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Maybe our tendency to see catastrophe is a product of how easy we have it in this age of abundance.
Sitting through the Christian liturgy for Easter weekend is, aside from its other virtues, a useful therapy for the catastrophism that has modern humans in its grip.
America and the world are living through a very long Good Friday. Like Jesus’ terrified and defeated disciples, we have no inkling of any Easter rising in our future. We are figuratively locked in an upper room of our own fears, bereft of hope, pondering the many ways in which the world is going to demolish us.
It’s the climate, roasting us in a crucible. It’s that old tormentor thermonuclear war, long submerged beneath trendier concerns, back with a vengeance because of an actual land war in Europe and a seemingly inevitable conflict with China. Plague, an older agent of human destruction, stalks us again; Covid was a mere foretaste if the alarmists are right. The latest terror is artificial intelligence. If you haven’t read it, do seek out the article in Time everyone is talking about, by Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI expert. Given all the other threats we face, there is something perversely calming about its essential conclusion: We’re all going to die soon.
At home the republic and democracy are finished. From one side the orange beast is slouching back toward Washington. From the other, a left wing authoritarianism is moving its slow thighs, crushing free speech and politicizing the law, its weird ideology pitting race against race even as it denies the existence of biological sex. A much noted Wall Street Journal/NORC poll last month found that tens of millions of Americans seem to have lost their faith and their values and think about nothing other than making money.
If you’ll indulge me for a second, I note an inappropriately pleasing irony. One of the many charges that atheists and agnostics have brought against religious belief is that it has inflicted unique amounts of suffering on the world: war, persecution hatred and prejudice. If you look back over the centuries there was a meretricious truth to this: When people insisted God sanctioned their cause, their authority was literally infinite—and demanded the annihilation of his enemies.
But the 20th century—when more people died under the heel of godless ideologies than had perished in all of Western civilization’s religious wars put together—ought to have put paid to the idea that there was something intrinsically religious about a monomaniacal belief that you are right and your opponents evil.
And now we have the 21st century—in which, for the first time in a couple of thousand years, believers in the Judeo-Christian heartlands of North America and Western Europe are outnumbered by nonbelievers, and the picture is, if anything, even worse. Even the rationalists can’t credibly blame religion for today’s wars, climate, AI and Trump.
But we are Easter people, not Good Friday people. And while those of us who believe the Gospel think redemption is the ultimate reality, the really good news is that you don’t even have to believe in the resurrection—or have any religious faith at all—to think our prospects of rising above our seemingly terminal challenges are better than they seem.
We have plenty of evidence that the past half-century has been the best for humans, including Americans, than any period in history. It takes an almost Old Testament fateful determinism to think that the current crises won’t succumb as all others have to the creativity of human ingenuity and the science and technology it generates, or that this time, unlike all the other times in history, humanity indomitability has met its match.
I don’t minimize the various challenges we face, and it’s true that past triumphs have sometimes come at staggering cost, but I suspect part of the current immanent gloom is a direct result of the dramatic relative success we have achieved. We have lived so long without a world war—more than three quarters of a century—that actual existential misery is unfamiliar to most of us so it needs to be replaced with an imagined one. The ease with which we analogize opponents to Hitler or their objectives to the Holocaust tells us only how far removed we really are from understanding genuine menace.
It’s a kind of obverse of the “Minsky moment” in finance—an extended period of relative calm and prosperity induces complacency and risk-taking among investors that ends in crashes. But I suspect in the nonfinancial world, it works the other way—the long period of calm induces only fear of something much worse.
You can see this in the frailties of the generation now emerging into maturity, the furthest removed from actual calamity in their lives and the ones most attuned to the supposed imminence of it. They require trigger warnings to read Shakespeare or Jane Austen, as they fill their social-media accounts with lurid panics over climate, gender, race, elections.
In addition to exposing themselves to alternative ideas and a little history, maybe they could read the Gospels. It might cheer them up.
Maybe our tendency to see catastrophe is a product of how easy we have it in this age of abundance.
Sitting through the Christian liturgy for Easter weekend is, aside from its other virtues, a useful therapy for the catastrophism that has modern humans in its grip.
America and the world are living through a very long Good Friday. Like Jesus’ terrified and defeated disciples, we have no inkling of any Easter rising in our future. We are figuratively locked in an upper room of our own fears, bereft of hope, pondering the many ways in which the world is going to demolish us.
It’s the climate, roasting us in a crucible. It’s that old tormentor thermonuclear war, long submerged beneath trendier concerns, back with a vengeance because of an actual land war in Europe and a seemingly inevitable conflict with China. Plague, an older agent of human destruction, stalks us again; Covid was a mere foretaste if the alarmists are right. The latest terror is artificial intelligence. If you haven’t read it, do seek out the article in Time everyone is talking about, by Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI expert. Given all the other threats we face, there is something perversely calming about its essential conclusion: We’re all going to die soon.
At home the republic and democracy are finished. From one side the orange beast is slouching back toward Washington. From the other, a left wing authoritarianism is moving its slow thighs, crushing free speech and politicizing the law, its weird ideology pitting race against race even as it denies the existence of biological sex. A much noted Wall Street Journal/NORC poll last month found that tens of millions of Americans seem to have lost their faith and their values and think about nothing other than making money.
If you’ll indulge me for a second, I note an inappropriately pleasing irony. One of the many charges that atheists and agnostics have brought against religious belief is that it has inflicted unique amounts of suffering on the world: war, persecution hatred and prejudice. If you look back over the centuries there was a meretricious truth to this: When people insisted God sanctioned their cause, their authority was literally infinite—and demanded the annihilation of his enemies.
But the 20th century—when more people died under the heel of godless ideologies than had perished in all of Western civilization’s religious wars put together—ought to have put paid to the idea that there was something intrinsically religious about a monomaniacal belief that you are right and your opponents evil.
And now we have the 21st century—in which, for the first time in a couple of thousand years, believers in the Judeo-Christian heartlands of North America and Western Europe are outnumbered by nonbelievers, and the picture is, if anything, even worse. Even the rationalists can’t credibly blame religion for today’s wars, climate, AI and Trump.
But we are Easter people, not Good Friday people. And while those of us who believe the Gospel think redemption is the ultimate reality, the really good news is that you don’t even have to believe in the resurrection—or have any religious faith at all—to think our prospects of rising above our seemingly terminal challenges are better than they seem.
We have plenty of evidence that the past half-century has been the best for humans, including Americans, than any period in history. It takes an almost Old Testament fateful determinism to think that the current crises won’t succumb as all others have to the creativity of human ingenuity and the science and technology it generates, or that this time, unlike all the other times in history, humanity indomitability has met its match.
I don’t minimize the various challenges we face, and it’s true that past triumphs have sometimes come at staggering cost, but I suspect part of the current immanent gloom is a direct result of the dramatic relative success we have achieved. We have lived so long without a world war—more than three quarters of a century—that actual existential misery is unfamiliar to most of us so it needs to be replaced with an imagined one. The ease with which we analogize opponents to Hitler or their objectives to the Holocaust tells us only how far removed we really are from understanding genuine menace.
It’s a kind of obverse of the “Minsky moment” in finance—an extended period of relative calm and prosperity induces complacency and risk-taking among investors that ends in crashes. But I suspect in the nonfinancial world, it works the other way—the long period of calm induces only fear of something much worse.
You can see this in the frailties of the generation now emerging into maturity, the furthest removed from actual calamity in their lives and the ones most attuned to the supposed imminence of it. They require trigger warnings to read Shakespeare or Jane Austen, as they fill their social-media accounts with lurid panics over climate, gender, race, elections.
In addition to exposing themselves to alternative ideas and a little history, maybe they could read the Gospels. It might cheer them up.
