Zeebo,
I'm deeply troubled by your last post. You strike at the core of my belief, my intellectual soul, dismissing the the one thing I believe we must cling to above all else: the possibility of progress. There are many blasphemies I am able to abide, more so when the blasphemer wields an intellect as mighty as yours. Here, however, I must draw the line. At this juncture I must cast about for a lifeline, an elixir for the infection of an attitude toward progresslessness. I must thrash about in the hopes of grappling some Virgil, a guide to lead us from the inferno while holding on to the hope that that an inner Beatrice emerges and enables progress up the mount. Forgive my brusqueness in the sections that follow, dear friend, but I find that this is a problem I am compelled to solve.
Let us start with your own words, words that outline our apparent, collective inability to drive forward, to progress beyond the problem of the day with the power of a unified front:
If this sounds like my usual soapbox, that's because it is. That's because even if we, as a species, could focus our collective energy on a single problem that would greatly improve humanity as whole we wouldn't be able to do it. Someone would want to make a documentary. Someone would get caught sexting a chief scientist for a raise. There'd be a news story. Upon closer inspection, there would undoubtedly be human trafficking and so on and so forth.
Humans generally suck. With that keen observation, you find in mine a sympathetic mind. Humans suck because, as the saying goes, to err is human. However, we as humans do both way less sucking and way less erring, taken on the whole, than we ever have before. My mind's ear hears you cry out, objections and accusations flying. How can that be true? In our current age of turmoil and toil, an age of conflict and sickness and radical politics and deep-seated unhappiness?
It's true for a very simple reason: none of those things except the last are true. The only thing objectively worse about our current age, measured by the things we've typically always measured in one way or another, is our level of happiness. And it really isn't worse, we're just about as unhappy as we've always been. Happiness is not a reliable metric for us. Humans are discontent by nature. That has always been the case, and probably always will, simply because happiness is a relative state of affairs. Humans are happy when the past was significantly worse than the present, or when the hope of a better future looks clearly achievable. For objective 'better'-ness, we need to observe something else than our state of intrinsic contentedness, writ-large and broadcast wide by the sorts of entities that have an eternal, vested interest in obsessing over unhappiness (read: the news). When asked to answer questions about the relative wealth, health, and dangerousness of the current age to an arbitrary day of yore, people overwhelmingly get things wrong. In fact, your average chimpanzee shows more prescience for the actual state of human affairs over time than an actual human, specimens screened for baseline literacy to boot. The fact of the matter is, we always feel like things are worse now than they were before.
Humans will never be happy, and yet we keep getting better. Alas, this is not original insight. Hans and Ola Rosling, in their 2018 bestseller Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, give an overview of the field of human doomer-ism, breaking down our inability to reason clearly about the state of our species into a number of rules of thumb for the lay nihilist. Concepts like humans' 'Destiny Instinct' -- our predilection to shout 'things never change!'' into our shiny cellular phones from rooftop terraces in gleaming urban-scapes, distinctly lacking small things like smallpox -- and the 'Size/Scary Instinct' -- our constant inability to judge just how bad things are, and on what scale -- are laid out by the father-son trio (An aside: book was published posthumously, the father having died of pancreatic cancer. Perhaps misery begets clearer insight into our actual state of affairs). They secure these observations to a pylon of objective, measurable truth: the world is constantly getting wealthier, the floor of poverty rising ever upward, leading to quality of life for the average human that only gets better.
You highlight Americans as perhaps a more rotted root of the underlying problem, with our love for short-form content and ever-insatiable appetite for entertainment. This, you say, underlies our pretension, our constant two-facedness about the problem of problem-solving. You write:
We are a society that loves to pretend to solve problems. The way we do that best, as Americans, is through entertainment. We love to watch and listen. Content is the solution. We don't have to work out when we can watch a video on nutrition and feel good about the fact that we now know seed oils are bad. We don't care about Nobel prizes. We care about Grammies and Oscars. And hardly even that anymore, because we're too absorbed in our own entertainment microcosms—the ones that have been algorithmically constructed and delicately tailored to satisfy our underlying fears (e.g. death).
I found myself nodding along at this section, sinking into the stance of meaninglessness, a void above which we are all suspended, but also one of which we all possess the tools to escape. While your words outline something specific, naming 'entertainment' as the scourge of decline, the clear beacon that foretells our uniquely freedom-flavored descent, it simply isn't so.
The fact is, it's not just an American intuition. In “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” Steven Pinker looks at recent studies and finds that majorities in fourteen countries—Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, the U.A.E., and the United States—believe that the world is getting worse rather than better. (China is the only large country in which a majority expresses optimism, a fact you might derive distinct amusement from). This miserable company actually underpins the hopeful argument that Pinker and the Rosling's put forth, because while a single nation may shout that its unique discontent is true even in the face of the human science that says otherwise, a chorus of western nations only sings in agreement with what Hans and Ola meticulously outlined in their research.
“This bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong,” Pinker writes—and not just a little wrong but “wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong.” Not only is it wrong, it's also dangerously wrong. While things have steadily gotten richer, healthier, safer (the Factfulness measures) over the ages, things have gotten dramatically better over the eras of technological breakthrough that have marked the centuries since the Enlightenment. Pre-enlightenment man was, in many ways, mired in a bog of his own making, struggling against self-made pessimism before finally emerging beyond.
This is because the idea that we have any control at all over the fate of humanity is brand-new, in anthropic terms. Apocalypse has forever been nigh. The 'pinnacle' of humanity has forever been couched at some nearly forgotten point in the far flung past, since at least the time of Plato but almost certainly before then. Our one major advancement has been to see our progress as possible within the bounds of our own agency. Our belief in our own vast potential is new. Where every recorded generation as far back as we can see thought we lived near the terminus of humanity’s mundane saga, many philosophers now believe we might be living at its daybreak. Put another way, things have gotten better because recently (in anthropic terms), we decided as a species that we can make them better. Collectively unshackled of the promise of Armageddon, of eternal salvation always around the bend, we arguably created paradise beyond the wildest dreams of our fore-bearers.
Of course, we're not happy about it. That's part of the delicious irony. Due to this quirk in our monkey biology, we run the risk of messing everything up. Because our current state of affairs, our steady climb up the mount, isn't a given. The mental trick we unlocked in the 1700s works just as well the other way. The pure mirror of a belief in god-given salvation, of pending doom, of eternalism in whatever incarnation, is simple nihilism. Both eternalism and nihilism presuppose that we cannot change things. And that belief becomes self-fulfilling prophecy once critical-mass is reached.
That, dear Zeebo, is what we cannot let happen. To assume a temporary stance of nihilism is human. To fall prey to the serpent's whisper of pre-determinism is a fate all but guaranteed for some number of us. To reach the tipping point doesn't spell our doom. After all, we made it through the mire once before. A return to an un-Enlightened time would almost certainly be a temporary detour. It would, however, be an unfortunate pit-stop considering how far we've come.
I feel I've barely scratched the surface of this thought, yet here I feel it best to leave for the moment. I hope to explore it further in the due course of our corespondance.
Progressively yours,
Austin