Christmas cheer: deluding ourselves?

December 21, 2011, 9:43 AM GMT+0

Christmas is supposed to be a joyful season, but in today's world, there doesn't seem much to justify it. Yet people say they are happy. John Humphrys considers the issues

Christmas is supposed to be a time of good cheer, a time when we are meant to feel positive about the world. But look around and there doesn’t seem to be much out there to justify it. On the contrary, it could be said that we face a more uncertain and perilous future this Christmas than we have for many years. Yet most people do indeed seem cheerful. Polls and surveys suggest that a healthy 70% of us think of ourselves as happy. How can this be explained? Maybe the state of the world in general doesn’t really much matter to us - or are we just deluding ourselves?

It is not hard to paint a picture so gloomy that it would make Dickens’ miserable Scrooge look cheery. Here in Britain, our immediate economic prospects are so poor that even the government has had to acknowledge that we are in for an even worse time over the next few years than we have already been through. Growth is at best sluggish and may well sink back into recession next year. Unemployment is at its highest for seventeen years and rising; job prospects for the young are dire. In his Autumn Statement last month, George Osborne, the Chancellor, had to revise down all his forecasts. All he could promise was austerity as far as the eye could see.

What this means is that it’s now clear that we shall never make up for the economic activity lost after the financial crash of three years ago. In other words, we are going to be permanently poorer than we had expected to be before the crash happened. That means that all the plans for spending on public services and for tax cuts have had to be ripped up and recalculated. We just aren’t going to be able to afford the services we had hoped for.

And that gloomy prognosis is based on the assumption that things won’t get worse in the countries where we do most of our foreign trade: the other countries in the European Union. But it is now almost universally accepted that they will. Attempts to keep the eurozone afloat seem to be foundering and the consensus is that the euro cannot survive in its current form. If it breaks up, however partially (and some commentators are saying the first stages of this could happen while we are eating our Christmas dinners), then the economic consequences would be at best destabilising and at worst… well, much worse.

All that’s ‘just economics’, you might say: it’s not as though we are in the middle of a war. But that itself is not true. Fighting in Afghanistan may not be in the headlines as it once was, but British soldiers are still being killed there and that is likely go on for another three years until the time set for British withdrawal. Furthermore few observers think the outcome will be victory. Almost no one believes the western allies can beat the Taliban and efforts to negotiate some sort of arrangement with ‘moderate’ Taliban seem to be getting nowhere.

Next door in Iraq the Americans have finally left. But it would be a rash optimist who would predict peace and harmony in that country over the next twelve months. The dust from the departing American convoy had barely settled before the Shia-dominated government was putting out an arrest warrant for the Sunni vice-president. A sectarian civil war may merely have been postponed and may be about to flare up again.

If that is not all gloom enough, there’s the rest of the Middle East. The Arab spring seems to be turning to winter without ever having enjoyed a summer. In Egypt, soldiers are beating up civilian women and in Syria, the Baathist regime is torturing and killing anyone with the temerity to oppose it. The Israelis and Palestinians continue to fail even to negotiate, let alone reach a settlement, and Iran proceeds on its apparent course to become a nuclear state. Meanwhile the most unstable and alarming nuclear power in the world, North Korea, loses its leader, fires test missiles to warn the rest of us of its intent and entrusts its future to a twenty-eight-year-old known only for liking basketball.

All this, you might counter, is just shroud-waving. Anyone can paint an apocalyptic picture of our prospects but the end of the world hasn’t happened yet. We always somehow manage to avoid it. That’s what we pay politicians to ensure.

Yet a case can be made that increasingly the problems we face are beyond the power of politicians to solve. Take climate change, for instance. There may have been progress towards some sort of agreement at the conference in Durban earlier this month, but no one thinks we are anywhere near agreeing to do enough to stop the world from frying.

Or turn your gaze back to Europe. All the summit meetings called to ‘solve’ the euro crisis end up doing no such thing. Some commentators are coming to the conclusion that it is just too intractable to solve, at least by democratically elected politicians. But that thought leads to an even more alarming one: that if democratic politicians can’t provide a way forward, undemocratic ones will turn up saying that they can. This is exactly how fascism and Nazism got going after the First World War. Is this what is in store for us in Europe?

Yet it is in this context that 70% of us claim to be happy. How can that be in a world so fraught? One explanation is that discontent is what economists call a “lagging indicator”. That’s to say, our contentment is the product of fifteen years of economic growth and rising prosperity and over sixty years of peace in Europe. Take those conditions away and we’ll have a very different expression on our faces.

But there is also a quite different explanation. It is that, in the end, what goes on out there in the real world, the world of politics and economics and current affairs, doesn’t actually bear upon us as individuals very much at all. We can’t, of course, dodge the worst effects of crises in that world, but we are somehow programmed to take such adversity in our stride. It’s true that none of us in a prosperous country like Britain has had to endure the sort of adversity faced by many in the wider world today, or by most of our own ancestors. Think of how the meaning of the word ‘poverty’ has changed in this country. I am old enough (just!) to remember when it meant my poorer friends going to bed hungry and going to school without a warm coat in the middle of the winter. Nonetheless, faced with adversity we adapt in order to stay cheerful. Deep in us is the knowledge that that is the case. And that’s why we are able to face the sort of future that may confront us this Christmas in a relatively cheerful mood.

But is that so, or are we just deluding ourselves? Perhaps 2012 is the year when we’ll find out.

Let us know what you think.

A merry Christmas and a happy new year – despite everything!