Most people tend to find the era in which they live--not necessarily the one in which they came of age but the one in which they raise children, or at least are of child-bearing age--to be 'the scariest time in human history.' Given the alarming frequency of mass shootings, the improbable resurgence of what is euphemistically called "white nationalism," and the fact that our president gets in Twitter wars with world leaders of nuclear capable foreign powers, it appears the current era is no different. People are afraid, and believe they should be uniquely afraid given the fact that they perceive this era's dangers to far surpass that of any other time in human or at the very least recent history.
But while the inclination can be tempting, we should be careful waxing poetic about the 'simpler' dangers of previous eras. I personally do not believe we are living in a time of unprecedented danger, at least no more or less so than just about any other generation. I would not rather live in a pre-antibiotic world, where a scrape could kill me. I do not long for the days when women were subjugated to household slavery and treated as chattel. I do not harken back to a time when brown people, more so than being shot by police or imprisoned for minor offenses, were chased through the streets and lynched by angry mobs as entertainment. Nor do I mean to imply that our current era is one which has vastly improved from the times referenced heretofore. Certainly we are, or very nearly could be entering a new, terrifying post-antibiotic era where the medicines we have come to depend on for keeping our bodies staph free or washing our hands, or disinfecting our mouths are all going to cease working. Women are still fighting for equal pay in the best cases, and in the worst cases are still treated as slaves and chattel. Brown people's bodies are still at risk of a policeman's bullet or a hangman's noose.
As the decades and millennia pass by, each time period seems to trade one "scary thing" for another, the net effect of which is sometimes impossible to quantify as being worse or better than previous or future "scary things." While progress has undeniably been made in some matters, it has been slow or even slipped backwards in others. The phrase, 'If it's not one thing, it's another' seems to fit here. If nothing else, humans have proven themselves particularly talented at perpetuating and manufacturing strife, danger, and suffering.
So the question becomes, how do we look forward to a future that will surely bring along its own set of as-yet-unknowable terrors? How do we pretend to be satisfied with 'progress,' be it social, economic, medical, technological, or political, when the modern era has proven itself to contain its own unique set of dangers, atrocities, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles? I don't know how to answer this, and I suppose this feeling, this knowledge that atrocities replace other atrocities, fears replace other fears, and one type of suffering replaces another is what makes it difficult to "look on the bright side" or "celebrate progress." Does progress as we tend to think of it really exist or are we just running along an endless hamster wheel of death, destruction, and unfathomable suffering?
And yet, another peculiar thing about humans is that somehow we do generally look on the bright side. We remain optimistic enough to continue working at our jobs, raising our families, caring for aging parents. In our darkest moments we may feel like screaming into stranger's faces and collapsing into ourselves, but for the most part, the human mind tends to wrench sense and order from the most nonsensical and disordered scenarios. And however improbably, this instinct does indeed coexist with a rosy-hued fondness for the past. For a time when 'kids could play outside' or 'traffic wasn't so bad' or 'families were stronger' and 'people knew the value of hard work.' And of course, politically this fondness for a less scary, more wholesome past is known as conservatism, a political stance as bewildering and illogical as it is predictable given humankind's stubborn adherence to fairytale, folklore, and familiarity. Conservatism is a dangerous form of make-believe wherein the believer sees the past as one might see a dead child--wholly innocent, luminous, free from corruption and malice and something to be propped up for all to see as a bastion of human integrity. The attendant quirks that tend to go along with conservatism--deeply held religious beliefs, xenophobia, an allergy to government funded safety nets, are but accessories in the core belief that at all possible costs, you must restore the country/your town/your family/the world to the past. Thus, conservatism is a fool's errand, if you consider that from the grandest to the most microscopic level of material existence, the only thing constant is change.
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