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Are you a performative pessimist, a Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Stan?
Do you loudly claim that War will soon end us all, despite both violence in general and battle deaths per year are in long-term decline since 1946? Like Thanos in Infinity War,do you believe in a coming global overpopulation-based famine that has been predicted ever since English economist Thomas Malthus thought it up in the 1790s — despite there being fewer famine deaths in the last decade than at any time in recorded history, despite scientists telling us the end of famine is in our grasp? Do you see a coming age of extreme global poverty when the data tells us it is literally declining every second, or imagine terrorism to be a greater cause of death than bee stings when the numbers are trying to tell you otherwise?
If so, rest assured you're not alone; imagining the worst is our natural state of being. We are descended from the more anxious-than-average primates who overreacted and saw danger around every corner — because in the wild, in small tribes, overreacting and seeing danger around any corner is more likely to keep you alive so you can pass your genes on. But like our in-built genetic desire for sugar and fat, this approach doesn't serve us well in the modern world.
For example, we're perpetually likely to overestimate the chance of being killed by animals such as sharks, and to underestimate the world's top killer, heart disease, as this recently viral causes of death GIF makes clear. (And by the way, even cardiovascular deaths have been declining steadily since 1978, another unsung public health victory.)
Causes of Death in ComparisonI'm not trying to claim, like some LEGO movie extra, that everything is awesome. It clearly isn't, and my natural inclination is towards pessimism too. I was the annoying kid who kept talking about the possibility of Soviet nuclear attack any day now — right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I was raising the alarm on Trump as early as January 2016, and I've written extensively about the catastrophic potential of climate change.
But I'm also a historian and a fan of actual data. And the older I get, the more widely I read, the harder it gets to avoid the conclusion that in the long run, almost everything keeps getting better. Check out Steven Pinker's study of our insanely aggressive past, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined(the audiobook of which is one of the few things that got me through Trump's first year in office with sanity intact), Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell on the heartwarming ways humans pull together in the face of all kinds of disasters, and the late great Hans Rosling's Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.
I also recommend this annual list of 99 good news stories you missed, and the picture it paints of a world that is quietly improving in every area. The list should be required reading for everyone on Twitter and Facebook who panics about the lead headlines and hews to the conventional wisdom that "everything is awful."
In fact, the data suggests that right here right now in 2020 is literally the best time we could possibly be alive, with the greatest opportunities available to the greatest number, and the lowest threat of death, Trump and the climate notwithstanding. This is not, of course, uniformly true for every group. For Central American refugees, children in Border Patrol custody, EU citizens in the UK and just about everyone in Syria, this is a particularly horrendous moment in history. But on average, overall, the proposition holds.
If you disagree, tell me when in the past you would want to escape to in a time machine. The 1950s? That decade of H-bombs and McCarthyism and the Korean War and institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia at almost all levels of society? With housewives hooked on speed and more than half the population smoking coffin nails all over the place? C'mon, don't make me play Billy Joel at you.
In the course of reporting a book on Star Wars, I came across a lot of people nostalgic for the day it came out, May 25, 1977. But to modern eyes, the news for that one relatively quiet, relatively peaceful day is an absolute nightmare. Terrorists had taken 160 kids hostage in the Netherlands. The economy was in the toilet and the Dow dipped below 1,000. The President warned that Social Security may run out of money within a decade. The U.S. Army was literally burning its surplus of Agent Orange in the Pacific. There was a deadly cargo plane explosion at Oakland airport, because planes didn't only crash or get hijacked more frequently, they also sometimes just blew up.
Speaking of Agent Orange, it is clear that we are not currently living through the greatest presidency in history; quite the opposite, in fact. But as destructive as Trump has been, a surprisingly popular and vigorous opposition has risen to fight him on every front, his own shrinking party excepted. In multiple polls, roughly half of Americans not only agree with impeaching Trump but also believe the Senate should remove him from office. That won't happen, of course, but at least around half of the people see right through him. If he'd been a smart populist, instead of an impulsive and narcissistic one who commits crimes in plain sight, we'd be in waymore trouble right now.
I can almost hear the chorus of shouts from superstitious readers: Don't say that! It can always get worse!Indeed it can. Trump could win reelection. But he barely squeaked an electoral college win by under 80,000 votes last time, and his approval rating remains solidly, historically dismal. We are on our guard against poll numbers now; we've learned from the overconfidence of 2016, and that in itself is an important victory. Still, creating an aura of inevitability around Trump is one of the worst things we can do in fighting him. He succeeds when he looks like a strongman; his opponents win when they are active and undaunted, energized by hope.
Hope is what we desperately need to win the war on climate change, too. It's in short supply when the horrific Australian fires dominate the headlines, and when we're still waiting for carbon emissions to peak. Luckily, there's plenty of positive news on this front; a thousand tiny victories that add up.
Gas vehicle sales have likely peaked. China decided against winding down its electric vehicle subsidies; its electric bus fleet alone displaces more demand for oil than Tesla. U.S. power generation from coal is set to decline another 13 percent in 2020, while renewable energy rises 15 percent. New carbon sequestering concepts crop up every day, from powders to pebbles to repurposed AC units. Simple changes in agriculture could swallow humanity's entire CO2 output by themselves.
What we don't need is the performative pessimism of people like Jonathan Franzen, who wrote a New Yorkeressay last year that basically encouraged readers to stop bothering to fight climate change because the world was already doomed. Franzen was widely criticized by climate scientists who are trying to scream at us that while it's worse than many people think, it's also not as bad as many people think. As even David Wallace-Wells, author of the pessimistic but fact-based The Uninhabitable Earthputs it: We will always have the ability to make our next decade better or worse than the last one.
"There’s a thing I call naïve cynicism," Rebecca Solnit wrote in her excellent letter to a young climate activist earlier this year, "when people strike a pose of sophistication without actually knowing what they’re talking about. I see it a lot with the ill-informed about climate, when they say it’s all over and we lost. That’s not what the scientists say, and it’s an excuse to give up instead of trying." Solnit continues:
Naïve cynicism is the offspring of amnesia. Amnesia says “the way things are now is inevitable, change is impossible, change for the better is beyond our power.” Memory says, not so fast: ordinary people massed together have changed the world again and again.
Memory also reminds us just how truly awful the past was, and why that change was so desperately necessary that people fought for it. If there's one thing the 21st century needs, it's more memory of the bad old days — and fewer amnesiacs spreading performative pessimism all over social media.
Topics Activism Social Good