Today is Christmas Eve, on which we contemplate Hope.
On the first day, Unity, I commented about how common enemies draw us together. Sadly, the political and social organizing corollary to that is that scaring the crap out of folks is a good way to establish solidarity. Shared Hope is vague and wishy washy; as one who shall remain unnamed once said, “How’s that hopey, changey thing working out for ya?” The power of the inverse, has been too well proven lately. Even sadder is the way this de rigueur organizing tactic, coming at us from all sides, can lead to a fatalistic and cynical world view.
This book, which Bill Gates described as one of the most important books he had ever read (I agree), 800 pages long, with over 100 pages of footnotes and index, makes a pretty irrefutable case for the unrelenting moral progress of humanity.
It’s an odd read to seed Hope, as it is filled with vivid descriptions of our dark history of despicable, cruel, and inhumane practices. But the central point: that all this horror has inexorably, if fitfully, decreased over the centuries, is made with extreme erudition and rationality. It strengthened my long standing hope, even confidence, that together, eventually, we will always find and destroy the evil that too often wells up in our kind.
You can see that I read my copy very hard. I carried it with me for weeks (I think spent about year on this and between Infinite Jest) and I was so saddened by the emphatic pushback I often got from folks to whom I tried to explain what the book was about. Sad that I should have already used the word sad five times in this short essay on Hope, but it is indeed sad that such a noble emotion should be so maligned. There may be many scathing reviews of the book, many folks who nitpicked his statistical methodology, but Pinker’s counter-arguments have been persuasive to me.
All I can say is read it, or take our word for it. Slavery, torture and genocidal warfare were standard operating procedure for humans for many millennia. While they may still be with us, there is no question that they are not SOP any longer. Go ahead and be outraged, go ahead and fear for the dark outcomes of misguided policies, but try to hold a place in your heart for Hope. Things will get better, they always do.
I’m sure there is some standard name for this phenomena of diminishing returns, but I had a bright epiphanie back when I was young and working as a bicycle mechanic. The spokes on a bicycle wheel are capped with nipples, little nuts, which by adjusting, you can use to pull a wheel the run true: wobbling neither side to side nor up and down. You spin the wheel and often use the swishing as the high point brushes your thumb to find the set of spokes where the wobble is, then tighten one side and sometimes loosen the other. It is an iterative process where you make many very small adjustments. You spin-adjust, spin-adjust dozens if not hundreds of times.
But, it will never be perfect, nothing is, and even though the amplitude of the wobble gets less and less, the little swish swish as the high point brushes your thumb, never goes away. The time it takes, the way you get so focused on that little swishing feedback, can lead you to feel like it is not working, that for all your effort the wheel was not getting any better. I learned that I had to disengage from my focus on the problem, and shift to judging not how bad but how good the wheel was. As I was learning to true, I sometimes discovered that I had had it as good as it was going to get long before I gave up, pulling it back and forth trying to solve a problem that no longer existed except in my desire to achieve perfection.
That subtle shift, from focusing on the negative to focusing on positive, is a gigantic cognitive transformation. Perspective can be everything, and we need to make sure to stop, step back and look from another angle. Breathe through or fear and anxiety and remember that Hope springs eternal.
HOLLY DAYS 