Things can only get better. That's what things (almost) always do
Let's start the new year with some cold, hard facts about the world we travel in. Warning: pessimistic readers may want to look away now
Comares, Spain: sunlight breaking through or clouds rolling in? You decide
In November, I went back to Comares, a Spanish mountaintop village where Annie and I have a house. November is usually a month we’d avoid: it’s when the rains reliably come, the storms barrel up the Pillars of Hercules and in a village over 700m up, you can spend your whole trip enveloped in a damp, cold, drizzly cloud.
Not this time: not a cloud in the sky. And the village, so often deserted and forlorn in winter, was packed. They’d put extra tables outside the bar in the main square. The on-off hotel, El Molino de Los Abuelos was not only open, they’d added an outdoor barbecue. The new owner, from Seville, seemed to be making a go of the place. (It has one of the most stunning terraces anywhere in southern Europe. It deserves to thrive).
As I drove cautiously up the dizzying road that skirts the village, the familiar and epic view of the campo filled the windscreen, But something had changed. The houses on the ridge, which have been half-built breezeblock structures for as long as I’ve been coming here, were all finished: whitewashed, flowers and children’s bikes outside. Near our house, they’d created an extension to the already spectacular and well-maintained walking track.
I stood on the site of the Moorish fort, I looked over the village and thought: looks like they’ve finally finished it. Shame it took 1,400 years.
New paths: This used to be a derelict house and rubbish dump
Down on the coast, a 40 minute drive away, there was hardly a parking spot at the shopping centre, El Ingenio. The shops have been upgraded, the building spruced up. Inside people were spending money, and lots of it.
So, why, after all my travelling experiences in 2023, do I choose this one?
Comares is a beautiful place. But it has, like isolated rural villages around the world, struggled with first, terrible poverty followed by depopulation – a flight of young people and families. A long-longed-for boom in rural tourism here in the mountains did not fill the gap. The property market that brought people like us up here in the 90s and Noughties, was already fizzling out before the property and financial crash of 2008. That crash hit Spain, and highly-geared Spaniards used to getting unrealistic prices for their houses, especially hard. Then COVID. Now there’s drought. Sunny November days are great for all those folk sunning themselves in the plaza. For the farmers, not so good.
And yet, here you have an agricultural village facing a seemingly systemic decline which has faced two devastating social and economic blows. And it’s never looked so splendid and prosperous.
Let’s qualify that: the cost of living is as acute here as anywhere. Spanish inflation rate is among the most stubbornly high in Europe. But I don’t think anyone who has been coming here for as long as I have could possibly mistake the evidence. The village looks better; it has a more diverse base of businesses and people; the tourists appear to be coming here at last. Everything is better.
And that’s why I wanted to start the first blog of the year with those three words.
2024: groan if you want to… but read this first
Do me a favour. Put down whatever you are reading and, if you haven’t already, get a copy of Factfulness by Hans Rosling.
Start this new year, and maybe every one, with the book. Whenever you are miserable and despairing about the state of the world, go back to it.
Rosling (1948-2017) was a Swedish statistician and expert on global health. With his son and daughter-in-law, he set about looking at all the facts and trends about the way we live. His data covers not only health, but income inequality, child mortality, population growth, education, violence, crime and conflict and dozens of other topics.
And his book, Factfulness, is just about the happiest and most cheering thing you’ll ever read.
I won’t go through the stats and charts here. But you’re hardly a chapter in before you get the gist: everything everywhere is getting better and better and has been doing so for many years.
Not quite everywhere, you’ll say. Not in Gaza, not in Sudan, not in Ukraine, not in the areas recently hit by earthquakes in China and Japan.
Rosling does not, ever, seek to downplay the atrocious things, many of them manmade, which happen in the world. But he asks us to see them, if we can, in the context of a much more violent, life threatening and destructive past – and always think twice when we start a sentence with the words, ‘things were better when…’
He asks us not to fall prey to negativity every time we switch on the news or hear a politician talk about how broken and screwed up the country is.
And this is the hardest thing he asks of us. If you can, he says, keep two ideas in your head at the same time. They are. First: things are bad. Second: things are better.
Take that Japanese earthquake. It was bad: 7.6 magnitude. How many lives where lost? 161. Bad and awful, heartbreaking for those affected, including the 97,000 people who had to evacuate their homes.
But that’s a fraction of what the figures would have been in decades past. Indeed, exactly 100 years ago, an earthquake hit the Tokyo area. It was of a similar magnitude, and at least 105,000 lives were lost.
Japan spends money on mitigating the risks and has learned the lessons. Perhaps China and Turkey will too, if they can get past the endemic corruption and dishonesty that plagues their building sectors (I am not singling them out in this regard). But in the evidence of Rosling’s indisputable and vast evidence, these events can and must become less devastating as nations move up the income scale. And most of them are, inexorably.
There’s a website set up to continue Rosling’s work. Here’s a relevant question: How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the past hundred years? a) More than doubled? b) Remained about the same? c) Decreased to less than half?
Maybe you thought that, as there are five billion more people now, it has to be a), however many more cargo planes, diggers and relief agencies we have to deal with natural disasters.
But c) is correct. Well done if you chose that answer. Perhaps the context of this article influenced you.
Still, congratulations. You are one of only 16% who got it right. And as Rosling continuously pointed out – it’s in fact the only thing that made him gloomy – the people who get it wrong include policymakers, aid experts, economists, academics and the like. That’s how entrenched our negative view of the world we live in is.
There was an election in Bangladesh last week: a flawed one, where the opposition was sidelined and a leader already intolerant of protest and opposition consolidated her position. Not good. But take a look at this country, famously described as a ‘basket case’ by Henry Kissinger.
In our mental picture of Bangladesh, these words are prominent: ‘floods’, ‘disasters’ and ‘overpopulation’.
Bangladesh is now a Level 2 country (Level 1 is the poorest, Level 4 the richest). In 1971, when George Harrison held his fundraising concert for Bangladesh, the birthrate was 6.9 children. Today, it is 1.9. That is a sure sign that a country is moving up the income scale. Those children, girls included, will have an education. Educated girls means smaller families, much reduced infant mortality and upwards social mobility. It’s already happening.
When I worked on the Transform project a couple of years ago, I saw how local entrepreneurs, phone by phone, district by district, family by family, are changing attitudes and outcomes. It doesn’t get much reported. We in the rich, Level 4 countries, cling to a binary view of us and them, developed and developing. It was ever thus.
Yet we don’t have to be experts in genealogy or watch Who do you think you are? to realise that in our own fairly recent family history, our relatives had multiple children, a significant percentage of whom died, lacked basic sanitation and often died young of disease and overwork. Then things got better.
What’s all this to do with travel?
As people rise up the income scale, their use of transport increases. That contributes to global warming. That’s too big a subject to discuss now, so we’ll look at climate change within the ‘everything is getting better’ framework another time: it’s the biggest ‘but’ of all, and there’s stiff competition for that honour in 2024. I am not Panglossian nor Polyanna-ish about the prospects for the year.
But let’s look again at the longer view and agree that with more transport comes more economic opportunities – and more chances to see how other people live.
Never in human history have more people had a better opportunity to do that. When I was growing up, most of the world was effectively barred to me – it was hard to get into Communist countries and impossible to get out. There was war and genocide in south east Asia and West Africa, coups in South America, war and starvation in Biafra and, yes, Bangladesh. Today, you have to do a bit of thinking to name the individual places it’s not safe or wise to travel to. Sudan. Kashmir. North Korea. Syria. Mali. The Russia-Ukraine war zone.
The author on a football tour to Communist Poland. It took weeks of form-filling to get in. There was no wine, little beer and no fresh vegetables
As for this century’s travails, after September 2001, the future was framed as an existential struggle between the West and Islam. How many of us would say that now?
Because it’s behind a paywall, I’m going to pull out a couple of quotes from a recent Economist article entitled A religious revolution is under way in the Middle East:
Religious practice has changed from a political mobilisation for communal salvation, as espoused by Islamists, to a more personal quest for spirituality. The upshot is that for many Muslims Islam has become increasingly depoliticised...
In 2021 an online poll by Gamaan, a Dutch research group, claimed that about half of its 50,000 Iranian respondents said they had lost or changed their religion…Iran is “the first post-Islamic society”, believes Shahriyar Ahy, a pundit from the country…
Institutions formerly in lockstep with Islam, such as the Saudi royal family, have loosened up. The kingdom’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Muhammad bin Salman (MBS), ditched his family’s 250-year alliance with followers of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th-century zealot.
I wonder how many of those sentences surprised as many readers as the Factfulness stats?
Travel helps. I’ve been to Tehran and seen how the ruling theocracy is despised. I’ve been in Saudi Arabia and seen a social revolution – especially for women – that’s as profound as any the world has seen in 50 years. I’ve questioned Arabs about their attitude to, say, alcohol and dress and every time you hear that, yes, it’s a personal decision. (And until very recently, it really wasn’t).
There is a big ‘if’, of course, which you will already have spotted, as the Economist article does. It’s called Gaza and the prospect of a wider conflict between Israel and its allies and the neighbouring countries.
The would-be theocrats of Hamas, seeing the ever-closer ties between Israel and formerly hardline Arab states, felt they had to strike while they could. They wanted to return us to 2001 and an existential fight between the West and the Islam.
I don’t believe they will succeed.
Tahrir Square, Cairo, 2013 during protests against Muslim Brotherhood rule
Not everyone believes in the same God, or any God at all. We don’t all want to live in the same kind of society. The states that want to give their people material progress and freedom of conscience are simultaneously embracing Big Brother with a deeply scary new generation of surveillance tools trialled in disobedient Chinese provinces.
More freedom; more threats to our liberty. We have to keep two ideas in our heads at the same time.
But for those of us with votes in 2024, consider this. It’s no longer a war between Right and Left. It’s between pessimism and optimism, between one-party rule and cross-border cooperation, between fear and openness.
I think you can guess which side I’m on. But don’t take my word for it. Look at the facts.
Songs that take you places
By Sampha Sisay
Sampha, Morden’s answer to Stevie Wonder, produced this, my musical highlight and discovery of 2023. Sampha won the Mercury prize for his debut album in 2017. He’s audibly been brooding a long time on this follow up. The lyrics allude to all kinds of personal and societal traumas; but ultimately, and melodically, he seems to have arrived at a place of calm, rising above the fray, as in this track inspired by Richard Bach’s book about flight and ambition. Alex Petridis’s review in the Guardian is headlined How to make an existential crisis sound sublime, and that seems a pretty good summary to me, and a decent soundtrack for 2024.
The full Marklands playlist, with 49 songs which have inspired and been inspired by my travels, is here.