It’s easy to feel defeated when thinking in the short term. As if crippling debt and the usual human irritants wasn’t bad enough, there’s the mental effort spent puzzling out the course of human civilization. And the evening news certainly doesn’t help, seeing how network anchors have engineered themselves to use fear to keep us glued to the television. Even when I stick to more sober reporting about issues, there’s little cheerfulness involved in the pursuit.
With these perfectly valid reasons to be pessimistic and cynical, it’s strange that there’s optimism often bobbing to the surface of my thoughts. It’s hard to find and difficult to see, but it is there. Feeding such a conceit requires a bit of digging, but I’d like to share a few items that have recently inspired me.
The Strange Case for Optimism
Robert Wright made an interesting argument at a previous TED about how the increased – and often selfish – interactions among peoples have helped to mature our social nature. With an eye toward the timeframe of centuries, we fail to appreciate this improvement because we live in the slow-motion of the now.
2,500 years ago, members of one Greek city state considered members of another Greek city state subhuman and treated them that way. And then this moral revolution arrived, and they decided that actually, no, Greeks are human beings. It’s just the Persians who aren’t fully human and don’t deserve to be treated very nicely.
But this was progress – you know, give them credit. And now today, we’ve seen more progress. I think – I hope – most people here would say that all people everywhere are human beings, deserve to be treated decently, unless they do something horrendous, regardless of race or religion. And you have to read your ancient history to realize what a revolution that has been.
Faster than I Might Suppose
An inspiring Radiolab episode is just a click away (the item beneath this paragraph). It begins with the observation that we’re more pessimistic than we were just twenty years ago. Following that are a few stories that look at the kinds of change that can happen in the short term.
That we are more pessimistic is hardly a news flash, but it’s buttressed further by the generational perspective examined by Neil Howe and the late William Strauss. They argue that modern social change might be subject to some kind of cyclical schedule that is somewhat predictable. While there are many questions raised by the theory, it offers a testable and fresh perspective with which to look at the changes in our national character. Their approach, whether or not it’s largely accurate, has served to take some of the steam out of the anxiety that I feel at this time in history.
The Enduring Problems
We die awfully young and see things with very limited perspective. We are consumed with the local and the trivial. Our institutions always outlive us. We embrace emotionally nourishing beliefs with care and also clumsy desperation. We are creatures evolved to live in a world that is no longer the norm and desperately wish for a way of knowing more about the cosmos. Using tools that seem so painfully limited, we are afraid. It’s no wonder that thoughtful minds often have difficulty finding happiness.
But in the long view, we’ve done so much and we may yet do more. This is why searching for sources of intellectual and moral nourishment is so important to stay legitimately positive. A paragraph at the end of Stuart Brand’s book The Clock of the Long Now is apropos.
The learning theorist Seymour Papert tells of a group of friends eating lobster at a Boston fish house. The question came up, “Can anyone eat lobster without making a mess?” Papert reports, “A brain surgeon at the table did it. It took him two hours – completely eaten lobster with a perfect absence of mess. He took the time appropriate to the job, which he knew about. It wasn’t his skill. It was his patience.”
Two hours was the difference between impossible and easy. For what tasks would two hundred years make that kind of difference?
