Anyone in our society whose eyesight and hearing are not totally impaired is likely to believe that we are on a collision course with Doomsday. Certainly the energy shortage has produced no scarcity in the rhetoric of crisis. Considering the amount of time and space devoted to predictions of impending disaster, it would appear that the media have sought to validate a variation on Gresham’s law: bad news drives out good.
The compulsion of the media to turn every scrap of bad news into a full-blown crisis distorts our perspective. The media neglect to remind us that troubles may be news, but they are by no means new. This negative emphasis ignores the decisive role of human ingenuity in a free society. One of our distinguished historians, Barbara Tuchman, recently put it this way: “The doomsayers work by extrapolation; they take a trend and extend it, forgetting that the doom factor, sooner or later, generates a coping mechanism. . . . You cannot extrapolate any series in which the human element intrudes; history, that is the human narrative, never follows, and will always fool, the scientific curve.” How right is her insight; alarmists’ curves frequently are based upon downward trends. As early as the sixth chapter of Genesis some believed the world was headed downhill. The doomsayers were already looking back upon better times: “There were giants in the earth in those days.”
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