The flight test

Are you a progressive optimist or a green fearmonger? Your attitude to aviation provides a clue.
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In 1929, when flying was still very much in its infancy, the pioneering aviator and author Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote: "Flying was a very tangible freedom. It was beauty, adventure, discovery - the epitome of breaking new worlds."

Fast-forward 70 years to 1999, when one British newspaper columnist wrote the following: "Flying across the Atlantic is now as unacceptable as child abuse."

He went on to claim that because planes emit CO2, which harms the environment, they were contributing to a "killing field" that would make "genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering". Blimey.

What went wrong between 1929 and 1999? Why have we gone from seeing manmade flight as liberating, something that allows us to go on adventures of discovery, to viewing it as tantamount to abuse, a selfish, uncaring act that we should apparently be ashamed of?

Such is today's cultural pessimism about flying that even Christians - those arch-pessimists, who have long viewed humanity with a combination of disgust and disdain - are getting in on the act. The Bishop of London says flying is a "symptom of sin", and the religious writer Theo Hobson urges the Bishop to go a step further and give it up.

There is much more to the rise of today's anti-flying sentiment than carbon emissions and pollution. At root, the hand-wringing over aviation reflects how we view ourselves and our role in the world. It seems to me that our fear and angst about modernity and the future are increasingly being projected on to the flying debate. Today's anti-flying arguments are a microcosm of some of the most backward trends of our time, capturing the localised, killjoy, narrow-minded, miserablist and misanthropic spirit that seems to dominate today.

Once, flying was seen as pleasurable. In the words of one writer in the early 20th century, being among the clouds could be "very pure and fine, bracing and delicious". Today, by contrast, we fret about air rage when we are in the skies, the possibly violent threat posed by those who have had a vodka too many. Or we worry that we will get DVT and end up sick, disabled or dead as a result of long-haul flying.

The debate encapsulates today's culture of fear, where we tend to view ourselves as weak and vulnerable and everyone else as a potential hazard.

Travel used to be seen as something that made us who we are. It contributed to our worldliness, to our personal humanity. Individuals were described as being "well travelled", and therefore intelligent, cultured and refined.

Today, people tend to rush home from their hols and log on to one of those websites that allows them to pay for the planting of trees in order to make up for all the CO2 they used. We apologise for our travel rather than celebrate it. We are ashamed of it. The anti-flying sentiment captures today's increasingly common view of humans as polluters, a plague on the planet rather than master of our surroundings.

Once, flying was seen as a great advancement on past generations, even as a tribute to those past generations who had had to slog it out by foot or by donkey over great distances. Wilbur Wright, one of the great developers of manmade flight, said: "The desire to fly is an idea handed down to use by our ancestors, who in their gruelling travels in prehistoric times looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space."

Today, by contrast, we seem to see man-made flight only as a potentially mortal threat to future generations, who, we are told, will perish in floods and hurricanes if we do not get over our "addiction" to flying. One commentator argues that: "The growth in flying will propel us into a future of melting ice caps, spreading deserts, rising sea levels and collapsing ecosystems."

Here, we can see today's profound doubt and uncertainty about human achievement and ingenuity projected on to the flying debate. Unlike Wright and others, we do not see flight as a tribute to ancestors, who struggled, but rather as a threat to our unborn great-grandchildren. We look suspiciously upon the achievements of the past and fret constantly about what will happen in the future.

Previously, flight was seen as a great way to speed mankind around the globe, to break down barriers between nations and continents. Today it is often discussed as a vehicle for disease. The American leftwing author Mike Davis recently said flight would contribute to the deaths of millions of people from bird flu: "Globalisation and global air travel have made the spread of a pandemic, once started, almost instantaneous."

Here, see how flight and movement are viewed as a danger rather than an opportunity? This captures a degraded sentiment among some of today's eco-extremists, who view mankind itself as a disease, a contamination on the earth that should, perhaps, be quarantined within its own local areas.

In many ways, flight has become one of the cutting-edge issues of our time. I would go so far as to argue that where you stand on the issue of manmade flight reveals much about your position on politics, progress and the future of humanity more broadly.

Those opposed to aviation tend to be conservative, anti-mobility, obsessed with the local, against progress and given to propagating the politics of fear; they want to restrain people from flying around the world and, more fundamentally, to restrain society from further development and industrialisation. Perhaps it will be left to those of us who are progressive and future-oriented, who believe that humans are mostly a force for good capable of solving the problems thrown up by development, to defend aviation as one of the great gains of humanity over the past 100 years.

So, are you with the men of the cloth and the green fearmongers for whom manmade flight has come to symbolise everything that is foul and rotten about humanity? Or are you willing to sin against this new orthodoxy and demand more flight, more movement, more development and a further breaking down of barriers between the peoples of the world?

If so, step forth, ye heretics. Let us sin.

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