The frightening future.

My grandfather was born into a prosperous English family at the beginning of the last century. It was the long Edwardian summer, a time of rising incomes, of technological wonders, of Science and Progress -- and a widespread assumption that the future would be better still.

Then the First World War exploded and the old world was shattered.

My grandfather's family became decidedly less prosperous. After working as an apprentice plumber, my grandfather left for Canada. He arrived just in time for the Great Depression.

As my grandfather struggled to put food on the table, he witnessed the rise of totalitarianism, the explosion of an even more devastating world war, the invention of a weapon that could demolish whole cities in a flash, and a Cold War that threatened to annihilate the entire human race.

And yet, as an old man in the 1980s, my grandfather looked back on all this and saw nothing particularly scary. In fact, he would say, it was the best of times.

And then he'd add, a little darkly, that it was my generation that faced a truly frightening future.

I like to remind myself of this story every now and then. It puts pessimism in perspective.

And there's plenty of pessimism today. Oil crisis. Food crisis. Climate change. Terrorism. Environmental degradation. The decline of the American colossus. Choose from the menu or take your fears à la carte.

On the left, gloom is de rigeur. "Bring on the Apocalypse" is the cheery title of a collection of writing by George Monbiot, the popular Guardian columnist, but it could serve as the slogan of the countless leftists who see only conspiracy, disaster and decline. There are moments when Naomi Klein sounds disturbingly like the president of the John Birch Society, circa 1962.

Among conservatives, too, optimism is last season's fashion. "Population booms, environmental stresses, economic inequality and disappearing resources may be our defining crises," declares The National Interest -- a conservative policy magazine whose patrons include Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger -- before piling up 95 pages of stuff that could go horribly wrong.
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It all seems a little extravagant. Yes, there's plenty wrong with the world. And plenty more that could get worse tomorrow.

Which has been true forever. And it bears repeating that those of us lucky enough to live in this place at this time are -- indisputably -- the safest, healthiest, and wealthiest people who ever lived in the entire long history of Homo sapiens. This is not a trivial fact.

And yet it doesn't penetrate the gloom.

In one of Reginald Bibby's surveys, four out of five Canadians agreed that "the world is not as safe a place today as it was when I was growing up." Of those born prior to the Second World War -- people who grew up amid Depression and cataclysmic war -- 85 per cent agreed.

For perception and reality to diverge so dramatically, something odd has to happen in the brain. And it is. Cognitive psychologists call it "hindsight bias."

Imagine that you are approached by a researcher who asks you how likely it is that Barack Obama will win the presidential election. You think hard and estimate his chances.

In November, John McCain wins an upset victory.

Months later, the researcher returns to ask you some follow-up questions. Think back to before the election, he says. Back then, how likely did you think it was that Barack Obama would win the election? You think carefully and answer.

In theory, the two estimates should match. But they won't. The second estimate will be much lower than the first. And when the researcher tells you that, you will be shocked. You may even deny it. Impossible, you say.

But it is possible. In fact, it happens all the time. Psychologists consistently find that once we know whether or not something happens, that knowledge changes our perception of how likely it was to happen: If it happened, it seems more probable; if it didn't, it seems more improbable. Even when people try not to let their awareness of whether the event happened or not influence their judgment, it still does.
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This may sound like a meaningless little quirk. It's not.

As I demonstrate in a certain book I shall not name lest this column be misconstrued as another shameless plug -- it's available at all fine bookstores, incidentally -- this cognitive bias promotes nostalgia for the past and fear of the future.

The defining feature of the future is uncertainty. This could happen. That could happen. Who knows what's going to happen?

Risk perception research shows uncertainty is inherently alarming. So when we stand in the present and try to peer into the black void of the future, we give ourselves the willies.

But the present becomes the past. And when we look back to the past, what do we see? A lot less uncertainty -- thanks to hindsight bias.

In the 1980s, nuclear annihilation seemed a very real possibility; the notion that the Cold War would end when the Soviet Union peacefully crumbled would have seemed like a ridiculous fantasy if anyone had even raised the possibility.

But we know nuclear war didn't happen -- and so we perceive that threat to have been much lower than it seemed at the time. And we know the Soviet Union did crumble peacefully -- and so we feel that outcome was much more likely than anyone did at the time.

"So here we are," I wrote in that unmentionable book, "standing in the present, peering into the frighteningly uncertain future and imagining all the awful things that could possibly happen. And when we look back? It looks so much more settled, so much more predictable. It doesn't look anything like this. Oh yes, these are scary times."

And so, always and forever, grandfathers see golden ages behind them while looking with trepidation on their grandchildren's future.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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