Living through the darkest moments of the brightest times
We’re living in the worst of the best of times.
Human progress has continued to advance exponentially since the Enlightenment. And it isn’t stopping, despite what will be a particularly severe yet ultimately temporary slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s easy to forget — especially since many people never fully realized — that virtually every vulnerability our species endures, other than this recent outbreak, has on average continued retreating across the globe over the past centuries, decades and years.
That goes for the proverbial Four Horsemen — War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.
Fewer people than ever are dying in conflicts around the planet. Fewer are starving. Average life expectancy has doubled over the past century, and the child mortality rate has been halved over the past two decades.
Even deaths by lightning strikes are down.
And, yes, we should still remember that fewer people than ever are contracting and dying from diseases, with COVID-19 as an exception — for now.
It’s worth appreciating that this progress ultimately means there has never been a better time for such a global crisis as this pandemic to occur, given the advancements in science, technology and public health.
The technical aptitudes needed in every component of overcoming COVID-19 — while obstinately far from perfect — are more sophisticated than at any time in history.
And that means it’ll be all the sooner — although nobody can say exactly when — that we’ll look back at the pandemic’s impact as a solemn but surmountable setback on what remains an upward trajectory of human progress. That is, ultimately, a few unusually rough years.
And beyond our recently developed technical competencies remains the ancient and innate resilience of human beings. It has been intrinsic to us as long as we’ve been a species and originated in our evolutionary genealogy long before that.
As cognitive scientist Steven Pinker points out in an interview with the UK’s Channel 4 News in midApril: “Although it seems now like nothing will ever be the same because we’re in the midst of the worst of it, but when the curve is bent, when the pandemic has wreaked its toll, and life returns to normal, all of the forces that made us connected in the first place aren’t going to go away.”
Pinker is among a growing movement of public intellectuals, called the “New Optimists”, promoting awareness of how far human progress has advanced and anticipation that exponential improvement will persist.
Thinkers like him, including Oxford economist Max Roser, late Swedish statistician Hans Rosling and US journalist Nicholas Kristof, point out that progress is incremental and long term, while disasters are sudden and relatively short term.
Progress is a slow burn. Disasters are abrupt flare-ups.
Consequently, advancement isn’t apparent in the public consciousness, although the data irrefutably proves it’s real. It’s a situation in which cognitive biases obscure objective reality.
A 2015 YouGov poll, for instance, found 65 percent of UK and 81 percent of French respondents believed the world was getting worse overall. Pinker’s research finds that majorities in a sample of 14 mostly wealthy countries agreed.
China seems to be the only major country surveyed where most people were optimistic, The Guardian reports.
And the outbreak seems to have expanded intercontinental pessimism.
“Punditry goes into overdrive, and we imagine the disruption we’re facing now will be permanent,” Pinker says.
“But there’s a massive tendency to slip back into life as normal. And I think that will be the overwhelming tendency.”
Certainly, we’re living through the darkest moments of the brightest of times.
But to recognize that, especially amid the pandemic, we must deliberately look toward the light to see the beacon of tomorrow shining across ages before and to come.