Paul Thomas: Fear the price of affluence

Say what you like about the Cold War but at least we knew where we stood.

The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) placed the USA and the Soviet Union in a permanent Mexican stand-off.

As well as the thousands of nuclear missiles poised in their silos, both sides always had mobile launchers in the field, bombers in the sky, ships at sea and submarines beneath it - a global deployment of weapons platforms in perpetual motion, each with a set of locked in target co-ordinates.

All was in readiness for Armageddon: one unforeseen crisis, one abrupt escalation of tension, one misjudgement, one push of a button, and all human life could be extinguished.

It was clear-cut. Reasonable people could agree that mankind was in grave danger. Depending on which news source you turn to, the swine flu outbreak is either a dire threat to humanity or just another in the long line of bogus scare stories concocted in order to pummel us into a state of permanent high anxiety.

One day the World Health Organisation is pushing the threat level into the panic zone, the next the sceptics are trotting out the mocking comparisons: in a given year more people are crushed to death by toppling grandfather clocks or accidentally suffocated by their St Bernards than have thus far succumbed to swine flu.

Even while people are still dying of it, the focus is shifting from the cause of the outbreak to the cause of the over-reaction to the outbreak.

In the Daily Telegraph an Anglican priest put it down to the lingering influence of our Christian upbringing.

He reckons those biblical stories of plague and pestilence and a wrathful God striking down sinners are still lodged in our sub-conscious.

No matter how far we've strayed from the flock, part of us still believes in Judgement Day and is always on the look-out for portents. I'm not so sure.

There are parts of the world where they still take their religion straight and regard the bible as an accurate historical record, but I suspect those nations were far less exercised about swine flu than the supposedly rationalist developed world.

After all, they have more pressing problems such as poverty and malnutrition, not to mention diseases like malaria which are actual - as opposed to potential - mass killers.

It was in the first world, where belief in God's punitive involvement in day-to-day affairs is considerably less widespread than the conviction that 9/11 was an inside job or that Elvis is just waiting for the death of hip-hop to re-launch his career, that the reaction to swine flu bordered on hysteria.

An obvious reason for this is our exposure to the 24-hour news machine whose default setting is overkill. Outfits like CNN are geared to covering Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, and thus have an in-built tendency to make big stories bigger.

They have the resources and they have the time to fill and you can only run so much footage of squalid pig farms and Mexicans in surgical masks.

So they assemble panels of talking heads and encourage them to speculate, and if they go off the deep end, well, it's just one person's opinion.

But these days one person's opinion counts for a lot news-wise, especially if the person has "Doctor" or "Professor", in front of their name. Whether it's because the scientific community has discovered there's no point in hedging or qualifying their pronouncements because the media will sensationalise them anyway, or that they quietly enjoy watching the public react like lemmings whenever they find something else that's bad for us, the white coat brigade knows how to score a headline.

A personal favourite was the claim by a professor at a London hospital that if we didn't eat more salmon, evolution would go into reverse.

When I was a child it was said that you should never swallow chewing gum because it takes seven years to pass through the digestive system.

Neither of these propositions reacts well to common sense.

Perhaps post-war generations jump at shadows because we've had it so good for so long and suspect that the law of averages has a really nasty quid quo pro in store for us.

This pessimism has been exploited by the Jeremiahs of the progressive movement who blame global warming, swine flu and much else on our abuse of the planet in pursuit of ever-higher living standards.

The more we have, the more we have to lose; the more we know, the more aware we are of what can posiibly go wrong. The price we pay for our affluence and knowledge is permanent insecurity.