I am conflicted about how to think of the future.
I am first drawn to the opinion of the optimist, charmed by John Stuart Mill’s assessment that “our general tendency is that towards a better and happier state.” This is a view that speaks of our current participation in an upward arc of modern civilization, one where I can look back and recognize the past two hundred fifty years as an utter miracle. Lost in its reverential outlook, I watch millions rise from the squalid trenches of poverty that proved insurmountable for thousands of years before. Bewildered, I witness people throw off the yoke of tyranny that once appeared to be impossibly permanent. I note the freedom of slaves, the enshrinement of women’s suffrage, the advent of vaccines; the invention of air conditioning, the rise of personal automobiles, and the global adoption of the Internet. My time is freely spent contemplating a world that has attained unprecedented heights, reaching a higher level of material living standards than any time in human history.
Accordingly, in this position, I also find myself carrying a profound belief in the system where this was made possible, in both democracy and the free market, and lamenting those who think otherwise. Pessimists who espouse existential fears of overpopulation and environmental catastrophe stand far from the truth, given that current positive population growth may actually raise living standards and the economic impacts of 3°C warming (twice as high as stated goal of the Paris Climate Accords) are projected to be minimal. Critics of businesses not paying their “fair share” are empirically mistaken. Not only are tax breaks negligible relative to the overall U.S. budget, but corporate income is already double-taxed. Categorical support for welfare programs that ‘ameliorate’ capitalism’s consequences are simply ignorant of past defeats: as Thomas Sowell explains in The Vision of the Anointed, “the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s ‘war on poverty’ to achieve its goal of reducing dependency – and in fact an increasing dependency as these policies went into effect – brought no acknowledgment of failure.”
I am captured by a vision that, while acknowledging problems do exist as a result of capitalism, does not think they are problematic enough to warrant mass pessimism or a significant overhaul of our current system of government. Near to us is a future of abundance that, being liberatory in nature, will free every one of us to climb Maslow’s hierarchy and shift our focus upward to grander questions concerning the transcendent and spiritual. Growth and progress are inevitable, and the path forward only appears bleak to those who fall prey to the tendency Hume astutely described: “Where real terrors are wanting, the soul finds imaginary ones, to whose power and malevolence it sets no limits.”
Yet I would be lying if I said this is the only vision that captures my attention, for the perspective of the pessimist is not without a kernel of truth. Indeed, I would say my natural tendency is to be pessimistic. A more scientific mind might frame entropy as the ruling law of the universe. In my mind, several adages strike me as prudent and sensible: What can break will break, all good things must come to an end, this too shall pass, and the like. In this eschatology, the inevitable end of political society is not progress, but collapse.
I believe history is epitomized by the extinction of the dinosaur and the fall of the Roman Empire, both of which few could have predicted would perish but nonetheless did. Reality is a pre-WWII Germany that, as described by Antonin Scalia, was morally corrupt despite standing at such civilizational heights that it could boast of authors like Herman Hesse, Stefan George, and Franz Kafka; painters like Paul Klee and Oscar Schlemmer; composers ranging from Anton Webern to Arnold Schoenberg; and a formidable scientific enterprise that was at the world’s cutting edge. We live in a world where Heinrich Himmler unabashedly carried the Bhagavad Gita, a central text in Hindu scripture, in his pocket. “To fully grasp the horror of the Holocaust,” said Scalia, “you must imagine, for it probably happened, that the commandant of Auschwitz or Dachau, when he had finished his day’s work, retired to his apartment and listened to some tender and poignant Lieder of Franz Schubert.” Material and cultural achievement stand for very little if the societies that produce them are mired in moral decay.
Antithetical to Mill’s sentiment, this view envisions a universe in which past successes count for nothing and history has no upward direction. It is a world capable of falling at any moment – from the highest peaks of human civilization into the lowest depths of unimaginable horrors and unspeakable tragedy. Anyone who believes that the future is not bleak is naive, convinced of their own righteousness, and blind to the multitude of disastrous outcomes that might occur. Just as it happened before, so too can it happen again.
I am thus conflicted. Caught between these two perspectives, I see both a world moving up and a world about to crumble. I am aware of our upward movement but cognizant of its fragility. I am grateful, yet never overconfident. The future does not belong to those obsessed with fixing a society that is not broken, but to those of us who actively conserve what we have. Perhaps it is this position – being neither cynical nor complacent, aware of America’s genius yet not convinced of its permanence – that is most productive. The stance that is best is the one of the Optimo-Pessimist.
Image: Mosaic of the Theatrical Masks (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
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