subject: Is This World Better Now Than the One Before? [print this page] Is This World Better Now Than the One Before?
Pollsters love asking us how we feel, relatively (Do you think the country is on the right track? The wrong track?). Economists, businesspeople and policymakers wait anxiously every quarter on the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), a score that factors in assessments of hundreds of companies across dozens of industries, as well as government agencies, departments and websites; a score whose plummeting or soaring can make Wall Street do the same. Every year, press releases announce the latest findings of one or another survey of international happiness, which they might as well call the Scandinavia and Everyone Else Index or, more accurately still,The Denmark and Everyone Else Index. (In happiness surveys that use different weighting,Costa Rica often does very well trailed, naturally, by the irrepressible Danes.)
In the hundred years or so since we really discovered how our inner life worked, thanks particularly to that brilliant, bespectacled, sometime coke user infin-de-siecleVienna, there has been an explosion of inward-seeking and often obsessive inventory-taking of the self. By some measures, these endeavors appear to have grown more intense in the last decade or so, at least in the U.S., where pioneers in the "science of happiness" hedonics, positive psychology like Martin Seligman and Ed Diener, and bestsellers like Daniel Gilbert'sStumbling on Happiness and Gretchen Rubin'sThe Happiness Project, show that we are captivated by, if not entirely successful at, the pursuit of happiness, that third and most frivolous-sounding (if not at all frivolous) of the unalienable rights set down in the Declaration of Independence.
That's not what I'm interested in. Mine is a different, though related, question: Is this world we live in now better than the world of thirty, fifty, one hundred years go? Are we happier in it? More fulfilled? Has the percentage of human beings that might feel more fulfilled who would answer yes, say, if a pollster called them at home and asked them such a question has that number grown or shrunk?
The problem (if it's a problem) is that I don't see how the question can ever be answered.
So why should I care to ask a question that cannot be answered? Because so many people seem to have an opinion on it.
Mad Men watchers look in on the great interior design and sharp suits of the day, the apparent civility with which some people treat other people (men taking their hats off in elevators when women step in!); an America of such vast economic and political power and promise and they lament that in the last four-plus decades we have lost more than we have gained. A light has gone out.
Mad Men watchers look at the rampant sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, institutionalized alcoholism, shitty parenting, breathtakingly, mutually unsatisfying yin-yang of marital relations, and they want to kiss today's ground for how much better things have gotten in the last four-plus decades, and how we have gained more than we have lost. A light has turned on.
We can play that game for any period not just the early 1960's but the 1940's or the 1920's or the 1850's; the Enlightenment or the Dark Ages. Was the former really a time when a significant number of people were provably better off in their day-to-day life, in their emotional and spiritual life? Was the latter really a time when a significant number of people were provably worse off? What do I mean by "significant"?
So many Americans right now think we're on a worse track. That's not to be refuted; perception is reality. (Not to mention, in the case of people who are out of work, say, and who were employed a few years ago, that reality is reality.) But much of the national conversation now is focused on the idea that this time is not another time. Much of the Tea Party movement, dare I say, is fueled by an elegy about an America that once was, or at least an America that they think once was but probably wasn't.Michael Kinsley wrote about how Newt Gingrich took exception to Barack Obama's seemingly tepid embrace of the idea of American exceptionalism, during the 2008 presidential campaign. Retorted Gingrich, "No longer, in the left's view, are we the Americans of the frontier, the sturdy, independent farmers." Wait who would ever say that today's America is a nation characterized by the sturdy, independent farmer? Would anyone, of their own will, have said that about America in 1950? And just because politicians are legally bound to be optimists, was the era of the sturdy, independent farmer if ever there was one really an era anyone now would want to have lived through? (Mark Twain said a classic was a book that no one wanted to read but everyone wanted to have read.)
This comparing now to another time is not just a problem of the right. Indeed, if I might attempt a generalization, perhaps the distinction, the problem, is this: Conservatives look to re-create a world that never existed, or at least one in which most people would not benefit returning to (in the way that theMad Men world was not particularly pleasant for anyone but upwardly mobile white men, who were pretty miserable in it, too). Liberals, on the other hand, wish to create a world that never could exist, a paradise that is unattainable so long as human beings continue to be made the way they are, a "paradise" whose virtue (if one would ever call it that) is that misery is shared equally.
Nostalgia surely serves an evolutionary function. But there seems a fundamental problem in comparing the world of now to the world of then (forget, for now, the world to be). Every time we look back and feel fondness, we have to question the memory for at least these three reasons:
We were younger then and to the young, especially children, the world any world looks a certain way.
Memory's distance from the thing remembered is probably, if crudely, inversely proportional to its accuracy.
We yearn for certain things; weneed to remember things a certain way.
How can we ever know if this world right now, all things considered, is a better world than any other that has been? (Or that will be?) What metrics might we use to measure such a difference? Some now will say that today's world is demonstrably worse than ever because of the unprecedented fact of climate change. Seen through other eyes, though, for the most part there are far fewer people dying from warfare today than in most previous decades in absolute numbers, for one, but far moreso in percentages. (This is not to trivialize the particularly disastrous wars of late in Congo and Sudan.) It might be inarguable to say that there have never been so many people, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the human population, that have lived so well as they do today; then again, one might counter that there never have been so many persons in absolute numbers (though probably not by percentage) living in poverty. And then again (again), is the misery today as miserable as the misery of previous eras? What about happiness? Given the complications of modern life, and what we know of ourselves and what we may think we know of God (or not), is this a better inner life to know than our counterparts did two hundred years ago? What about 700 years ago? Did the people of 700 years ago shake their heads, thankful that they were not the people of 750 years ago? ("I am SO glad I didn't have to live through the mid-thirteenth century." "I know, right?")
When people lament what they have lost, what America has lost, what exactly are they lamenting? What did they lose? What did America lose? Have they lost while others have not? Does it make a difference if they haven't really lost something meaningful, so long as they feel they have? Is there any objective way to assess whether things have gotten better or not?
Maybe I should just shut up. I may someday pine for nostalgia.
