"The Perennial Orgy of Doom"
by Paul Rosenberg
"Doom rules public discourse these days; people can’t get enough of it and there is no end of people selling it. The problem is that 90 percent of it is wrong, massively overblown or a long, slow road to nowhere. But it does have a nice dramatic arc, placing you in the role of the hero. People have been crying doom for a very long time, and while problems certainly have arisen, they’ve also fallen away. Would you rather live in today’s world or the world of 1,000 BC? Or even 1,000 AD?
Life, you see, has become consistently better for humanity, even as so many of us complain from adulthood to the grave. And so I’d like you to see that crying doom has always been a huge seller, and that pronouncing doom upon anything broader than narrow areas has nearly always been wrong. Here’s one of my favorite old passages, from Hesiod, an ancient Greek writer, from the 8th century BC:
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint. And this may be my absolute favorite, found on an Assyrian tablet from 1,800 BC: "The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching."
So, “it’s all going to hell” may sell, but it’s also a consistent failure. Many of our more insightful thinkers, on the other hand, have noticed and rejected this perma-doom. The first passage that leaps to my mind is from Montesqieu: "Horace and Aristotle told us of the virtues of their fathers, and the vices of their own time, and authors down through the centuries have told us the same. If they were right, men would now be bears. Likewise Goethe, when he was very old and his friend said something along the lines of “We can’t lose you; there’s no one else who can do your job,” replied, “The earth will bring them forth, as it brought them forth before.”
The point here is this: We are massively wasting our time and energy. And much worse, we are displacing any positive vision for the future. If you were a hyper-dimensional super-villain and wanted to crush the human future, this would be how you’d do it.
I’ll leave you with a passage from the great historian, Will Durant. You may wish to spend some time working this into your consciousness. Hopefully you’ll dare to consider the wonderful things waiting for us once we shift our energies toward creating them. This shift will take time, but please try to give these concepts some space in you mind. Thank you.
"Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts - between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks."
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