Michael Hanlon claims that the “true age of innovation – I’ll call it the Golden Quarter – ran from approximately 1945 to 1971,” during which time just about everything that “defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown,” from the pill to computers to civil rights. One reason he believes we’ve stagnated? Our increasing risk aversion:
Apollo almost certainly couldn’t happen today. That’s not because people aren’t interested in going to the Moon any more, but because the risk – calculated at a couple-of-per-cent chance of astronauts dying – would be unacceptable. Boeing took a huge risk when it developed the 747, an extraordinary 1960s machine that went from drawing board to flight in under five years. Its modern equivalent, the Airbus A380 (only slightly larger and slightly slower), first flew in 2005 – 15 years after the project go-ahead. Scientists and technologists were generally celebrated 50 years ago, when people remembered what the world was like before penicillin, vaccination, modern dentistry, affordable cars and TV. Now, we are distrustful and suspicious – we have forgotten just how dreadful the world was pre-Golden Quarter.
Risk played its part, too, in the massive postwar shift in social attitudes. People, often the young, were prepared to take huge, physical risks to right the wrongs of the pre-war world. The early civil rights and anti-war protestors faced tear gas or worse. In the 1960s, feminists faced social ridicule, media approbation and violent hostility. Now, mirroring the incremental changes seen in technology, social progress all too often finds itself down the blind alleyways of political correctness. Student bodies used to be hotbeds of dissent, even revolution; today’s hyper-conformist youth is more interested in the policing of language and stifling debate when it counters the prevailing wisdom. Forty years ago a burgeoning media allowed dissent to flower. Today’s very different social media seems, despite democratic appearances, to be enforcing a climate of timidity and encouraging groupthink.