Optimism, Awe, and Gratitude in the Face of the Gathering Storm
We've got it so damn good—can we keep it that way?
Mar. 23 - This was supposed to be yesterday’s almanac but Friday slid out of my control and by the time I had a grip on things it was too late to do much more than pour a scotch and let the world go to hell.
I don’t mean that literally—not entirely. The scotch was poured literally (and liberally), but I didn’t then lean back on the living room sofa and eagerly await the collapse of civilization. I just mean I went to my happy place, my nothing box, and didn’t allow intrusions.
A recent Bill Whittle Right Angle episode took optimism as its theme. Maybe not optimism, but something related: the awe we ought to feel at the world we’ve inherited—the “we” in this case being those of us with at least a couple of decades experience as 29-year-olds.
Somewhere in there he makes the point that almost any American alive today enjoys a more blessed existence than almost any human being born into any civilization in the history of the world this far: that even terminally ill Americans should reflect on the fact that they live in the best of all times and places to be terminally ill.
That goes for most Europeans, too—provided they’re not Ukrainian.
Whittle’s exuberance is palpable and infectious. It’s not quite the same as my own indefatigable optimism, but it’s definitely related. If you’re willing to look away from all the angry words being said by all the angry people out there (including ourselves in our own angry moments), and look instead at the lives being lived all around you right now, and you compare them to those lived by our own grandparents or great-grandparents, it’s almost astonishing how rapidly and dramatically things have improved.
There’s no historical precedent.
At no point in history has life improved so rapidly and substantially from one generation to the next—much less over the course of a single generation.
Whittle, Ott, and Greene reflect on changes that have occurred within their own life spans: as someone in their age range, I can relate to most of their own observations.
If you yourself are a deeply experienced 29-year-old, these changes surely haven’t been lost on you, either.
My maternal grandparents lived in London when I was a child, and when my mother wanted to talk to them she had to schedule a time in advance with the telephone company. The cost was exorbitant and the connection terrible, but they were grateful for what they had. My grandparents’ grandparents couldn’t even have imagined such a thing! A mere three decades later my mother would get cranky whenever the entirely free video on our regular trans-Atlantic Skypes got too pixelated.
I remember the thrill of our family getting its first television with a remote control. I would never again have to force my little sister to change channels for me! My own children don’t even remember a time when they couldn’t watch virtually anything they wanted to on a device not much bigger than that remote.
I have a Danish in-law whose earliest memory is the sight of dead body lying on one of the streets in his Copenhagen neighborhood. It was the corpse of a Nazi collaborator: the bodies of liquidated collaborators were always left in public as a warning to others. That’s a living memory from the generation before mine: have any of us known the like—Ukrainians, Croats, and Serbs aside?
Herself’s paternal grandmother was in and out of sanitariums throughout the 1940s and early 1950s with tuberculosis. She was fortunate enough to have survived, but look at the tuberculosis death rate in the United States:
There are thousands of equally dramatic charts for America and Europe. Bad things plummeting into non-existence, good things soaring exponentially upward. War, starvation, disease, and poverty disappearing. Peace and plenty, health and wealth, spreading like wildfire.
I grew up watching Captain Kirk fly around a cheesy universe of half-assed sets on Star Trek reruns—and just a couple of years ago I got to watch the actor who played him, now ninety years old, actually take a rocket into space.
I watched it on my phone.
(It was Shatner’s birthday yesterday; a link to video of his Blue Origin rocket ride is down in the birthday section.)
Each of my daughters has been rushed to the hospital with serious and aggressive infections. Each of them was given antibiotics and recovered quickly and completely. Not that long ago. . . well, one doesn’t even like to think such things.
How many farmers do you know? Any? Just a couple of hundred years ago, 99 out of 100 Americans worked on farms. Backbreaking work, dawn to dusk, every day of the year. Most westerners alive today work in climate-controlled offices with ergonomic seating. 37½ hours a week here in Denmark, with six weeks paid vacation a year.
We ought to be thrilled to be alive right now.
But what about those who don’t have as much experience being 29?
What about those who haven’t even yet reached 29?
Whittle says he feels genuinely sad for them. Not a pitying kind of sadness, but a sort of regret-by-proxy. A certain ruefulness that so much of their participation in the world is through a little screen.
Meh. They’ll still end up having it better than us, most likely.
There’s a lot of stupidity afoot in the world right now, and some of it’s genuinely dangerous. Past performance is not indicative of future results. We might be on the cusp of a global conflagration that turns everything upside down and radioactive. A supervirus pandemic might be right around the corner. Maybe the doomsayers are right and the climate’s going to collapse around us in a matter of months or years. Maybe we’re about to plunge into an economic collapse that makes 1929 look like a mere blip.
Which of those things could you not have said in 1995, or 1980, or 1970? I’ll tell you: none of them, because all those things were said twenty years ago, and thirty, and fifty. To some extent that’s why we have it so good: because optimism isn’t enough by itself. It’s not enough to say, “Look how well things have been working out these last five, six, seven decades! And surely they’ll only keep getting better!” We have to work to ensure they keep getting better, and that work involves thinking about all the ways they could get worse—after all, we’ll never be able to prevent a calamity we weren’t capable of imagining beforehand.
So the necessary twin of Indefatigable Optimism is Pragmatic Pessimism. That is, things can only keep getting better to the extent we keep worrying about things getting worse. Horrors must be imagined before they can be averted.
So it isn’t purely pessimistic to worry about the wars in Ukraine or Gaza escalating out of control, or China invading Taiwan, or immuno-resistant superviruses sweeping the planet, or overextended economies collapsing under the weight of their own debt, or supervolcanoes or wanton meteors threatening actual extinction.
It isn’t even pessimistic to fret about the possibility of civilizational collapse: after all, it’s happened before. Repeatedly.
We really do live in the best of all worlds so far.
And so will our kids, and our grandkids. All we have to do to guarantee it is not fuck it all up.
And yes, there are a lot of people who seem hell-bent on fucking it all up, but as my grandmother used to say: it was ever thus.
Those were the thoughts that flitted through my head in a matter of moments last night while I nestled into my nothing box and sipped my scotch and luxuriated in the warmth of the fire.
Take them for what they’re worth.
This Day in Show Biz
Two leading lights of twentieth century musical theatre were born on March 22: Stephen Sondheim (1930), best known for his work on Gypsy, West Side Story, Company, and Into the Woods, and Andrew Lloyd Weber (1948), best known for Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, and Phantom of the Opera.
By some mysterious natural process of compensation, March 22 is also the birthday of Marcel Marceau (1923), best known for not making a sound.
Auguste and Louis Lumiere first demonstrated motion pictures in Paris using celluloid film on March 22, 1895. Unless it was March 19, 1895, or December 28, 1894, or cellulite instead of celluloid. And it may have been in Milan, or Warsaw, and it's possible it wasn't Louis and Auguste Lumiere, but Tanya and Sophie Belcher. It depends who you ask. It wasn't much of a movie anyway—just footage of workers leaving the Lumiere Factory at the end of their shift—so the ambiguity surrounding its debut shouldn't be so surprising.
Experience the thrill for yourself:
If you actually took a moment to watch that video, you’re probably not marveling at its historical significance. Instead you’re almost certainly wondering, “what sort of employees wear big flouncy dresses and crazy hats to do factory work?”
I’ll tell you: 19th century French factory workers, that’s who. Because the French had a little something called panache.
March 23
On March 23, 1534, Pope Clement declared that the marriage between Henry VIII of England and Catherine of Aragon was still valid even though they'd been divorced the previous year and Henry had already married Anne Boleyn. This left Henry no choice but to invent his own religion and appoint a more agreeable pope.
It's interesting to reflect how richly improved the spiritual condition of our own age might be if our leaders were still required to invent religions every time they wanted a little sugar on the side—the Clinton Administration alone would have been a theological tsunami.
On March 23, 1919, Benito Mussolini founded his own party in Italy. He had tried all the other parties, had tried really, really hard, but he was an awkward young man, not much of a people person, and had a hard time getting to know people. His Fasci di Combattimento ("Evil Fascist Bastards Party") was extremely popular, however, and even the cool kids came. It got so crowded that the neighbors started complaining, which ended up starting a big fight, and the rest is history.
On March 23, 1985, Billy Joel married supermodel Christie Brinkley in New York. It was unbelievable. It was so exciting. Here was this rich but kind of funny-looking musician marrying this beautiful, wealthy model. No one had ever seen anything like it before. It changed everything. Nothing would ever be the same. It was like “Uptown Girl” had come true. I still can't believe it.
On March 23, 1925, Tennessee banned the teaching of evolution in schools. Teacher John Scopes couldn't think of anywhere else to teach evolution, so he ignored the ban and was later prosecuted in what became known as the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” which resulted in an Oscar for Spencer Tracy. The ban persisted until the governor of Tennessee signed its repeal in 1967. Spencer Tracy died just 22 days later. Coincidence?
March 24
On March 24, 1401, Tamerlane conquered Damascus. Tamerlane (Timur the Lane) was a descendant of Ghenghis Khan and one of the greatest Tater leaders ever, expanding the Mongrel empire from the Pacific to the Meditterranean. Tamerlane is best remembered for having built pyramids out of human skulls, owing to a faulty understanding of architecture which no one ever had the courage to correct.
Birthdays and Holidays to Be Aware of
March 22 is the birthday of Reese Witherspoon (1976), Matthew Modine (1959), Bob Costas (1952), William Shatner (1931), Karl Malden (1913), Chico Marx (1887), and the aforementioned trio of Sondheim, Webber, and Marceau.
It's also Nevruz Day in Albania.
March 23 is the birthday of Keri Russell (1976), Chaka Khan (1953), Roger Bannister (1929), Wernher Von Braun (1912), Akira Kurosawa (1910), and Joan Crawford (1908).
And Pakistan Day in Pakistan.
March 24 is the birthday of Steve McQueen (1930), Norman Fell (1924), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919), Joseph Barbera (1911), Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (1887), and Harry Houdini (1874).
Enjoy the weekend!
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