Does the trend-line of recent human history advance or decline?
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” (F. Scott Fitzgerald).
I guess that leaves me out.
Looking around at the contemporary landscape of ideas, I find plenty that mutually contradict each other and it just makes me dizzy. Turning one way lies damnation; turning the other way, salvation. On the one side:
Humankind rushes blindly toward the edge of environmental and social catastrophe.
On the other side:
We enter a marvelous age of technological breakthroughs that will solve all our problems and open the way for a glorious future for humankind.
On the positive side, offering light and hope, writers like Steven Pinker of Harvard whose 2012 book, The Better Angels of our Nature, followed this year by Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, show that violence, prejudice, mutual hostility, and all kinds of mistreatment of humans by humans have steadily declined with the rise of the state, and even more since the Enlightenment. “We”—people in general through time—have been making ourselves better.
On the other side, mounting evidence of ecological breakdown, potentially devastating climate change, and other looming environmental problems, as well as serious social ills like alienation, rising inequality, bureaucratic indifference and the disintegration of social bonds (Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone), paint opposing, gloomy, scarier pictures. The overlay to these gloomy pictures is our apparent inability to really confront, any less resolve, these threats.
Both sides seem true. Turning around and around, looking one way and then the other, what can you be except dizzy and confused? But wait! Here comes Aristotle to the rescue:
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Or, as I’ve seen the same idea differently expressed on a bumper-sticker: “Don’t believe everything you think.”
So…. Just don’t believe either side. Hold both thoughts in mind, and hold the outcomes they point to open as real possibilities, without necessarily (at this time) making one true and the other false. (Thanks again, Aristotle!)
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The upshot is that we are truly at a crossroads. Or, we would be if we weren’t already going both ways at once. Maybe it’s more that humankind now is like an amoeba thrusting out two pseudopods in opposite directions. But since it is really one organism, it will have to pull its whole self one way or the other in the end.
A graph of our current situation paints a big “X”, with a rising line of increasing peace and well-being trending up, and another line representing decline, collapse and misery trending down. That “X” is the unresolved variable in the human equation in our time.
All that said, I think that it’s realistic to stay hopeful, and we should do—so long as it doesn’t mean discounting the also real challenges and problems we’re making for ourselves. In that light, I’ll just mention one more thing. On the side of salvation, I came across a couple of interesting brief essays in Know This, edited by John Brockman (2017, HarperCollins).
One, titled “High-Tech Stone Age” (pp. 55-56), by Danish science writer Tor Nørretranders, sees possibilities in high-tech to return to some of the benefits and strategies of pre-civilized hunter-gatherers. The possibilities he focuses on are in the areas of food and food production, harnessing energy (generation of light through improved LEDs), and social and political relationships (decentralization facilitated by technology).
The other by Scott Sampson (pp. 36-38) is called “Technobiophilic Cities.” Sampson sees a convergence of those interested in improving cities through high-tech (“One camp calls for ‘smart,’ ‘digital,’ and ‘high-tech’ cities”), and those who want to make cities green (“From the other camp we hear about the need for ‘green,’ biophilic,’ even ‘wild’ cities, where nature is conserved, restored, celebrated”). The upshot: “Today, few proponents of green cities claim we need to go ‘back to nature.’ Rather they argue for going forward into a future rich in both technology and nature.”
But beyond the few specifics, I like this approach because it speaks to the paradoxical human equation of our time: It goes forward to go backwards; and in so going backwards it goes forward. It directs current space-age technology to address and simplify some of the really big ancient and long-term problems of civilization.