia incoronati come "Page turners", libri di cui il lettore gira avidamente le pagine e che non smetterebbe mai di leggere.

In cima alla lista dei libri di politica e attualità, è l'America al tempo di Obama.
"Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, Mc Cain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime", scritto da due giornalisti americani, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. La lettura è definita "scioccante" e "compulsiva", in particolare per quanto riguarda Hillary Clinton e John McCain. La campagna presidenziale 2008 emerge come "porno politico di alta qualità".
"The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama", di David Remnik è una biografia del presidente Usa, ben scritta e ricca di nuovi dettagli sulla sua vita.

C'è anche l'America della guerra al terrorismo ereditata da George W. Bush. "The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State", di Shane Harris, racconta dell'ascesa dello stato di polizia negli Stati Uniti dopo l'11 settembre 2001.
Sulla Cina, l'altro grande protagonista della politica mondiale, L'Economist ha scelto due titoli. "The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers" di Richard Mc Gregor (ex capo dell'ufficio di Pechino del Financial Times), racconta il mondo segreto del partito comunista cinese e sostiene che il potere si basa su un sistema che rende la corruzione quasi inevitabile.
In "Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory", il giornalista americano Peter Hessler si mette dietro al volante di un'auto per esplorare come la Cina sta cambiando.

Uno sguardo alla Gran Bretagna alle prese con i costi dei baby boomers è "The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future—and Why They Should Give it Back". La generazione che ha "rubato il futuro ai propri figli" dovrebbe ridarglielo. L'autore è David Willetts, ministro per l'Università e la Scienza di David Cameron, che l'Economist definisce uno dei pochi "pensatori profondi" dei Tories.

Tra le biografie e memorie, spicca "The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance" di Edmund de Waal. Si tratta, secondo il settimanale, di "uno studio magico di come gli oggetti sono manipolati, usati e poi passati di mano in mano", scritto da un ceramista britannico che ha ereditato 264 miniature giapponesi. Il titolo si riferisce a una di queste miniaure, la lepre con gli occhi d'ambra.

Nel paragrafo dedicato ai libri di storia, in primo piano la rivalità tra Occidente e Cina. "Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future". Ian Morris, storico britannico alla Stanford University, spiega perché l'Occidente domina, per ora, e sostiene che i dibattiti sull'ascesa della Cina e il declino dell'Occidente saranno alla fine marginali perché la natura si ritorcerà contro la società umana.
Sempre con l'attenzione rivolta alle relazioni tra Est e Ovest, "Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth", di Hilary Spurling, narra come gli scritti della prima donna americana vincitrice del Nobel per la letteratura abbiano contributo a lenire le tormentate relazioni tra l'Occidente e la Cina nella prima parte del 20.mo secolo. Ancora sulla Cina, la storia della grande carestia di Mao, "Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962", di Frank Dikötter.

Ma c'è anche il sogno sovietico degli Anni Cinquanta: "Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream". Francis Spufford racconta perché la pianificazione centralizzata dell'Unione Sovietica fu un fallimento.
Originale e certamente adatto come regalo di Natale, "A History of the World in 100 Objects", una storia del mondo attraverso cento oggetti raccontata elegantemente da Neil MacGregor, direttore del British Museum.
Sul fronte dell'economia, c'è quello che per il settimanale britannico è uno dei migliori libri sulla recente crisi, "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine", di Michael Lewis.
Contro tutti quelli che propendono per il pessimismo della ragione, nella sezione scienza e tecnologia, l'Economist segnala "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves". Matt Ridley, noto autore di scienza, sfida chi vede nero e sostiene che il mondo non può sfamare 9 miliardi di bocche, che l'Africa è destinata a fallire e che il pianeta va verso il disastro climatico.

Toni più lievi e addirittura spensierati nel paragrafo dedicato a cultura, società e viaggi. Si scivola sull'onda del surf leggendo "Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, With Some Unexpected Results". Michael Scott Moore racconta come il surf si è diffuso dalle Hawaii e dalla California al resto del mondo, con "risultati inaspettati".
Nella narrativa, non poteva mancare "Freedom", il nuovo romanzo di Jonathan Franzen, l'autore di "Le Correzioni". E' la storia di una famiglia del Midwest che rappresenta il ceto medio dell'America contemporanea. Per l'Economist, un moderno "Paradiso perduto".
L'Economist ha scelto anche un romanzo ambientato a Roma, "The Imperfectionists", di Tom Rachman, che racconta vicissitudini e drammi di un grande quotidiano internazionale americano in crisi, non troppo lontano dall'International Herald Tribune, basato a Parigi, dove l'autore lavorava.
Due premi Nobel nei libri di poesia, "Human chain" del poeta nordirlandese Seamus Heaney e "White Egrets: Poems" del poeta santaluciano Derek Walcott.

L'Economist propone a parte una rassegna dei libri scritti dai suoi giornalisti "quando non erano in ufficio". Spiega di farlo su richiesta dei lettori, poiché abitualmente non fa recensioni di libri scritti dal suo staff o dagli ex che hanno lasciato il giornale da meno di cinque anni.
Nella lista di dodici titoli compaiono due libri sull'Italia. Il primo è "Forza, Italia: Come Ripartire dopo Berlusconi"di Bill Emmott, un saggio che – spiega l'Economist - "analizza la lotta tra ‘l'Italia buona' e ‘l'Italia cattiva' e dice come può vincere quella buona. Il secondo saggio, "Into the Heart of the Mafia: A Journey Through the Italian South", di David Lane (corrispondente dall'Italia per la finanza ), descrive come l'influenza della mafia nell'Italia del Sud è stata rafforzata dalla globalizzazione.
Da segnalare infine il libro degli "ismi" di John Andrews, "The Economist Book of Isms: From Abolitionism to Zoroastrianism"; una guida all'economia, "The Little Book of Economics: How the Economy Works in the Real World", di Greg Ip; e una guida agli hedge fund, "The Economist Guide to Hedge Funds: What They Are, What They Do, Their Risks, Their Advantages" di Philip Coggan.

A healthy relationship

The mere presence of women seems to bring health benefits to men

For hormone-addled teenagers, finding a date can often seem to be a matter of life and death. As it turns out, that may not be so far from the truth. In a paper in the August issue of Demography, a team of researchers led by Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University reports that men who reach sexual maturity in an environment with few available women are at risk of dying sooner than their luckier confrères. The team points out that this finding may have important implications for public health in countries such as India and China, where sex ratios are skewed against women.

The idea that a dearth of available women hurts male longevity has been around for some time. There are several reasons why such a hypothesis makes sense. It is now well established that marriage has a beneficial effect on health and survival. Since women are traditionally the caregivers, these benefits accrue especially to men. If there are fewer potential mates around, men may delay marriage or forgo it entirely, losing out on these nuptial niceties. In addition, with more men and fewer single women, the intense competition for a mate is likely to be stressful. Such early-life stress is known to have effects on health that can last for years.

As reasonable as it all sounds, the hypothesis that a skewed sex ratio leads to shorter male lifespan has never been confirmed in humans. To put it to the test, Dr Christakis and his team made use of two unusual sets of demographic data. The first, known as the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, consists of a third of all those who graduated from high school in the state of Wisconsin in 1957—about 10,000 people. The male-to-female ratio in each person’s graduating class is known, and provides an indicator of the ratio during the sexually formative years of the study’s participants. The second set of data consists of 7½m white men who were enrolled in America’s Medicare programme in 1993. The researchers found the year and state in which each participant’s Social Security number was issued, which typically happened between his 15th and 25th birthdays. The sex ratio of his contemporaries was then calculated from state-level census data.

In the Wisconsin sample, Dr Christakis looked at those who had died before their 65th birthday. For the women, there was no significant relationship between their school’s sex ratio and their age of death. For the men, however, a significant relationship did emerge. A percentage-point increase in the male-to-female ratio of a man’s graduation class led to a percentage-point increase in his likelihood of dying before the age of 65. The Social Security data, moreover, suggest that a lack of women during men’s teenage years still haunts their health decades later.

The average white American male who was 65 in 1993 could expect to live another 15 years. Dr Christakis found, however, that those who had come of age around the most available women, however, had a life-expectancy three months longer than that of the least favoured. Three months may not seem a huge difference, but according to Dr Christakis it is comparable to the benefit an elderly person can expect from exercising or losing some surplus weight.

In an American context, these results are, perhaps, no more than an interesting curiosity: at the age of 15, boys outnumber girls by about 4% and the ratio shrinks towards equality thereafter. In China, however, it is estimated that there are now 20% more men of marriageable age than women—the result of selective abortion and infanticide consequent upon the country’s “one-child” policy. That bodes ill for the future health of China’s menfolk.

Onwards and upwards

The idea of progress

Dec 17th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Why is the modern view of progress so impoverished?

Illustration by Matt Herring

THE best modern parable of progress was, aptly, ahead of its time. In 1861 Imre Madach published “The Tragedy of Man”, a “Paradise Lost” for the industrial age. The verse drama, still a cornerstone of Hungarian literature, describes how Adam is cast out of the Garden with Eve, renounces God and determines to recreate Eden through his own efforts. “My God is me,” he boasts, “whatever I regain is mine by right. This is the source of all my strength and pride.”

Adam gets the chance to see how much of Eden he will “regain”. He starts in Ancient Egypt and travels in time through 11 tableaux, ending in the icebound twilight of humanity. It is a cautionary tale. Adam glories in the Egyptian pyramids, but he discovers that they are built on the misery of slaves. So he rejects slavery and instead advances to Greek democracy. But when the Athenians condemn a hero, much as they condemned Socrates, Adam forsakes democracy and moves on to harmless, worldly pleasure. Sated and miserable in hedonistic Rome, he looks to the chivalry of the knights crusader. Yet each new reforming principle crumbles before him. Adam replaces 17th-century Prague’s courtly hypocrisy with the rights of man. When equality curdles into Terror under Robespierre, he embraces individual liberty—which is in turn corrupted on the money-grabbing streets of Georgian London. In the future a scientific Utopia has Michelangelo making chair-legs and Plato herding cows, because art and philosophy have no utility. At the end of time, having encountered the savage man who has no guiding principle except violence, Adam is downcast—and understandably so. Suicidal, he pleads with Lucifer: “Let me see no more of my harsh fate: this useless struggle.”

Things today are not quite that bad. But Madach’s 19th-century verse contains an insight that belongs slap bang in the 21st. In the rich world the idea of progress has become impoverished. Through complacency and bitter experience, the scope of progress has narrowed. The popular view is that, although technology and GDP advance, morals and society are treading water or, depending on your choice of newspaper, sinking back into decadence and barbarism. On the left of politics these days, “progress” comes with a pair of ironic quotation marks attached; on the right, “progressive” is a term of abuse.

It was not always like that. There has long been a tension between seeking perfection in life or in the afterlife. Optimists in the Enlightenment and the 19th century came to believe that the mass of humanity could one day lead happy and worthy lives here on Earth. Like Madach’s Adam, they were bursting with ideas for how the world might become a better place.

Some thought God would bring about the New Jerusalem, others looked to history or evolution. Some thought people would improve if left to themselves, others thought they should be forced to be free; some believed in the nation, others in the end of nations; some wanted a perfect language, others universal education; some put their hope in science, others in commerce; some had faith in wise legislation, others in anarchy. Intellectual life was teeming with grand ideas. For most people, the question was not whether progress would happen, but how.

The idea of progress forms the backdrop to a society. In the extreme, without the possibility of progress of any sort, your gain is someone else’s loss. If human behaviour is unreformable, social policy can only ever be about trying to cage the ape within. Society must in principle be able to move towards its ideals, such as equality and freedom, or they are no more than cant and self-delusion. So it matters if people lose their faith in progress. And it is worth thinking about how to restore it.

Cain and cant

By now, some of you will hardly be able to contain your protests. Surely the evidence of progress is all around us? That is the case put forward in “It’s Getting Better All the Time”, by the late Julian Simon and Stephen Moore then at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank in Washington, DC. Over almost 300 pages they show how vastly everyday life has improved in every way.

For aeons people lived to the age of just 25 or 30 and most parents could expect to mourn at least one of their children. Today people live to 65 and, in countries such as Japan and Canada, over 80; outside Africa, a child’s death is mercifully rare. Global average income was for centuries about $200 a year; a typical inhabitant of one of the world’s richer countries now earns that much in a day. In the Middle Ages about one in ten Europeans could read; today, with a few exceptions, such as India and parts of Africa, the global rate is comfortably above eight out of ten. In much of the world, ordinary men and women can vote and find work, regardless of their race. In large parts of it they can think and say what they choose. If they fall ill, they will be treated. If they are innocent, they will generally walk free.

It is good to go up in the world, but much less so
if everyone around you is going up in it too

It is an impressive list—even if you factor in some formidably depressing data. (In the gently dissenting foreword to her husband’s book Simon’s widow quotes statistics claiming that, outside warfare, 20th-century governments murdered 7.3% of their people, through needless famine, labour camps, genocide and other crimes. That compares with 3.7% in the 19th century and 4.7% in the 17th.) Mr Moore and Simon show that health and wealth have never been so abundant. And for the part of humanity that is even now shedding poverty, many gains still lie ahead.

The trouble is that a belief in progress is more than just a branch of accounting. The books are never closed. Wouldn’t nuclear war or environmental catastrophe tip the balance into the red? And the accounts are full of blank columns. How does the unknown book-keeper reconcile such unknowable quantities as happiness and fulfilment across the ages? As Adam traverses history, he sees material progress combined with spiritual decline.

Even if you can show how miserable the past was, the belief in progress is about the future. People born in the rich world today think they are due a modicum of health, prosperity and equality. They advance against that standard, rather than the pestilence, beggary and injustice of serfdom. That’s progress.

Every day, in every way…

The idea of progress has a long history, but it started to flower in the 17th century. Enlightenment thinkers believed that man emancipated by reason would rise to ever greater heights of achievement. The many manifestations of his humanity would be the engines of progress: language, community, science, commerce, moral sensibility and government. Unfortunately, many of those engines have failed.

Some supposed sources of progress now appear almost quaint. Take language: many 18th-century thinkers believed that superstitions and past errors were imprinted in words. “Hysteria”, for example, comes from the Greek for “womb”, on the mistaken idea that panic was a seizure of the uterus. Purge the language of rotten thinking, they believed, and truth and reason would prevail at last. The impulse survives, much diminished, in the vocabulary of political correctness. But these days few people outside North Korea believe in language as an agent of social change.

Every time someone tells you to “be realistic”
they are asking you to compromise your ideals

Other sources of progress are clothed in tragedy. The Germanic thought that individual progress should be subsumed into the shared destiny of a nation, or volk, is fatally associated with Hitler. Whenever nationalism becomes the chief organising principle of society, state violence is not far behind. Likewise, in Soviet Russia and Communist China unspeakable crimes were committed by the ruling elite in the pursuit of progress, rather as they had been in the name of God in earlier centuries. As John Passmore, an Australian philosopher, wrote: “men have sought to demonstrate their love of God by loving nothing at all and their love for humanity by loving nobody whatsoever.”

The 20th century was seduced by the idea that humans will advance as part of a collective and that the enlightened few have the right—the duty even—to impose progress on the benighted masses whether they choose it or not. The blood of millions and the fall of the Berlin Wall, 20 years ago this year, showed how much the people beg to differ. Coercion will always have its attractions for those able to do the coercing, but, as a source of enlightened progress, the subjugation of the individual in the interests of the community has lost much of its appeal.

Instead the modern age has belonged to material progress and its predominant source has been science. Yet nestling amid the quarks and transistors and the nucleic acids and nanotubes, there is a question. Science confers huge power to change the world. Can people be trusted to harness it for good?

The ancients thought not. Warnings that curiosity can be destructive stretch back to the very beginning of civilisation. As Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, so inquisitive Pandora, the first woman in Greek mythology, peered into the jar and released all the world’s evils.

Modern science is full of examples of technologies that can be used for ill as well as good. Think of nuclear power—and of nuclear weapons; of biotechnology—and of biological contamination. Or think, less apocalyptically, of information technology and of electronic surveillance. History is full of useful technologies that have done harm, intentionally or not. Electricity is a modern wonder, but power stations have burnt too much CO2-producing coal. The internet has spread knowledge and understanding, but it has also spread crime and pornography. German chemistry produced aspirin and fertiliser, but it also filled Nazi gas chambers with Cyclon B.

The point is not that science is harmful, but that progress in science does not map tidily onto progress for humanity. In an official British survey of public attitudes to science in 2008, just over 80% of those asked said they were “amazed by the achievements of science”. However, only 46% thought that “the benefits of science are greater than any harmful effect”.

From the perspective of human progress, science needs governing. Scientific progress needs to be hitched to what you might call “moral progress”. It can yield untold benefits, but only if people use it wisely. They need to understand how to stop science from being abused. And to do that they must look outside science to the way people behave.

…I am getting richer and richer

It is a similar story with economic growth, the other source of material progress. The 18th century was optimistic that business could bring prosperity; and that prosperity, in its turn, could bring enlightenment. Business has more than lived up to the first half of that promise. As Joseph Schumpeter famously observed, silk stockings were once only for queens, but capitalism has given them to factory girls. And, as Mr Moore and Simon argue, prosperity has brought its share of enlightenment.

The Economist puts more faith in business than most. Yet even the stolidest defenders of capitalism would, by and large, agree that its tendency to form cartels, shuffle off the costs of pollution and collapse under the weight of its own financial inventiveness needs to be constrained by laws designed to channel its energy to the general good. Business needs governing, just as science does.

Nor does economic progress broadly defined correspond to human progress any more precisely than does scientific progress. GDP does not measure welfare; and wealth does not equal happiness. Rich countries are, by and large, happier than poor ones; but among developed-world countries, there is only a weak correlation between happiness and GDP. And, although wealth has been soaring over the past half a century, happiness, measured by national surveys, has hardly budged.

That is probably largely because of status-consciousness. It is good to go up in the world, but much less so if everyone around you is going up in it too. Once they have filled their bellies and put a roof over their heads, people want more of what Fred Hirsch, an economist who worked on this newspaper in the 1950s and 1960s, called “positional goods”. Only one person can be the richest tycoon. Not everyone can own a Matisse or a flat in Mayfair. As wealth grows, the competition for such status symbols only becomes more intense.

And it is not just that material progress does not seem to be delivering the emotional goods. People also fear that mankind is failing to manage it properly—with the result that, in important ways, their children may not be better off than they are. The forests are disappearing; the ice is melting; social bonds are crumbling; privacy is eroding; life is becoming a dismal slog in an ugly world.

All this scepticism, and more, is on display in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Brave New World”, the two great British dystopian novels of the 20th century. In them George Orwell and Aldous Huxley systematically subvert each of the Enlightenment’s engines of progress. Language—Orwell’s Newspeak—is used to control people’s thought. The individuals living on Airstrip One are dissolved by perpetual war into a single downtrodden “nation”. In both books the elite uses power to oppress, not enlighten. Science in Huxley’s London has become monstrous—babies raised in vitro in hatcheries are chemically stunted; and the people are maintained in a state of drug-induced tranquillity. And in the year of our Ford 632, Huxley’s world rulers require enthusiastic consumption to keep the factories busy and the people docile. Wherever the Enlightenment saw scope for human nature to improve, Orwell and Huxley warned that it could be debased by conditioning, propaganda and mind-control.

Crooked timber

The question is why neither Orwell’s nor Huxley’s nightmares have come to life. And the answer depends on the last pair of engines of progress: moral sensibility in its widest sense, and the institutions that make up what today is known as “governance”. These broadly liberal forces offer hope for a better future—more, indeed, than you may think.

The junior partner is governance—not an oppressive Leviathan, but a democratic system of laws and social institutions. Right and left have much cause to criticise government. For the right, as Ronald Reagan famously said, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” For the left, government has failed to tame the cruelty of markets and lift the poor out of their misery. From their different perspectives, both sides complain that government regulation is often costly and ineffectual, and that many decades of social welfare have failed to get to grips with an underclass.

Yet even if government has scaled back its ambitions from the heights of the post-war welfare state, even if it is often inefficient and self-serving, it also embodies moral progress. That is the significance of the assertion, in the American Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”. It is the significance of laws guaranteeing free speech, universal suffrage, and equality before the law. And it is the significance of courts that can hold states to account when they, inevitably, fail to match the standards that they have set for themselves.

Illustration by Matt Herring

Such values are the institutional face of the fundamental engine of progress—“moral sensibility”. The very idea probably sounds quaint and old-fashioned, but it is the subject of a powerful recent book by Susan Neiman, an American philosopher living in Germany. People often shy away from a moral view of the world, if only because moral certitude reeks of intolerance and bigotry. As one sociologist has said “don’t be judgmental” has become the 11th commandment.

But Ms Neiman thinks that people yearn for a sense of moral purpose. In a world preoccupied with consumerism and petty self-interest, that gives life dignity. People want to determine how the world works, not always to be determined by it. It means that people’s behaviour should be shaped not by who is most powerful, or by who stands to lose and gain, but by what is right despite the costs. Moral sensibility is why people will suffer for their beliefs, and why acts of principled self-sacrifice are so powerful.

People can distinguish between what is and what ought to be. Torture was once common in Europe’s market squares. It is now unacceptable even when the world’s most powerful nation wears the interrogator’s mask. Race was once a bar to the clubs and drawing-rooms of respectable society. Now a black man is in the White House.

There are no guarantees that the gap between is and ought can be closed. Every time someone tells you to “be realistic” they are asking you to compromise your ideals. Ms Neiman acknowledges that your ideals will never be met completely. But sometimes, however imperfectly, you can make progress. It is as if you are moving towards an unattainable horizon. “Human dignity”, she writes, “requires the love of ideals for their own sake, but nothing requires that the love will be requited.”

Striving, not strife

At the end of Madach’s poem, Adam is about to throw himself off a cliff in despair, when he glimpses redemption. First Eve draws near to tell him that she is to have a child. Then God comes and gently tells Adam that he is wrong to try to reckon his accomplishments on a cosmic scale. “For if you saw your transient, earthly life set in dimensions of eternity, there wouldn’t be any virtue in endurance. Or if you saw your spirit drench the dust, where could you find incentive for your efforts?” All God asks of man is to strive for progress, nothing more. “It is human virtues I want,” He says, “human greatness.”

Ms Neiman asks people to reject the false choice between Utopia and degeneracy. Moral progress, she writes, is neither guaranteed nor is it hopeless. Instead, it is up to us.