Yet I fear that, in my feverish state, I may be hallucinating. Because at the same time as I am lying back on the cushion of the twenty-first century, the message I am being bombarded with by my multimedia communications system is that modern life is a disaster. Modern farms are 'like Auschwitz', modern food is 'toxic', modern medicine is 'unsafe', etc. This is a remarkable turnaround. There is obviously no substance to most of these stories about the horrors of modern life.
People now live longer, healthier and wealthier lives than ever before.
Many of those now classified as poor in developed societies such as the UK have access to goods and services beyond the imagination of the super-rich a century ago. Not least among the improvements we have experienced is in the food that we eat, now cheaper, safer and better than it has ever been. Of course, we all know that plenty of problems remain. But that should not blind us to the huge advances that have been made so far - or to the potential for human ingenuity to overcome those problems and take us further in the future, as it has done so often before. The lesson of history is that there are no solutions to be found in the past.