An even deeper problem is the assumption that has become unchallengeable conventional wisdom in the mainstream development world: that everyone with good intentions has already reached agreement on the broad outlines of what decent societies and a decent international order should look like. There was a tremendous backlash in the 1990s to Fukuyama's The End of History, when it was rightfully dismissed as post-Cold War triumphalist nonsense. But the reality is that all optimistic thinking on human rights and the end of poverty (not to mention the Sachs/Reese-like overreach of predicting perpetual peace in some foreseeable future) rests on the conviction that the universalization of Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government. If you believe that, then it makes sense to treat poverty reduction not as a moral or political problem, but as an essentially technical exercise, except perhaps in some small number of corrupt spoiler states that sooner or later are bound to see the light. (Well, if not from above, then from somewhere.)
But what if ideology is not dead and pessimism is as rational a stance as optimism? What if Gates's "creative capitalism" is not enough to mitigate climate change, let alone bridge the growing gap between the increasingly gated and demographically challenged West and the poor world, so young and hungry? Do we even know how to think about this, let alone what to do about it?
Clearly Gates, Sachs, and the rest of the "end of poverty" brigade think they have the answers. But what if they don't? It is anything but clear that liberalism will prevail in the 21st century, as the recent decline of democratic governance in many parts of the world should make clear. Religion may be disappearing like war from the consciousness of Western Europeans and North Americans, but, also like war, it is staging a comeback in great swaths of the poor world. And the obituaries written for communism and dictatorship over the past 25 years haven't been quite as prescient as they seemed at the time of the Soviet empire's collapse. The rise of an authoritarian, illiberal capitalism may prove to be just as successful as the liberal variant of the system. As that great sage Yogi Berra famously said, "Prediction is very hard, especially about the future."
If anything, the impatient optimists and techno-utopians may be predicting an assured victory precisely at the moment when the global ideological consensus on both politics and economics is beginning to fray. Perhaps human beings always will oscillate between giddiness and despair. But when a belief that some Internet-based deus ex machina will come along to fix the most intractable of humanity's problems becomes the consensus view, and that the most profound moral and political challenges that confront humanity in the 21st century are in fact not moral or political at all, but rather largely technical, then there is ample cause for alarm.
The problem is not optimism per se. Just as the Marxist writer August Bebel called anti-Semitism "the socialism of fools," today's headlong rush to believe in technology, utopian or otherwise, seems like nothing so much as the optimism of fools.
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