Reasons for not losing hope

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

I am not an optimist. I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends toward justice. It bends toward entropy.  I often feel discouraged about the state of the world, and my own country, the USA, in particular, and I think I have good reason.

But I haven’t lost hope.  Optimism is the belief that success is inevitable in the long run.  Hope is the faith that failure is not inevitable.

What gives me hope is recalling all the things in the past that turned out better than I thought they would. This means it is possible that things in the present may turn out better than I think they would.  Not inevitable.  Possible.

Some examples of what I have in mind are:

• The eclipse of racism.
• The eclipse of famine
• A healthier world
• Doomsday deferred

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The eclipse of racism.  I grew up in the USA of the 1940s.  This was a time when, throughout the former Confederate states, a white person could kill a black person with impunity.  Lynchings of black people were still a thing.  My parents, teachers and Sunday school teachers taught me that racism was wrong, but those who spoke against it were in the minority.

The heart of racism seemed to be the loathing and disgust felt by most white Americans, especially Southern white men, at the idea of a black man having sexual intercourse with a white women.  I wish I had a dollar for every time I was asked whether I would want one of them to marry my sister—often by people who knew me well enough to know that I didn’t have a sister.

It seemed to me, and to others, that the struggle for racial equality would take decades, and that acceptance of racial intermarriage might never occur at all.  But this proved wrong.  The civil rights revolution of the 1960s really was a revolution, a cultural revolution.  By the 1970s, black students at the University of Mississippi walked around arm-in-arm with their white girlfriends, and nobody said anything about it.

That’s not so say the civil rights revolution solved everything.  Racial prejudice still exists.  The old-time white-sheet racists have been marginalized, but they haven’t gone away.  The black community still has a lot of problems, not all of them directly related to racism.  And I happen to think that a lot of what’s called anti-racism nowadays is useless and even harmful.

Still, it is a mark of progress that we Americans are debating reparations and affirmative action rather than voting rights, racial segregation laws and lynchings.

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The eclipse of famine.   As a boy and youth, I was influenced by books such as William Vogt’s Road to Survival (1948)and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968).  They said most of the world was doomed to death by starvation because the number of people in the world (over 2 billion in 1948, 3.55 billion in 1968) exceeded the carrying capacity of the land.  I took this very seriously.

What is killing middle-aged white men? Despair

We take it for granted that, in scientifically advanced countries, the death rate will decline.  But since 1999, there has been a dramatic increase in the death rate among non-Hispanic American white men aged 45 to 54, especially those without education beyond high school.

No such increase occurs among middle-aged white people in other countries or among other American ethnic groups.  Although the death rate for African-Americans is higher, it is not increasing, and, as the chart shows, the death rate for middle-aged Hispanic Americans (USH) is decreasing.

A Princeton University study indicates that the main reasons for the increased death rate are an increase in alcohol-related disease (liver disease), in drug overdoses (heroin and opioids) and in suicide—all diseases associated with depression and despair.

[Note added 11/13/2015: Some experts say the increase is primarily among middle-aged white women.]

Optimism or pessimism?

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I schedule and sometimes lead a Sunday morning discussion group at First Universalist Church of Rochester, NY.  One Sunday the discussion leader made the case for that, although there were very serious problems in the world, some things are getting better.

One of the members of the group angrily disagreed.  He said that although some things are getting better, there are very serious problems in the world.

The world has in fact become a better place in some ways.  That doesn’t mean it will automatically become a better place in all ways, but it is reason to resist hopelessness.

LINKS

It’s a cold hard fact: Our world is becoming a better place by Max Roser, creator of Our World in Data.

50 Reasons We’re Living Through the Greatest Period of World History by Morgan Housel for The Motley Fool (via Barry Ritholtz)

Who in the world is hopeful about the future?

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One of the defining characteristics of Americans used to be that, whatever our circumstances, almost all of us expected that our children and grandchildren would be better off than we are.

This is no longer true.  And a Pew Research survey indicates that people in other supposedly advanced nations are more pessimistic than we are.

While 62 percent of Americans expect the next generation to be financially worse off than their parents, this pessimistic view is held by 64 percent of Canadians, 64 percent of Germans, 74 percent of the British, 76 percent of Japanese and 90 percent of the French.

The most optimistic nations in the world are China, where 82 percent of those surveyed said they expect a better future, and Brazil, where 79 percent are hopeful (see below).  Among European countries, the least pessimistic was Russia.

I think survey results in China or any other dictatorship have to be taken with a certain amount of skepticism, but, even so, I am astonished at the differences among countries.