Onward and downward

Man is a constitutionally ungrateful creature, taking all progress immediately for granted and making the most of whatever complaints still come to hand. However privileged he is, either in relation to people who have lived in previous ages, or to contemporaries living elsewhere in the world or even in his own country, a man can always find reason to believe that he is the most unfortunate of creatures, and that all is for the worst in this, the worst of all possible worlds.

In this invigorating, clever and often very funny satire, Ross Clark mocks the pieties of our age that have replaced the pieties of our forefathers. Among them, of course, is that our industrialised society is uniquely horrible, polluting the earth to destruction, responsible for all the diseases that afflict us (albeit after an unprecedently long life) and depriving life itself of meaning.

The author imagines a world in which industrialisation has gone into reverse. Environmentalists have brought about a revolution after which nothing is manufactured any longer, no chemicals are produced, there are no means of transport so that everyone must stay more or less where he was born, and people return to a subsistence while living in the ruins of the previous civilisation. They have been brainwashed into believing that their crude and necessitous existence is vastly superior to that enjoyed by those who had the misfortune to live in the industrialised times.

All learning is now despised and the grossest superstition prevails. Kangaroo courts are the only form of justice — so much more authentic than the artifices of the rule of law — and crowds take a vote by acclamation on the guilt of the accused, shouting o-nine-o-six or o-nine-o-seven for guilty and innocent respectively, the numbers deriving from an old TV polling system.