Whatever you personally believe about the state of the world or our prospects for the future, humans simply don’t get to choose. You are here and will remain here, until you aren’t whether you like it or not.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Charles Dickens began his immortal A Tale of Two Cities, “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” While I never quite warmed up to the book in high school myself or even Dickens more generally, there’s a reason the opening lines have been remembered perhaps even more frequently than the work from which they originated. Dickens published the novel in 1859, while the industrial revolution was becoming an undeniable force in society. The combination of rapid changes in early technology, massive social displacement, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, and various other ills seemed insurmountable, but he wasn’t writing about the time he lived in. Instead, the novel is set at the onset of the French Revolution in 1775, which was some 85 years earlier and yet was still a time of massive unrest and upheaval, perhaps even more so than Dicken’s own day in many ways. Britain would shortly be at war with its own colonies in the United States. The streets of Paris would soon run with blood, first of the royals, then of the revolutionaries themselves, finally giving way to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte who would ultimately take the entire European continent to war. For his part, Dickens was aware of all this and yet still chose to make the comparison, claiming the two periods were similar down to how the intelligentsia at the time chose to describe them. The hidden or perhaps not so hidden meaning is that the same statement could be true of any period, that humans generally believe things are either the best or the worst with nothing in between, nothing ever just plain normal, everything always at polar extremes at the same time.
Fast forward another 165 years, and it seems that many have decided today is the worst of times rather than the best. While the phrase “worst possible timeline,” cribbed from the popular TV show Community, has replaced “worst of times” as the description of choice, there’s little doubt that many people seem to believe we inhabit some form of inescapable and inescapably tortuous dystopia, the victim of forces we cannot control who seem to want to make our lives miserable for no apparent reason than the old adage about misery loving company. In fact, if you run a search simply for “worst possible timeline,” results abound. There are articles and videos proclaiming that is surely the case. Matthew Maniaci, writing for The Medium two years ago, claimed “There is a common joke that, of all of the many timelines and universes in existence, we live in the worst one. I might have even made it at one point, since I have pointed out that, since 9/11 happened, nothing seems to have improved and everything seems to have actively gotten worse. What’s worse, it often feels like there are a whole bunch of people whose sole purpose is to actively make things worse. Whether it’s our country’s seemingly inevitable march toward fascism, the many active war zones in the world right now, or the collective shrug that many people seem to be giving to all of this, it often feels like nothing will ever improve. There is nothing but darkness, pain, and strife ahead of us no matter what we do.” When the more widely read The Atlantic asked, “How to Escape ‘the Worst Possible Timeline?” They began by laying out the facts as many people apparently see them, “The government is paralyzed by toxic polarization. Our economic and social systems make the rich richer and keep the poor poorer. Marginalized groups continue to fight against centuries of systemic injustices. A pandemic has killed more than 1 million Americans. Meanwhile, preventable ‘deaths of despair’—including suicide and deaths related to substance abuse—are on the rise. Fewer and fewer people are choosing to have children, citing not only economic concerns but moral ones: How could anyone bring an infant into a world as benighted by cruelty and injustice as this one?” Ultimately, they concluded the feeling was essentially positive rather than negative in a way because it’s a byproduct of wanting things to get better somehow or something.
Even for those who do not readily accept the complete worst of times view, there’s a sense among many that the world is in permanent decline, that our quality of life has gone down substantially compared to some undefined period in the past, and both trends lie beyond our individual control, as they have in the past or probably worse than they have in the past. In some ways, I understand this more limited view. Even if it’s not the worst of times, there’s a not entirely false feeling that events move far too fast for an ordinary person to keep up. Beyond the daily headlines broadcasting the latest doom and gloom, large or small, life or death, we’ve stumbled out of the massive global disruption of the pandemic to the worst inflation in forty years without any break in between. For almost a full year we couldn’t simply live our lives and once we could, our lives seem to have become to expensive, unaffordable for many. Is it any wonder there is a lingering dread among at least some that the new normal might well be periodic dislocations in our lives followed by large spikes in prices, that history will repeat itself again, sooner rather than later, and worse rather than better? If that weren’t enough of a challenge, the rise in inflation following the pandemic has also been accompanied by the emergence of a new, at times still somewhat mysterious and elusive technology that harkens back to classic science fiction dystopias, Artificial Intelligence. While most of the current applications have been rather benign, productivity improving tools, some or even many fear more changes to come, lost jobs, entire careers eliminated, futures threatened, and perhaps the entire human race if the most extreme views are to believed, leading to a bizarre war on data centers that support the very technologies we use every day. Though I might not personally agree, it strikes me as not unreasonable for some or even many to see all of these events as related, as if we truly were trapped in a sci-fi movie where a global disease leads to economic calamity, allowing our new computer overlords to sweep in and take control of the entire planet, managing everyone’s lives at the behest of shadowy corporations owned by remote, barely human if not actual alien billionaires. Humans, after all, are not entirely rational creatures and as the old saying goes, it can be difficult to discern the forest through the trees, or perhaps in this case, to see a forest when there aren’t enough trees to truly make one.
The reality, however, is that we are far more likely to be closer to the best of times than the worst of times in almost every measurable way. In fact, if you were to even try to explain to someone from 1775 or 1859 how we live today, they probably wouldn’t have been able to understand half of what you were saying because the language, the underlying science, and the technology hadn’t been invented yet or – even if the physical theory was developed – hadn’t yet made it into any practical implementations. In 1775, a horse was the fastest a human could travel on land, about 45 miles per hour at a full gallop though that couldn’t be maintained for long and the actual rate of travel for an expert rider over the course of a day was barely 20. Before any form of telecommunications, this was also the maximum rate information could travel. Paul Revere didn’t declare “one of by land, two if by sea” because he wanted to. Instead, it was the only way to signal people from afar. By 1859, the steam locomotive had been invented, but the early versions weren’t much faster than horses. Some could top out at 60 miles per hour for short distances, but most traveled at a meager 20 to 30. Of course, even at 60 miles per hour, you could only travel where there were tracks, which only ran for 26,572 miles across the entire United States. California for instance, only had 22 miles of total track in the entire region. Even as late as 1883, it took Teddy Roosevelt almost four full days to travel from New York City to the Dakota Territories, a distance of barely 1,400 miles. In other words, the average person was almost entirely stuck, unable to move about freely or until the telegraph was popularized in the late 1830s, send a message at any faster pace – assuming you had the money to pay for a telegram which wasn’t inexpensive by any means. During the Civil War, for example, a simple telegram of just a few words cost $1 compared to an average salary for a soldier of less than $16 per month. If you wanted to reach England, it would cost an incredible $100, or upwards of $2,000 today. What are the odds anyone would believe that much less than two centuries later, you could hop on a plane to Dakota and be there in a couple of hours, drive in less than a day, or simply send a message complete with video anywhere in the world at any time, practically for free?
If you consider that recorded sound wasn’t invented until 1887 and broadcast until 1906, and recorded moving pictures were not invented until 1892 and broadcast until 1926, the very idea of capturing and broadcasting someone speaking into a camera would’ve been impossible to many in the first place. It’s not even clear if the leading thinkers of the day would’ve believed it was possible or assuming they did, that it would be so widely used, freely available, and somehow hooked up to the equivalent of every library on the planet and fully accessible by voice control. Indeed, most of them probably would’ve said you were insane and recommended you be committed to the rest of your natural life. For better or worse, this would not likely be long: The average life expectancy in 1775 was only 35 to 40 years with some 30% to 40% of children not making it to adulthood. Even in 1859, life expectancy topped out around 43 years with a similar rate of childhood death. If you were lucky enough to make it to 20, you had a reasonable chance of making it to 60, but the odds of doing so were only around one in three. Even setting aside countless advances in medicine, at least some of this was because the standard of living was extremely poor. The average person – to be clear, I should say the average person who was not a slave and actually had some level of freedom and autonomy – spent up to an incredible 70% of their income on basic food and necessities in 1775 assuming they could find what they needed to begin with, most working grueling jobs farming, hauling, or otherwise engaging in backbreaking labor. Even in 1859, the figure was around 50% and while some were lucky enough to work clerical jobs at that point, many toiled on railways, farms, and other incredibly difficult physical labor. Further, while everyone complains about prices today, a quart of milk ran about $4.02, almost double the cost now, and while a pound of meat was about the same, a bushel of potatoes would cost you an incredible $40. By 1859, there were some of what we might consider modern conveniences, but good luck affording them when something as basic as a sewing machine could run over $5,000.
Between the lack of travel, either the lack of communication or the expense of it, and the short life span, we can summarize what life was like in a few lines: The average person was largely confined to one place, unless they were extremely adventurous or rich, reduced to spending the vast, vast majority of their time simply surviving and many would fail to do even that for long. Assuming our hypothetical person from the past believed a word you said, they would almost certainly conclude you lived in the best of all possible times, an age of wonders and plenty that was almost – if not completely impossible – for them to conceive. Further, if you were to detail the challenges of today – and certainly, life has never been easy – in an attempt to explain why so many think we live in the worst of times, they would’ve simply have shrugged for the world they lived in was ever at war, people were always dying, someone was starving, someone suffered from disease, someone went without, and bad things simply happened to both good and bad people, once again assuming you were not a slave and owned by someone else entirely. Then, this hypothetical person probably would have recommended you be committed once again for refusing to accept how much better you have it than 99% or more of those who have lived in the entire history of the world. While this might not make it the best of times – largely because there’s no such thing as the best of times in a world where there will always be room for improvement – it certainly makes the case that it is the best time to be alive and even if it didn’t, there is no other time for us anyway. Whatever you personally believe about the relative quality of the times, humans simply don’t get to choose. You cannot transport yourself to another era as easily as you do to another state or country. You cannot wake up in the future, at least with the current state of technology. Instead, you are here and will remain here, until you aren’t whether you like it or not. Thus, there is a choice before us this Labor Day or indeed any day: You can live your life as best you can, finding the pleasures and enjoyments you can in world with more of them than ever before, or you can whine about how bad things are, convince yourself they are gonna be worse, and waste your days being miserable. I know what I’m choosing…
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 