Have we ever had it so good?

Students appear jubilant at Cheonggu Elementary School in Seoul, July 15, as this year's summer vacation starts. Yonhap

By Scott Shepherd

In 1957 British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan gave a speech where he famously said that most Britons had "never had it so good."

It's the kind of statement that a politician's enemies will forever attack, which is of course what happened almost straight away. In fact, even now the Labor party and its supporters in Britain still use MacMillan's speech to attack the Conservatives.

In fact, you can imagine the indignation if any leader today dared to make such a brazenly optimistic claim. If Yoon Seok-yeol said that Korea was better off than ever before, the political sections of Korean-language social media would explode with all the usual lines about political elites out of touch with the real world. The same is true the other way round too: if Moon Jae-in had made the claim while in office, it would have been conservatives posting memes of war, poverty, floods and earthquakes. Five minutes on the political parts of Twitter will more than prove this true.

No doubt there are plenty of problems worth getting worked up about anywhere we care to look. We could spend all day just listing the recent or ongoing injustices and disasters on the local, national and international stage: this time last week we were all reeling in shock at the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe. Now the chaos in Sri Lanka, which had been bubbling away for months, has come to the fore of our collective consciousness. That's to say nothing of the war in Ukraine, once such a pressing issue but now rumbling in the background of the news cycle, or of any of Korea's many problems.

Indeed, a simple list of nouns is more than enough to get the cortisol flowing: Afghanistan, COVID-19, culture wars, Ethiopia, guns, inflation, interest rates, monkeypox, pollution and so on ad infinitum.

The world in MacMillan's day had plenty of problems too, as his critics both then and now have willingly pointed out. But I can't help but think that he was right ― not necessarily in the short term: I don't know whether the inflation-adjusted earnings of 1957 Britain were higher or lower than the year before, and I have no idea how well the pound was doing on the currency market compared to five years prior to his speech. What I mean is that a broader historical view makes clear how incredibly rich almost everyone in late-1950s Britain was compared to basically anyone before them in history, and indeed compared to most of the rest of the world at the time.

If it was true in Britain then, how much more so it must be true for us who live in Korea today. Even as we struggle with rising inflation and an apparent resurgence of COVID-19 and all the myriad uncertainties of life, we should acknowledge that the richest czars and potentates of history lived lives of relative poverty compared to us.

I'm not saying that today's ordinary people have more power than the monarchs of old, but in terms of dentistry, comfort, life expectancy, sanitation, human rights, access to transport, communication, music, culture, education, healthcare, food, almost everything ― we win hands down. We have more information in our phones than was held in the greatest of libraries even a century ago. And next time you visit an ancient building, take a look at what the toilets were like. These give a better glimpse of life in the past than the grand plazas or the domes and steeples. This is true all over the world: Hampton Court Palace has an old toilet from King Henry VIII's time which is basically just a room with a hole in the floor.

Today we can get a machine to do in an hour something that took our great-grandparents hours or days of hard labor to complete ― and the machine does it so much better. I can fly across the world in a day, rather than spend months of my life travelling in perilous conditions across oceans or deserts pass bandits and wild animals. And we're so much more connected: within a lifetime intercontinental communication has shifted from a wondrous possibility to something so widely expected that we fume at the slightest hitch in a Zoom call.

We take for granted things that would have flabbergasted our forebears. Proof of this lies all around us. Pretty much everything I look at in this room has been produced to a higher quality at a cheaper price than it would have been a century ago. I'm sitting at home in Incheon and writing this on my sofa and you, wherever in the world you are, can read it without having to leave your bed if you don't want to.

We're far richer and more blessed than our ancestors and indeed than the people of Britain in the 1950s. MacMillan was right then and it's even truer now that most of us have never had it so good.

None of this is to say that when we encounter a problem we should simply shrug and philosophize about how lucky we are. It's clear that there's a stark difference between standard of living and quality of life. Money most certainly isn't everything. And poverty and stark inequality still exists here in Korea and elsewhere. To struggle for improvement is surely an aspect of what it means to be human: that's how we've developed so far in the first place, and I hope that we can continue to strive for the betterment of society.

But it's right to take a moment every so often to acknowledge that even with all the difficulties we face, even with all the conflict and danger of modern life, we really are privileged to be living at this point in history.

Dr. Scott Shepherd is a British-American academic. He has taught in universities in the U.K. and Korea, and is currently an assistant professor of English at Chongshin University in Seoul. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.