It's Not the End of the World As We Know It…and We’ll Be Fine
Why we wish for the apocalypse even as life is getting better
By Jared Feuer
”I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” - John Stuart Mill
I recently traded in my internal combustion engine (ICE) car for an electric vehicle. Having moved deeper into the burbs of Atlanta, I am now driving prodigious miles. While guilt about my carbon footprint was a minor factor, I mostly acted because an electric car will better handle the wear and tear. What I hadn’t expected in changing my car was that it would reveal a technological breakthrough. Within a day I realized how ridiculously advanced an electric vehicle is when compared to an ICE car. It doesn’t need to ‘start’ but rather propels itself when you want, is whisper quiet, gives immediate torque, has fewer parts to break or maintain, can integrate all functions like climate since the car is a single unit, and on and on.
I raved about the car to friends, including Chorus of Union co-editor Micah, comparing it to moving from a flip phone to a smartphone. And I wondered why the transition to electric cars was going so slowly. One friend, well to my left, noted uncritically that environmentalists didn’t actually want widespread deployment of electric cars due to the associated environmental damage from any form of private transportation, not to mention class issues of who gets access to chargers. Meanwhile Micah noted that mining for the batteries and the emissions of central power generation will simply make things worse. In short, the whole fucking thing was going to pot and I might as well stop patting myself on the back for my little consumer choice.
Their responses evidence our tendency toward apocalyptic thinking. Like everything, one can find partisan trends. Broadly, the right imagines the collapse of societal order with the fall of American hegemony and in its place a new world order where ‘Bill Gates vaccines’ track, kill, or make us impotent while the left lives in terror of environmental collapse and wonder if they should even have children. But the particulars of doomsaying don’t need to align with political orientation - we elevate our specific life choices and imagine them under attack; we are brave holdouts in our respective Alamos. I myself am not immune to apocalyptic thinking as I often hyperventilate in fear that enlightenment values are collapsing, and will take with them the scientific method, individual rights, and ultimately notions of agency and purpose.
It’s everywhere - apocalyptic thinking is an ingrained part of humanity and always has been. In fear of our general irrelevance we shrink the horizon so that we can hold the expanse of existence in our hands. Even if it means squashing it. Catastrophizing existence is a coping mechanism to generate control via a reduced canvas.
But it’s misery and it’s wildly wrong.
Okay, first the basic fact. Singular. Fact. The externalities of existence are getting better and better and better. Yes, there are dips, but the broad trajectory from food availability to literacy to democracy is remarkable and incontrovertible. The uniquely human capacity to record, share, and pass on knowledge means that progress is exponential. In the early rounds, progress seems slow, but over time, the leaps jump off the page, and then the book, the library, the city, and the planet. We are in the early stages of the inflection point and all around is proof of the exceptional.
Fighting with doomsayers is a game of whack-a-mole, so I’ll just point to an article by Noah Smith and the matrix of good news always served up by the Cato Institute’s HumanProgress.org. There are plenty of others who do the work in confronting the doomsayers. It’s mostly thankless work, but in short, no, we are not going to end up in a runaway environmental disaster where my home in Atlanta is oceanfront while a world government makes us sterilized slaves. So put away the guns. And the Heinz ketchup. I wish this was hyperbole, but I have heard these ideas firsthand.
For me, I’ll confront my bugaboo - the end of enlightenment thinking. Closed loops consume but they don’t create; over the past quarter century a subset of the academy and the related fields of journalism, NGO’s, philanthropy, and the arts has been feasting on the deconstruction of value that they did not create. But the material is running out and they are beginning to suffocate. Competition always wins, even if it takes patience to allow natural law to reassert itself. And the green shoots are there as elite academic institutions are beginning to see that their creative capital is under threat. Thus in the past week alone we’ve seen the Cornell President and Provost telling students who demanded trigger warnings on everything to forget it, the resignation of the Hamline University president who threw an instructor under the bus, Stanford University calling out its law school students for not understanding expression involves the right to hear, and Penn State’s president articulating the moral value of free speech. I am furious at seeing my friends, family, life work, and principles being attacked, but these are bumps in the road. They hurt, but humanity is destined for the stars.
Even the stars are limitless. Recently I’ve been reading about the expansion of the universe out of a fear that we were headed toward entropic death. That the big bang would keep expanding the universe until the very nature of matter would be torn apart and it would just be nothing. But that doesn’t seem to be an open-and-shut case. There are the potentials of infinite universes, our universe’s expansion reversing course and contracting before it restarts the cycle, inflation continuing but never reaching an end point, and humanity ultimately scaling knowledge until we shape physics. The law of existence is … existence.
The challenge with this knowledge is that we must let go of the reins; the universe is boundless, our personal centrality to the script of humanity minor while existence - even one experiencing accelerating progress - is mundane unless you look closely. Our blessing is to exist, to witness, to love, to experience, and to appreciate. That’s all we get. Most of us matter to a small group of friends and family, and some might move the needle a bit on a societal level, and a smaller subset might do somewhat more than that. But overall, we are self-aware cogs. The solution to our inherent mundanity is not to become a Buddhist; a lack of attachment is a lack of life. Instead, we should embrace the underlying premise of humanity - that we scale information - as a source of remarkable optimism. As a species we will break out of every trap, including what we might temporarily create.
God or other ideologies used to be unifying forces in providing hope for the majority of humanity. Now we have to find optimism in a very tough place: in the nature of that humanity. Yes, we commit horrors against each other but that is a secondary expression. The foundation of our species is that we work together, and when paired with the natural law that the better entity ultimately wins, we will guide ourselves to greater and greater external realities. That said, the inner realities will become more difficult as the external horizon goes well beyond our individual reach. This is why it’s arguable that external progress is becoming decoupled from internal contentment. I recently read of a study that when people are told they have a year to live, they are motivated to create, build, and use their time. But when they are told humanity has a year left, they become despondent and purposeless. We need a touch of immortality if we are to exist. If our progress is crowding out God, then we must believe in the ordinary people around us to find the immortality we desperately need. And then, perhaps our greatest challenge: we must be content with the beauty of a limited experience in a world without end.
And feel fine.