Three facets of pessimism in human society which resist Teilhard’s optimistic vision of the future
Today’s Post
Last week we noted that despite the generally positive aspects of human evolution as postulated by Teilhard and quantified by Johan Norberg, there is a steady undercurrent of belief that things are going from better to worse, leading from more perfect past to a dystopian future.
This week we will look at three facets of this phenomenon in which those who have benefited most from Teilhard and Norberg’s articulation of progress seem to be those that most fail to see it.
Progressophobia In Western Society
Stephen Pinker, in his book “Enlightenment Now”, notes that when Westerners are polled about their opinion of progress in society, a twofold perspective can be seen. On an individual basis, people seem optimistic about their personal situation, and that of their immediate relationships (family, neighbors, friends), but pessimistic about society at large. Pinker refers to this as the “Optimism Gap”:
“For two decades…when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.”
This is a puzzling phenomenon: comfortable, secure, educated individuals are unable to project their personal optimism onto their society. Why should this be so? Pinker offers a few suggestions.
Ubiquity of News – We are immersed in news in a way which is truly unprecedented. Thanks to technology, we receive it not only in ‘real time’ but in unprecedented volume. As Pinker observes:
“Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is.”
And not only does immediate news sell, negative news sells better than positive news, resulting in negative slant. As an example, Pinker cites a survey showing a ‘negative count’ in the New York Times from 1945 to 2015, in which the use of negative terms in news articles shows a distinctive increase.
Miscalibration – Further, while the result of such a plethora of information might be seen as simply leaving us ‘better informed’, it can also be seen as leaving us ‘miscalibrated’. For example, we worry more about crime even as (as Johan Norberg documents) crime rates are falling. As Pinker points out, such information can “part company with reality altogether”. He cites a 2016 American poll in which
“77% agreed that “Islamic militants operating in Syria …pose a serious threat to the existence and survival of the United States.”
Pinker notes that such an opinion is not only an example of ‘miscalibration’, it is “nothing short of delusional”.
The Negativity Bias – As in the above examples, such pessimism isn’t just due to skepticism about the data but suggests an ‘unpreparedness’ for the possibility that the human condition is improving. This is, to some extent, a ‘human original sin’, in which it is easier for humans to imagine a future in which life is degraded by violence, illness, poverty, loss of loved ones or a nearly endless list of woes, than it is to imagine it as uplifted, quality of life improved, relationships deepened, or their future brighter than their past. Effectively, lack of clarity about the past can be seen to lead to an unpreparedness for the future.
But there’s also a biological factor at work. One reason for such negative bias is the simple fact that our ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic brains) continue to stimulate us with the basic urges common to our ancestors, such as fight or flight, hunger, anger or other ‘base instincts’ so necessary for their survival. Just because evolution has endowed us with a neocortex brain capable of rationally dealing with such instincts (“am I really threatened?”) doesn’t mean that the stimuli from these ‘lower’ brains will cease.
It also illustrates the incomplete maturity of our 200,000-year-old neocortical skills. Teilhard sees humanity as still in the early stages of its evolution. He notes that just as the cell emerges in evolution as “dripping in molecularity”, so our human brains emerge as “dripping in animality”. To put it into perspective, if universal evolution was captured in a thousand pages, the appearance of the human would not occur until the bottom three words of the last page. Hence Teilhard sees humanity as still in an early evolutionary state very much influenced by the instinctual stimuli which served our ancestors so well.
Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that after a mere 200,000 years, we have yet to become fully aware of the current that has carried us so faithfully thus far. Teilhard suggests that as our understanding of the cosmos continues to widen, we will learn to navigate this current more successfully.
“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”
Next Week
This week we took a second look at why the positive view of human evolution so clearly encouraged in the New Testament, recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ and quantified by the statistics of Norberg, should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Next week we will explore Steven Pinker’s parsing of this ‘headwind’ a little further.