Jeremiah Tolbert

Michael Brotherton and I had a bit of a con­ver­sa­tion on the phone the other day—I don’t remem­ber the exact sub­ject, but we talked a bit about opti­mism for the eco­nomic and cli­matic future.  I expressed the usual dour pes­simism (“Paolo Bacigalupi is too upbeat for you,” I seem to recall him say­ing.)  Mike has an inter­est­ing post up recently about this whole issue of opti­mism as it relates to writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion and dystopias in par­tic­u­lar.

Mike calls bull­shit on Paolo’s state­ment that teenagers pre­fer dystopias because they sense the lie in opti­mism and “…our chil­dren will inherit a world sig­nif­i­cantly depleted and dam­aged in com­par­i­son to the one our par­ents handed down to us. And they know it…”  He makes some state­ments which I don’t find entirely con­vinc­ing regard­ing his own life—just because your life has improved doesn’t mean every­one has, nec­es­sar­ily.  The lives of my fam­ily have declined con­sid­er­ably in the last decade due to the econ­omy in par­tic­u­lar, and I think there are a few peo­ple out there whose lives are start­ing to see seri­ous effects from global warm­ing.  I can under­stand why some look at the future and they feel like we’re on a roller coaster about to make the big drop.  But then there’s a fas­ci­nat­ing link to a video in his com­ments that paints a very opti­mistic pic­ture about the qual­ity of life glob­ally over time.   So maybe ulti­mately things are con­sis­tently get­ting bet­ter for peo­ple, when taken as a whole (even if it does seem to suck pretty badly to be in Africa).

Personally, I think dystopias are pop­u­lar with teens because they fit that world view that EVERYTHING SUCKS that seems to come with the brain chem­istry of puberty.  And today, with all the news about dire eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal pre­dic­tions, maybe they buy into it even more heav­ily.   But I think teens just have a nat­ural pes­simism that comes along with being squeezed out of child­hood and into adult­hood, pos­si­bly not very will­ingly.  I know becom­ing a teenager pissed me off any­way.  I spent 4 years angry or depressed all the time for no good reason.

But to the mat­ter of adult opti­mism for our real futures…

The rea­son I have a hard time being opti­mistic about the envi­ron­ment in par­tic­u­lar is that I’ve watched our planet lose habi­tat after habi­tat and species after species for 20 years.  The Amazon will likely be a fairy tale today’s con­ser­va­tion biol­o­gists tell their grand kids.   Habitat destruc­tion in search of resources so our species can grow and build and extend is some­thing I can’t be opti­mistic about.  There’s lit­tle evi­dence to me that this trend will reverse any time soon, if ever.  Until devel­op­ing nations climb up out of poverty entirely, they’re going to slash and burn their resources to do it.   The planet becomes poorer for it in terms of bio­di­ver­sity which is some­thing I can’t explain the value of in the same way I can explain the value of a bar­rel of oil or hard­wood lum­ber.    So I won’t go into it here.  Another post, perhaps. 

Ultimately, it all comes down to the finite­ness of resources in my mind. Constant growth as demanded by cap­i­tal­ism is a phys­i­cal impos­si­bil­ity, as far as I can tell.  The world will run out of any num­ber of resources. Shit, helium may run out any day now.  Any num­ber of pre­cious met­als are becom­ing dif­fi­cult to find, met­als cru­cial in the man­u­fac­tur­ing of high tech devices.  Why is now any less likely than some time in the dis­tant future for resource deple­tion?   We hear news about peak oil, how we may have even already passed peak oil and begun our decline. 

And if you’re a mem­ber of the mid­dle or lower mid­dle class in the United States?  You have lit­tle to be opti­mistic about eco­nom­i­cally.  I defy any­one to give me evi­dence that my gen­er­a­tion will enjoy the same level of com­fort and sta­bil­ity that our par­ents did (or grand­par­ents in the case of my young par­ents who are hit very hard by this econ­omy as well).  Employer sta­bil­ity, this notion that you would have one excel­lent job for 35 years and then retire com­fort­ably?  Not for us.   Look at unem­ploy­ment rates among gen Y as well.    There’s an entire gen­er­a­tion grow­ing up to reach for the American dream only to find it miss­ing.  Can you fault them for won­der­ing if it were ever really there?

And yet, times have never been bet­ter for the megarich!  I sup­pose for them, the future has never looked brighter.  You’ll excuse me if I don’t share their opti­mism.  I wasn’t born with a plat­inum spoon in my mouth.

Our entire polit­i­cal sys­tem seems rigged in favor of the wealthy and their cor­po­ra­tions.  Do you think I as a small busi­ness can get away with pay­ing no or min­i­mal taxes like many mega­cor­po­ra­tions?  Of course not.   Did the wealthy really need a tax cut that increased our deficit by some­thing like 25%?  Of course they didn’t;  but they got it any­way.    And it just makes the future for us lower in the eco­nomic strata look even bleaker.  Our wages go down or stag­nate in real terms, and their net wealth con­tin­ues to sky­rocket into the stratos­phere.   I loathe the Tea Party and what they stand for, but I know where those peo­ple are com­ing from.  They see a world that increas­ingly is leav­ing them behind.  For both good and bad reasons.

For a good chunk of the peo­ple I know back home, their only hope of not strug­gling their entire lives for just enough income to get by is to win the lot­tery.   Or go on a game show run by the mega-​​rich which taunts them with the pos­si­bil­ity of win­ning money and then records their anguish when they lose it, and then they sell that fuck­ing anguish to you and I on net­work televisions. 

Seriously, is there any­thing more fuck­ing evil on tele­vi­sion today than shows like “Money Drop”?

Hell, I used to believe in the power of sci­ence to make the world bet­ter.  And I’ve spent my entire life watch­ing peo­ple in power reduce the public’s opin­ion of sci­ence to the point where more peo­ple in the U.S. ques­tion evo­lu­tion than believe in it, which to me is basi­cally on par with dis­be­liev­ing grav­ity.  The wealthy have attacked the public’s faith in sci­ence because it would have cost them money for us to believe that the planet’s cli­mate is being changed by their indus­tries.  An entire polit­i­cal arm of this coun­try dis­trusts the notion of experts.  The only sci­ence they care about is that which allows them to wring more money from the world.

And don’t fuck­ing get me started on the trav­esty that is our health care sys­tem in the U.S..  We are ALL one seri­ous ill­ness away from com­plete finan­cial oblit­er­a­tion.  Anyone who doesn’t believe that is a deluded fool or wealthy enough that noth­ing I have said here applies to them anyway.

Where’s my opti­mism?  Where’s my abil­ity to write sci­ence fic­tion like “The Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad?”  Where did I leave it?  And would it be delu­sional of me to even try and adopt it again?  That’s the thing, isn’t it? If you’re a pes­simist and your pes­simism doesn’t come true, you get to be happy along with the opti­mists.  But if you’re an opti­mist whose pre­dic­tions prove false, then there’s lit­tle to be happy about.  The pes­simist at least gets the grim sat­is­fac­tion of being right. Even if they’re no hap­pier about the out­come than the optimist. 

Now, by being a pes­simist, did they some­how help ensure that the opti­mistic vision would never come true? Possibly.  But as far as pre­serv­ing one’s own sense of ego, the pes­simistic belief sys­tem is a bet­ter bet.   At least I can rec­og­nize that in addi­tion to every­thing else.

I feel like Mulder on this sub­ject.  I want to believe that the world will only get bet­ter.  But some part of my intel­lect rebels at the notion.   Maybe when I’m not send­ing money back to Kansas to help my fam­ily out reg­u­larly, maybe then I will start to believe that things can improve.  But right now, I feel like we’ve begun an unprece­dented decline, and I’m not sure for my fam­ily this decline will reverse.   And maybe we were spoiled in the first place, and it shouldn’t mat­ter so much? People in Africa are starv­ing, right? 

Yes, most every­thing I say here is self-​​interested.  No need to point that out.  Life may be improv­ing leaps and bounds for the Chinese, but when it comes down to it, I don’t really care except in a very gen­eral sense. And if their life’s improve­ments have to come at the cost of our qual­ity of life, all that’s going to do is make folks even more angry and dis­il­lu­sioned with the future

I’m going to keep  look­ing for my opti­mism.  Things like that video give me a broader per­spec­tive and make me feel bet­ter about where we’ve come from.  It’s hard to see the bat­tle­field when you’re in the trenches.  Maybe we really are win­ning the war.  I’ll be as happy as any opti­mistic soul if it turns out to be the case.

Maybe even happier.