| Positively
pessimistic |
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Everyone tells me I should be more optimistic, and I’m sure they have good reasons for doing so. One anecdote should suffice to illustrate my general mental outlook. Some hours after my daughter was born, her aunt, my sister, came to the hospital to welcome her to the world. As we stood over her being pulled into her steady, disquieting newborn gaze, I said something along the lines of, “Just think, in sixteen years, she’ll be crashing a car into a telephone pole!” My sister gave me a look of horror and disapprobation. From her point of view, I was souring one of the most moving moments life has to offer with an image of disaster. From my point of view (after 40-plus hours of high adrenaline and no sleep), I was being humorously ironic. That I would find humor in such a remark probably reflects poorly enough on me, but the fact is I’d been imagining that telephone pole and plenty of other worst-case scenarios (the coming influenza epidemic, the devastating Jiffy Mix industrial accident of 2009, the drunken adolescent male blowing through the red light, and so on) throughout my wife’s pregnancy. I usually rationalize such dark thoughts on the principle that if you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed, and on occasion you’ll be pleasantly surprised. But really this is just the perverse way my brain works: give me a reason to be optimistic, and I’ll give you three reasons why you’re wrong. Optimism might as well be a synonym for willful ignorance. Nevertheless, I made a resolution this year to become more attuned to silver linings, small mercies, simple pleasures, and other similar hooey. What motivated me, to be frank, was fear. A study conducted by several Dutch psychiatrists and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry this past fall confirmed the cliché that optimists really do live longer. The effect was particularly strong on cardiovascular health but had a measurable effect on all causes of mortality, even after the results were adjusted for factors like smoking, drinking and high blood pressure. Devotees of the “mind-body connection” have seized upon this study as validation that we can, to some degree, will ourselves to be well. I don’t know much about the mind-body connection (assuming there’s any separation between the two to begin with), but that didn’t stop me from envisioning myself dying of heart failure 15 years from now as a prematurely old and bitter man. My pessimism convinced me to try being more optimistic. I might have had more success at refurbishing my outlook if I hadn’t decided right after the New Year to pick up Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Diamond’s Pulitzer-winning previous book, Guns, Germs and Steel, was one of those rare marvels that manage to confirm everything you knew was true while simultaneously forcing you to understand it all in a wholly new light—a history of the rise and triumph of Western civilization as told from the geographer’s perspective Diamond credited not the Westerners themselves (societies around the world were largely developing along the same lines, just at a slower rate) so much as the environmental conditions with which they were blessed, including large temperate zones, many domesticable plant and animal species, and natural trading routes that allowed for the wide dispersal and intermixing of innovation. Guns, Germs and Steel is one of very few books written in recent decades that could be truly considered required reading, and it is clear from the scope and ambition of Collapse that Diamond hopes lightning will strike a second time. Diamond’s
main argument in Collapse is that environmental conditions are only
one (albeit major) piece of the puzzle in the history of civilizations,
the other being whether or not a civilization manages to live within
a given environment in a sustainable fashion. Along the way, he
traces the rise and fall of historical civilizations from Easter
Island to Viking Greenland, all of whom committed varying forms
of eco-suicide, before turning his attention to the modern world’s
“exponentially accelerating horse race” between resource
depletion and environmental awareness. For my money, the most interesting
part of the book comes at the end, when Diamond turns to the question
of why a society might “choose” to fail. His most compelling
reason, and the one most pertinent to our lives today, is that people
in general (and, I would add, wealthy, well-fed people in particular)
have an enormous capacity for deceiving themselves into thinking
the status quo can be maintained indefinitely, maybe even infinitely.
He notes that for most of the cultures in his case studies, the
ecological disasters they faced usually followed closely on the
heels of their most prosperous (and not coincidentally their most
wasteful) eras. In other words, optimism—foolish, blindered
optimism—is what killed the Vikings in Greenland and all the
rest; and if the unique continent of Australia becomes the world’s
next Sahara desert in the next 50 years, it will be at the hands
of criminal optimists, who maintain against all clear evidence that
the land can continue to sustain high levels of sheep and cattle
ranching, cotton and wheat farming, and a population three times
the size it is today. |
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