Our band of apes has managed to bob and weave past all the obstacles, both internal and external we have faced these past million years. Knowing we have overcome impossible odds again and again, I have managed to remain hopeful — that whatever we may face, we will find a workaround. We are unprecedentedly industrious critters whose continuing existence demonstrates our ability to surmount monumental challenges.
Recently, I heard Brook Gladstone, who I respect very much, comment very casually that she could not imagine humanity could still exist in 500 years. I was stunned. What a dark attitude. It may be one that is becoming more common, but it is also almost certainly untrue. We may stumble down paths that lead us to agonizing tragedy as we have in the past, we may face horrible natural disasters, but the survival of our species — of life itself — has shown to be so resilient that its destruction would require the darkest of black swans.
Negativity bias has evolved, as with the increased durability of painful memories I mentioned yesterday, as a protective psychology, easily understood in the maxim better safe than sorry. However, like so many of our cognitive biases and other instinctive reactions, our modern collective life pretty much requires our resistance to them. In fact almost all of our moral philosophy and religious traditions have evolved specifically as cultural counterbalance to our most primitive impulses. Watch a group of young toddlers interact and you will quickly see that our inherent nature is violent and selfish, and that if not ameliorated with a massive set of please and thank yous, using our words, and keeping our hands to ourselves, civilization would collapse.
We have evolved these cultural norms and have actively modified them over millennia to meet new challenges as they have arrived. It’s impossible to deny the the immense social, political, technological, and ecological dangers we face given the way we are constantly reminded of of them by our modern, distributed, light-speed communication networks. But we have overcome other horrors, and have a good chance of overcoming these. Life, almost by definition, is the enforcement of homeostasis on a chaotic environment. Given our bias for negativity and danger, and the explosion of the frequency of these bleeding images and information, I’m pretty sure things are not nearly as hopeless as Brook imagines
The pendulum swings, we dodge it and rebuild usually stronger than before. Hope energizes, dispair immobilizes. If only to better our odds, we should choose the former.
HOLLY DAYS 