There’s an argument I keep having with myself. It’s about the past and the present. It’s about how things today compare with the things of yesterday.
The ‘things’ in question keep changing, as new headlines emerge and fade. Prompted by some new poll or poisonous words from a pulpit, I wonder about democracy in America. Reading about wealth and poverty, markets and unions, I question the equity of capitalism. In conversations with friends I bemoan the effects of social media. And on the news I see war return to Europe.
The topic thus changes, but the argument is always the same: are we worse off today?
My stance on this question has almost become a reflex; the present is not worse than the past, it just feels that way. We feel the struggles and heartbreaks of our time more urgently, and for respite we look back in nostalgia. We emphasize and distort the good things of yesterday, never caring to look critically or honestly. And while we can identify specific conditions or situations that have deteriorated in recent decades – climate change, for example, or polarization in the U.S – we cannot assume that we have fallen off the righteous path.
Indeed, criticizing such thinking has been a persistent theme in my writing on this page.
Yet, beneath my assumptions lies a gnawing doubt. Every time I assert reasons to be optimistic, or at least try to argue for the inherent sameness of different generations’ despair, I feel doubt. What is the value, I ask myself, of such reductive thinking? Surely this is mere dismissiveness? And then comes perhaps the most damming question: did any great moment of progress follow the exclamation “things aren’t really that bad”?
Then I waver, wondering whether my assumptions are false, wondering whether our generation has unique grounds for despair.
Who knows? It may well be that the waves are truly cresting. I certainly cannot resolve the matter in a few hundred words. I can only turn the thing over a couple times, shake the snow globe and see where things land.
And so I ask myself new questions: what is the harm in pessimism?; why not acknowledge our fall from past graces, if so many people feel so?; does despair not preclude change? Once posed, I stumble forward, grasping one way then the other, finding some epiphany only to see it dissolve. Chasing these questions like will-o-the-wisps, I inevitably move in circles.
But, eventually, I do approach answers.
What is the harm in pessimism? It is the great paralytic, the refuge of the inert. We will always feel pessimism from time to time, but if we allow ourselves to be consumed by it we will only ever slink and fade. True, negative emotion can galvanize change and motivate action, but only the destructive sort. Great reform may not follow "things aren’t really that bad,” but it does follow “things can get so much better.” It takes optimism to build.
Why not acknowledge our fall from past graces, if so many people feel so? Because emotions mislead. Nostalgia is powerful, and like pessimism we all experience it. It is not even necessarily harmful, if it gives us a feeling of peace and a target to strive for. But it is altogether different to allow nostalgia to cloud our judgement, to convince us that past generations had it all figured out. I think about the movie Midnight in Paris, where Owen Wilson’s character travels back in time to 1920s Paris, his idea of the perfect past, only to find that the people there don’t feel like they’re living in a golden age. Back and back in time he travels, to different French ‘golden ages,’ only to find each generation yearning for a time a little further back. We can chase the past if we want, try to get back to past graces, but we will only ever find disappointment.
Does despair not preclude change? Maybe in some instances, when despair leads to raw desperation, the kind that prompts an all-or-nothing fight. But despair is just as likely to preclude catastrophe. A despairing society is more likely to see every challenge as potential death blow, every opportunity as a zero-sum game. And if we look a little harder, we see that the great ruptures of the last century and a half often occurred when the historical zeitgeist coalesced around an object of despair; the fear of war, the pain of a war lost, the sight of fallen towers. It may seem small, but what individuals and communities believe is a tectonic force of history.
Tanks approach Kyiv, weapons flood across the continent, and another rupture point looks set to tear open. Climate change seems more insurmountable than ever, and I fear for my republic. And because of these struggles, not despite them, we must not succumb to generational despair.
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