LifeLines. Malcolm Doney
you woke up to on the morning news. Or, on who’s asking the question. And where they’re standing. But mostly your answer depends on what you mean by the question. Do you mean: is the world a better place today than last year, or are things better in the twenty-first century than, say, in the nineteenth? Or in ancient times?
For example, in 1980, smallpox, which has existed for 3,000 years and was once one of the most feared diseases on the planet, was eradicated. The polio virus, which as recently as the 1980s, paralysed 350,000 people a year, is now almost gone too.
Or take life expectancy. If you’re a woman in sub-Saharan Africa today, and you are asked if things are getting better and you compare yourself to the life of your grandmother, you may well say, ‘yes’. Today, you will probably live until you are fifty-seven – that’s sixteen years more of life than your grandmother, who might have made it to forty-one.
This kind of news doesn’t make the headlines because it didn’t happen an hour ago, or even yesterday. It didn’t happen with the sickening thud of a bomb blast or the flash of a paparazzi camera. This is not twenty-four-hour rolling news but another sort that we rarely notice until, some time later – years, decades, centuries – someone decides to call it history.
Journalism is sometimes referred to as the first draft of history, but first drafts don’t tell the whole story. In a world of 24/7 news, we can miss the bigger picture.
Each year, Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest people, publishes a letter on behalf of his philanthropic foundation drawing on the latest research, from child mortality to economic growth. Recently Gates wrote:
‘By almost any measure the world is better than it has ever been – by 2035 there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.’1
That sounds unlikely, but on the other hand, maybe Gates can see a more distant news cycle with a greater circumference.
Stand back a little, adjust your view and some days you might capture the faint outline of a more promising image of history.
5
Imagine it
Human beings are makers. We invent stuff: tools, machines, meals, stories, art, ideas, religions, cultures, mischief. Our capacity to create came in a ‘cognitive revolution’ around 70,000 years ago, according to the historian Yuval Noah Harari.1 That’s when Homo sapiens’ capacity to create took off. And creation is one of the things that marks us out.
The engine of making is the imagination. And the fuel of that engine is a question. What if? A question that sends us way beyond straightforward invention.
What if I were you? In order for us to understand one another, we each need to imagine what it’s like to be the other. Otherwise we do one another harm, trample over each others’ feelings. To hurt someone else deliberately is a failure of the imagination. When we cry at weddings, view movies, watch our children play, we are imagining life through someone else’s eyes.
Wouldn’t it work better if? It takes imagination to plan anything: to develop a road system; to make a garden; to choose a school for our kids; to decide how much garlic to add to the casserole. To think ahead.
Couldn’t we possibly? Crucially, our ability to hope is embedded in the imagination. Anne Frank, Nelson Mandela, Rachel Carson, Harvey Milk and Malala Yousafzai envisioned a different, better world. Unless we can imagine that there is more than this, we’re stuck in despair.
Is there more to life? Faith and belief are rarely built on certainties. They’re based on imagination. For instance, thinking that there might be a God (or not), and trying to work out what that God might be like. That’s why believers and doubters use metaphors for the divine: a parent, a despot, a shepherd, a friend. God is by definition beyond definition, so even in our understanding of the sacred, there’s an element of invention.
What would happen if? Imagination opens us up to infinite possibilities, and leads to action.
Imagine it...
What would happen if you asked?
What would happen if you kissed him?
What would happen if you stopped it?
What would happen if you said goodbye?
What would happen if you... added some anchovy?
6
Ride your Luck
You’ve got to be in it to win it.
It could be you.
The chances are you’ll play it this week. Or someone in your family will. Seventy per cent of people in the UK play the National Lottery regularly. They’re betting that their number will come up. That luck will be on their side.
It’s not logical. It’s faith. Or maybe just fun.
The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 45 million. You are more likely to be crushed by a meteor (1 in 700,000), die from flesh-eating bacteria (1 in 1 million) or be hit by part of a plane falling from the sky (1 in 10 million).1
We can’t prove luck exists but we often behave as if it does. ‘Good luck,’ we say, as if it will make some kind of difference. ‘Bad luck!’ we commiserate – as if some unseen force explains why your horse fell at the last, or you unexpectedly lost your job.
Why do we think it could be us? Perhaps it’s evolutionary. Perhaps it’s because the odds of just being alive on this good earth, in this strange universe, are so much longer.
Jim Al-Khalili, a theoretical physicist and former president of the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK), writes: ‘For me nothing makes life more worth living than the knowledge that my very existence is thanks to a colossal sequence of events since the beginning of the universe. Whether or not I was inevitable, how can I not be grateful for this privilege of being? And why would I not make the most of it?’2
Someone with a lot of time on their hands calculated the odds of any of us being born at one in ten... followed by two and three-quarter million zeroes. In other words, the odds of being alive are so improbable that winning the lottery looks quite plausible. Just by being here all our numbers came up.
And we’re luckier still.
We can send our children to school, call on a doctor when we’re sick, vote out politicians we don’t like.
Most of this good fortune was made by people who came before us, people who got lucky with their own health or education, and decided to share their winnings by working for the rights we take for granted.
Religions find luck hard to explain. Faith and fate, divinity and destiny are not always good company. But whether we believe in God or don’t, we lucked out just by being alive. Right here, right now.
7
Use the F Word
In March 1986, a gang armed with knives broke into a vicarage in Ealing, West London. During the assault Jill Saward, aged twenty-one, was raped; her boyfriend and father were beaten so violently that both were left with fractured skulls. But Jill’s response was unexpected. ‘I do not now, nor have I ever, hated the men who attacked me,’ she said later. ‘While I hated what they did to me, I was always able to distinguish between the act of aggression and the aggressors.’1
Jill Saward would dedicate the rest of her life to campaigning for the rights of survivors of sexual assault. As a Christian she was familiar with the