The highlight of the week was probably watching Fox News last Saturday. It felt like East German state TV days after the Berlin Wall fell. Suddenly, the anchors were even-handed and fact-driven, gently correcting any to-the-bitter-end propagandists who still insisted that the Great Leader had won a glorious victory. (Declaration of interest: I am biased against Donald Trump. That may be because of my prejudice against lies, abuse, racist dog-whistling, environmental destruction, plutocracy and baseless anti-democratic conspiracy theories.) Then on Monday came news that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against coronavirus may be more than 90 per cent effective.
It was the best 48 hours of news in years. But there’s a human tendency to overvalue short-term events versus long-term trends. Even if we can beat nativism and the other virus, we’ll remain stuck with a worse problem: climate change. That’s why I suspect that my generation — Gen X, born between 1965 and about 1979 — will prove to have been the luckiest in history.
I used to be a Pinkerian. Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, argues that whereas daily TV news is generally bad, the world’s long-term trends are good. Life expectancy and literacy rise over time, poverty and violence decline. Societies gradually stop treating women, ethnic and sexual minorities as second-class humans: see Kamala Harris’s election as vice-president.