Choose Now

Fall 2023 Blog Entry

One of the things I love about going to an academic conference is the chance to talk to folks about all kinds of things, hear different and challenging perspectives…learn, change my mind. I’ve been thinking about something that I got into in Philadelphia at the American Sociology Association conference recently; not in a conference room, but in a dive bar over beers with some fellow sociologists I had just met that night. And I think this might be one of the most controversial things I’ve ever written down.

A bit of background: there’s a philosopher named John Rawls—really popular in many academic circles, particularly for his 1971 book “A Theory of Justice.” In it he invites the reader along on a compelling thought experiment. I’m simplifying here (it’s a big book and this is just a blog entry), but imagine you were going to participate in creating a society from scratch—but you have no idea who you will be or what position you will occupy in that society once it starts. Your memory will be wiped, you won’t remember being a part of the society’s creation, and you will wake in a random social station within that society. What kind of society would you want to create, if you had no idea whether you would be rich or poor, powerful or downtrodden, healthy or chronically ill? Rawls has basically tricked the reader into some high-grade humanitarian empathy—why would you want to create a society in which the poor are allowed to starve or the sick are allowed to die or the disabled are treated as second-class citizens if you yourself might be poor or chronically ill or disabled?

Over beers, we were conversing about whether things are better or worse right now in the world (the sort of thing sociologists argue about over beers). Here, I offered a similar thought experiment: if you could pick any time in the whole history of the human species in which to live, and you didn’t know who your parents would be, how much wealth or privilege you would be born into, what your race or gender or sexual orientation would be, when would you choose? The only rational choice, in my view, would be now—or, at least, within the last couple of decades. You don’t believe me. It seems unbelievable that someone could even think this. What is wrong with me?

But the data tell a compelling story—the easiest way to find them is to look up “Our World in Data.” I also think the psychologist Steven Pinker puts these ideas into writing well in his book “Enlightenment Now.” You will see that living now means your average life expectancy is longer than it ever was before, and twice what it has been throughout most of the history of our species. You are far less likely to live in poverty—particularly extreme poverty. You are more likely to have more consistent access to clean water and relatively abundant, nutritious food. You are less likely to die a violent death, or to have to maim or kill other human beings to stay alive. You have a higher level of education than any population in the past. We are, to put it simply, healthier, wealthier, safer, and wiser, on average, than any other humans at any time in the past. I like telling this story whenever I can, because it’s both uplifting and important. That is why you should choose now.

There are no “good old days.” That has always been a myth, a bias that becomes ever more tantalizing with age. I’m learning this for the first time as I enter middle age, the siren song of the past, of nostalgia, is really a projection—I remember when life was simpler and when I had more energy and when parts of my body didn’t hurt for no reason. But better for me doesn’t mean better for everyone on average—and the more I think about it, I don’t long for the past, and remain cautiously optimistic that the best days of my life lie ahead. But again, if you didn’t know who you were going to be—what race, what gender, what social class—would you really long for any time period in the past relative to this one? It is hard for me to imagine what it would be like to be a Black man in the Jim Crow South or a Russian peasant facing the perennial threat of famine or a woman who lived in a democracy but did not have the right to vote or an Indigenous person watching settlers slowly force me from my ancestral lands and upend my way of life. Ending legal segregation in the U.S. happened less than a century ago; the last major famine, and the first changes to allow women to vote, happened just a few decades before that. Colonialism, if treated as a single event starting around 1492 when the two halves of the world discovered each other, was the single deadliest event in the history of our species; I do not imagine such wounds ever fully heal. Perhaps it seems perverse to be an optimist when history is full of such bloodshed and injustice.

I also think there is a danger in letting optimism create complacency. It shouldn’t. There are a lot of challenges ahead. I started my first full-time academic job the year the pandemic hit. Now, with demographic shifts, a tight labor market, and the culture wars heating up, people just aren’t going to college like they used to. It’s a very difficult time to be a teacher in a public school, and I don’t think it’s going to get easier in the immediate future. The U.S. is a cauldron of unrest and division, and I suspect there will be (more) chaos and violence not far ahead. The climate is changing due to human activity and despite ongoing warnings it doesn’t seem like workable solutions have been forthcoming. Yes, I know—just end fossil fuels, etc.—but meeting growing global energy demand as standards of living have lifted record numbers of people out of poverty is a challenge already. There’s no such thing as a free lunch—entropy always wins. The fact that our fellow human beings who are trans* are being targeted with broad-spectrum hatred, threats, and violence, and an ongoing smear campaign to label all sexual minorities predators, demands a response rooted in the dignity and rights of persons (and no, I don’t mean we should let people off the hook who have, in fact, abused children). Opioid epidemic, rising suicide rates, inflation… well, I could go on but I think the point is made.

I’m not arguing that life is easy now, or that it will be easy in the future. It isn’t, and it won’t be. But it definitely wasn’t easier in the past. I’m also not arguing that the institutions and systems we mostly take for granted are the best they could ever be. Finally, I should remind that “on average” means just that. An old stats joke: my feet are in the freezer and my head is in the oven, but on average, I’m the right temperature. People could be better off on average and some of them could be worse off than they used to be—there’s no contradiction in that. It should be obvious that not every group of people has shared in these improvements to the same degree, and that things have been worse in recent times for people in specific places. It should also be obvious that any progress could be destroyed in the future—a planet-killing asteroid impact that we failed to avert (the movie “Don’t Look Down” comes to mind); or large-scale nuclear war would very quickly reverse all these gains. It is therefore important, in my view, that human beings start from a place of cautious optimism; use reason and sympathy to recognize the problems that we face, weigh risks carefully with the best available information, be watchful for the ways all the progress we have made can be undone, and work imperfectly to make things even better for even more people.

However difficult the road ahead seems, I will choose now.

A photo I took from a recent hike through the bog, Lake Bemidji State Park.