To live in hope

Rudy Francisco is a ‘slam poet’ who enjoys reading to an audience, especially in competitions.  He’s been very successful, from winning his first individual poetry slam in 2007, [i] to coming first in the National Poetry Slam in 2017, as leader of the San Diego Team he founded and mentored. [ii]  He also publishes his poems, most recently ‘Helium’, which came out in 2017.

In that book, one of the poems addresses hope:

Remember,

you will survive,

things could be worse,

and we are never given

anything we can’t handle.

When the whole world crumbles,

you have to build a new one

out of all the pieces that are still here.

Remember,

you are still here.

The human heart beats

approximately 4,000 times per hour

and each pulse,

each throb,

each palpitation is a trophy, engraved with the words

“You are still alive”

You are still alive.

So act like it. [iii]

Do we live in an age of hope or despair?  When I was younger, working, I always believed that whatever the problem I was facing, there was a solution.  The challenge was to find it, but I was always confident the answer could be determined.  Ever the optimist, I once read Alexander Pope’s lines from his oddly named 1734 poem ‘An Essay on Man: “Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest.”  I know some read that as a cynical comment, hope against a less than hopeful future, but I saw it as true:  we always hope and strive to be blessed, even when the odds might seem overwhelming.  In this famous work, Pope was trying to rationalise the unknowable ways of God, and it helps to read the two lines before the quote I’ve just given: “What future bliss, he gives not thee to know, But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.” [iv]

I find Pope and Francisco timely buffers against the massive amount of despair, cynicism and fear I see around me.  Both poets signal the centrality of hope, but it is Francisco’s reminder that we can handle anything, that we are alive, and so we should “act like it” that hits home for me.

There are two ways in which people can be positive about the world and what is going to happen.

You can be a ‘blind optimist’, and just believe everything will turn out right, and there we are.  I have a major problem with blind optimists:  they live in a world where life will just get better by itself; I live in a world where things will only get better because of what we do.  We act in order to make a better life for ourselves and for everyone around us, even if all we add is a tiny contribution to the progress of the whole.  Optimists need to have their eyes open, ready to act, not be blind.

The alternative to being blind is to look for evidence that the world is getting better, seeking some factual evidence.  For this we can turn to Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist and linguist, whose earlier work on language I found quite fascinating, despite his commitment to a computer learning model of language acquisition, where language is fundamentally based on a human capacity for logical reasoning.  Incidentally, that view led him to dismiss music as such, regarding it as an unimportant cognitive phenomenon, merely something that happens to “stimulate important auditory and spatio-motor cognitive functions”!  He has compared music to “auditory cheesecake”, saying “As far as biological cause and effect is concerned, music is useless”.[v]  Thanks, Steven: so much for computers and rationality, and thank heavens for composers and musicians!

With that happy aside, we can turn to Pinker’s more recent work, and especially his newest book, “Enlightenment Now”. [vi]  In this comprehensive overview, Pinker presents statistics and charts to demonstrate life has been getting better in just about every way you can imagine. Globally, improved health care has dramatically reduced infant and maternal mortality, and many more children are better fed, better educated, and less abused. Workers make more money, are injured less frequently, and retire earlier. In the United States, fewer people are poor, while elsewhere in the world, and especially in Asia, billions fewer live in extreme poverty, (in 2017 defined as an income of less than a dollar and ninety cents per day). Statistics show that the world is growing less polluted and has more parks and protected wildernesses (despite the US President’s current efforts). Carbon intensity, a measure of the amount of carbon released per dollar of G.D.P., has also been falling almost everywhere, a sign, Steven Pinker suggests, indicating we are capable of addressing our two biggest challenges, poverty and climate change, and doing so simultaneously.

There is a great deal more included in his book.  The global data also shows there are now fewer victims of murder, war, rape, and genocide. Life expectancy has been rising, and regulations and design improvements have resulted in a decline in accidental deaths (car crashes, lightning strikes). Despite what we often read, students today report being less lonely than in the past, and, although many Americans feel working hours have increased, studies show that men and women alike have more leisure time than their parents did (ten and six hours more per week, respectively).

The book is packed with an overwhelming collection of data. Enlightenment Now’s message is simple: progress is real, meaningful, and widespread, a very good reason to be optimistic today.  However, if these are the facts, the question becomes as to why we have so much trouble acknowledging things are getting better, with pessimism widespread, rather than optimism.

Steven Pinker places much of the blame on the news media, which he considers concentrate almost entirely on ‘of-the-moment’ crises and systematically under-report positive, long-term trends. The power of bad news is magnified, Pinker writes, by a mental habit that psychologists call the “availability heuristic”: because people tend to estimate the probability of an event by means of “the ease with which instances come to mind,” they get the impression that mass shootings are more common than medical breakthroughs. We’re also guilty of “the sin of ingratitude.” We like to complain, and we don’t know much about the heroic problem-solvers of the past. “How much thought have you given lately to Karl Landsteiner?” Pinker asks. “Karl who? He only saved a billion lives by his discovery of blood groups.”  [vii]

When I talk about findings like those Pinker has reported, the standard response is “yes, but”, and the contrary is then explained.  People might be living longer, but here in the US, life expectancy is getting shorter; there may be less homicides, but more and more people are being killed in mass shootings; and so the responses continue.  Ignoring facts to the contrary, it is as if we determined to disagree the world is good, and our lives are getting better.  Why?  Do we want to be pessimists?

Perhaps there are a number of strands to this.  We could begin with the baby boomers.  For decades, this group held the centre of attention:  they moved on from being radicals to business builders, from being poor to being wealthy.  And now this same group is surprised to find it is being moved aside, retired, and is feeling increasingly out of touch with the changes that are taking place today.  The baby boomers might need to be renamed the ‘grumpy generation’, working hard to hang on to their wealth, blaming the government for finding ways to take their money away, and fearful of the young smart kids who are creating new businesses that destroy older familiar enterprises whose business models are out of touch, while also developing new ways of working.

Sounds journalistic?  Try Joan William’s study of the group she calls the ‘white working class’. [viii]  Her book is about class in America, and she distinguishes four key groups:  the (very) rich, the elite class of doctors, lawyers, finance specialists and the like, the working class and the poor.  No middle class?  The terminology here can be confusing. Usually when we talk about the working class, we mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 back in 2008. That is today’s working class, seeing problems above and below them.

The way Williams explains it, this group was the middle-class years ago, at a time when incomes kept growing, and their position in society was acknowledged by all.  But the past few decades have seen a major change in employment.  White collar work as well as skilled blue-collar work has been squeezed by efficiencies unleashed by robots, IT, outsourcing, offshoring and many other new technologies.  As they see these changes, the new working class concludes those above them, the elite, want to exploit them, evidenced by the high fees charged by lawyers and doctors.  Below them are the poor, who, as the working class sees it, are pandered to by government agencies, and supported by the elite, both of whom are constantly the pushing services and support the poor need.

In the middle, incomes are under pressure, costs keep increasing, and governments ignore their needs.  What is being proposed?  An increase in the minimum wage?  How can this help them?  When asked, Williams reports, they explain they want steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life.  With past confidence and certainties disappearing, the white working class has a frustrated sense of lost entitlement, a sense well exploited by Donald Trump, promising to listen to their needs (even while he fails to do much to help them).  This is a huge group of ignored and angry people, who feel left out.  When Fox News reports everything is going bad, the reasons include the exploitative behaviour of liberal elites, governments, and all those major corporations taking their businesses and jobs offshore.  The white working class knows what they hear is all true.  There are no good stories from their perspective.  Pessimism and anger are deeply intertwined.

There’s even more to the sense of pessimism, of course.  It is also a function of the salience of ‘bad news’ as opposed to ‘good news’.  The stories get prominence are those that have some kind of adverse human impact; they catch our attention.   Suppose a news channel has to consider a story about improvements in reducing child mortality in hospitals, or the case of a woman who went for an operation and the wrong leg was amputated.  The latter will grab more ‘eyeballs’, and more viewers will increase that station’s ability to grow its advertising revenue.  Bad news sells.

Perhaps a comparison between fifty years ago and now might show that the balance of news has shifted, too.  Then, the mainstream newspapers reported on events in a calmer, more unemotional fashion, leaving ‘human-interest’ stories to the other news-sheets and magazines.  Now, dramatic real-life stories appear in newsprint, magazines, television, social media, on iPhones and on computers, a relentless flood of tales about what is going wrong, alongside continuous ‘news’ items about film stars and pop groups, where viewers’ fascination is torn between longing to be ‘like them’, and avidly following their personal stories, a bewildering compilation of expensive clothes, cars and homes, and salacious gossip about affairs, failures, abandonment, and petty crime.

Feeding in to this have been two rather different political narratives.  On one side, the conservative parties constantly denounce government, which claim is taking away money to serve its own needs, building resentment.  On the other, for liberals a focus on marginalized groups has led to the belief society has been failing in addressing suffering, establishing a culture of “victimhood,” in which one group after another seeks recognition.  One statistic Pinker didn’t include, was claims for liability and compensation have increased, reflecting the rise of a society obsessed with allocating blame. Thanks to cable news, talk radio, and Facebook (among others), we are encouraged to have strong opinions, sustaining our belief that catastrophe is all around us, reinforced by a continual overstatement of what’s wrong, (“Everything is terrible” is a stronger view than “Things are pretty decent.”).  Perhaps ubiquitous technologies to deliver news, especially to smartphones, increase the power of media to influence our moods, too. There’s a disaster happening, right now: pay attention!

It seems we have manufactured a culture of pessimism: if it can go wrong, it will.  We look back to history, and instead of learning what we have achieved, we are presented with a litany of disasters and mistakes: events are about wars, wars become focussed on battles, and battles are about bodies, dead warriors and maimed returning soldiers.  We read biographies of the ‘great and the good’, to learn they were flawed and far from perfect.  In Australia, we live by the tall poppy approach: if a person stands out or is doing well, chop him or her down, to restore the overall sense of mediocrity.  Remain alert, scared of change, scared of the crazy person with a gun, scared of drugs, scared of the dangers on the streets.  Make no mistake, it’s better to be scared, because things will get worse.

All wrong.  Steven Pinker is right:  the world is far better a place to live in today than it was thirty, fifty, or a hundred years ago.  It can be even better.  Not because of a blind belief that things will improve, but because we should continue to strive, to improve the quality of life for everyone, to reduce inequalities and exploitation, and repair and rebuild our environment.  Should?  We must.

Realistic practical optimism: “You are still alive.  So act like it.”

 

[i] https://www.lataco.com/from-a-stutter-to-tonight-show-how-rudy-francisco-became-a-poetry-slam-champion/

[ii] https://sdvoice.info/san-diego-poetry-slam-team-celebrates-national-championship-win/

[iii] Rudy Francisco “Helium’, 2017, Button Poetry

[iv] Out of copyright, the whole poem can be read here: <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44899/an-essay-on-man-epistle-i

[v] A view criticised by many: see Joseph Carroll < http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Carroll_C98.html>

[vi] Published by Viking, 2018

[vii] Op cit

[viii] Joan C Williams, White Working Class, Harvard Business Review Press, 2017

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