About that handcart: Where’s it going?
Over the decades, and even centuries, people have variously claimed that we are, indeed, heading in the wrong direction.
As the old adage goes, we’re going to hell in a handcart.
Over the decades, and even centuries, people have variously claimed that we are, indeed, heading in the wrong direction. Whether it be Malthus and impending population crises, crime and the youth of today, secularism and waning religious belief, or climate change together with a return to warring nations, there are many who still advance this notion.
In his recent books including The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker has advocated for evaluating across multiple metrics to assess that things are much better than they were. Within his thesis, there is the allowance for blips in the general trajectory. While there may be much more favorable statistics on many crimes, on longevity, on education and human rights, there might be challenges here and there that cut against the grain for a short period of time.
The question for now is this: Are we generally moving in the right direction, are our current worries merely temporary downturns, or is there something more fundamentally worrying going on?
Global news is never easy viewing. In an era where we are more interconnected than ever, and where information and news spreads like Australian wildfires, it is easy to feel things are getting out of control. After all, bad news sells and is treated as more newsworthy than are positive stories.
War—superpower war— appears to be back with a vengeance. Politicians seem abjectly terrible at grappling with the challenges of climate change in light of lobbying and vested interests while island nations drown. Reproductive rights have been repealed. Life expectancies are not comfortably rising. Democracies are backsliding like a polar bear on the last vestige of Arctic ice. And I’m sure there’s a super-volcano we can predict will explode somewhere in the next decade.
As 2023 meanders to a close, we can be forgiven for thinking times are tough and are looking to be tougher.
Of course, there are things to be happy about: the rise of the “nones” in many countries, AI could really help us out (or…?), a reproductive rights backlash could continue in the US, we’ve entered a golden age of medicine (including there being an end to a global pandemic, and breakthroughs in cancer and Alzheimer’s research), and renewables are surging.
What can we make of our prospects next year as a species on this pale blue dot we call home?
There is a lot on the line in 2024 since seven of the world’s 10 most populous countries will go to the polls, making it the busiest election year in history. For all the good things we might hope for in the world next year, having the best people elected to take on the world’s challenges has to be top of the list.
Fingers (and ballot check boxes) crossed.
