It would be an interesting experiment to dig out newspapers from five or ten years ago and look at the headlines. Apart from the trivial and the ever-present, my guess is that there would be much discussion about some issues that seemed highly consequential at the time but humdrum now. It is not easy to put present anxieties into a wider context.
As examples, think of all the military escapades of the USA since 1945. The Korean war started seventy years ago this week and the cause seemed strong enough at the time to justify deploying thousands of soldiers into a highly hostile environment and to accept that many would perish. The Bay of Pigs still holds some intensity, but Vietnam and Iraq less.
It is the same about more mundane domestic issues. How can we forget the discussions about toilets and changing rooms for people of rare genders? In that case, much of the excitement was generated for political ends. A cynic might claim that the same could be true of all the warmongering.
One of the most heartening articles I read this year was in The Economist about abortion. I find abortion to be a tough subject. I attend Catholic Mass in the USA and observe the passion that it generates. Even in 2020, our local priest came close to suggesting a vote for Trump, with abortion the deciding factor. W were asked to look beyond crime, misogyny, racism, arrogance, bullying and the rest, an antithesis of the gospel teachings, all in the cause of reducing abortion.
For the most passionate, the key argument is that all life is sacred. What I find hard to reconcile is that it is often these same people who accept people starving in the streets for a want of societal support, or capital punishment, or even extra-judicial killing of foreign scientists. Can we really judge those lives to be expendable whereas a creature with an undeveloped brain is not?
On the other hand, it should never be a trivial thing to abort a child, beyond some point where a scientist might classify it as a human being, so I have some sympathy for the anti-abortion cause.
The article in question did not explore these well-worn avenues, but instead pointed out how the science of having an abortion has changed. What used to be a risky operation can now be reliably undertaken at home via cheap and readily available medication, which is becoming available to more and more people in different parts of the world.
Over time the result will be that the harrumphing of the anti-abortion evangelicals will have less and less effect. They can close all the clinics and squeeze the professionals, but that will be of little avail if a simple prescription from the Internet will do the trick. Banning the pills would even be difficult if they are available in other countries.
We can hope that the upshot of all this will be a reduction in political heat. The new pills is only safe in the first trimester, but hopefully their easy availability will mean women can make a decision and act on it quickly enough. The abortion pill is little more than an extension of the morning after pill. People can still debate the point at which abortion becomes unethical, but once the discussion becomes theoretical rather than consequential it should become less intense. Continuous improvement in sex education, availability of contraceptives and male responsibilities should extend the trend of women’s agency.
This is a surprisingly common phenomenon: an issue enflames passions but then quickly becomes old news thanks to societal trends and some game-changing innovation. In the developed world, matters relating to LGBT people have gone this way over one generation. Prejudice still exists and other parts of the world have some catching up to do, but nowadays the diehards emit a sense of having missed the bus.
The challenge for activists and policy makers is to discern which issues will vanish of their own accord, which ones need only a nudge and which ones need an almighty heave. An example from a less ethically sensitive area is competition law. Twenty years ago legislators became concerned about the monopolistic behaviour of Microsoft, but the problem vanished before they could do much about it. Now the same dilemma exists concerning other tech giants. Most likely that will solve itself over time as well.
More difficult is the whole area of populism being fed by conspiracy theories and anger and misinformation, all turbocharged by social media. It is tempting to take an evangelical approach and seek to banish the scourge via prohibitions. But it is very hard to know what to do, partly because any restrictive action risks firing up resentments even more and creating martyrs. As an optimist, I like to hope that this issue will reduce over time too. Successive generations are better educated and less digitally naïve, and platforms will develop to drive more discerning segmentation of content. It could still be a bumpy ride for a while, especially if elites continue to ignore the challenges of inequality and deprivation.
Climate change is clearly an issue demanding the almighty heave. But I suspect we are reaching a tipping point, a good one in which humanity does what it needs to rather than a bad one where nature wreaks havoc. Now that the moneymen have started seriously downgrading dirty investments and worrying about insurance, momentum for necessary change will snowball. This example is also salutary, because the temptation ten years ago was to mandate all sorts of solutions, most of which would have been the wrong ones. Even an almighty heave should not be too specific.
The same is true for all the challenges of racism. Again, this warrants an almighty heave, but success will come more from changing minds than implementing draconian policies, though some police reform is surely in order. Rioting and tearing down statues and demanding reparations all help to make activists feel empowered, but may often be counter-productive.
The Economist has also been mounting a subtle campaign in the area of transsexual rights and policies. Rightly feeling guilty about past persecution of gay people, the magazine fears that society has overreacted and used an almighty heave where a nudge might be more effective. It is such an immature area, and young kids risk taking drastic changes to their bodies that they later regret. Over time things will become clearer as evidence builds up, science innovates and professionals improve their skills. If we are cautious, then some kids will surely suffer from being unjustly forced to live with the body they were born with. But is that a bigger risk than creating a cohort of kids regretting drastic changes that cannot be easily reversed?
I know little of the subject, but I lean towards the side of The Economist. Patience and caution should not be mistaken for conservative obstructionism. And, as the other examples show, the passage of time can have wonderful benefits. At work, prevarication and inaction can be a good strategy, when the result is a problem disappearing of its own accord. Such miracles can occur in public policy too.
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