Sometimes, I think about spices. If you go to your local grocery store, you can find all kinds. Black pepper, cumin, ginger, nutmeg, and turmeric spring immediately to mind. To think that five centuries ago men took great personal risk to travel around the world to get their hands on these seems pretty wild. To serve spices at your table demonstrated wealth and status, and now even those of modest means can enliven their plates with as much cardamom as their hearts desire. We just live in a different world from our forebears in certain ways. People of no remarkable wealth or status can treat themselves to spices from India, wine from Chile, and cheese from the Netherlands and scarcely think about it.
You wouldn’t know it from watching the news, but we live in prosperous and in many ways safe times. Cyclical famines have become far rarer, and fewer and fewer people work as subsistence farmers. Have you heard from smallpox recently? I haven’t. Infectious diseases are far more survivable, and cancer, while not yet cured, has gone from a sure death sentence to a treatable condition that our best medicine can manage. Violence too has declined in frequency and intensity in most of the world. Far fewer of us live in fear of the theft of our possessions of the killing of our loved ones by roving bands of armed thugs than ever before. Whenever things start to look bleak, when Antifa or Proud Boys or whatever group you want to blame causes violence and disorder, our eternal optimists tell us to calm down. We have truly seen a decline in violence and other unpleasantness in the last few centuries. Truly, it would seem that history is always on the side of the optimists.
Our eternal optimists find much justification in their celebration, and I join them in rejoicing at the comforts and medical advances we all enjoy. We do indeed live in a time when food is abundant, when medicine can cure many ills, when more have access to indoor plumbing and when fewer people die in war. Here, though, is the rub: I could have told you almost exactly the same thing in the spring of 1939 or the winter of 1913. I could even have even said similar things in the fall of 1860. Things have been getting better for a long time, and I hope they continue to do so. But we have to face the unfortunate reality that sometimes history just hands you a shovel and tells you to dig.
“Yes, the 20th century saw the world wars, but you have to understand that even in the 20th century, the world got less and less violent.” Great. I’m sure those guys whose guts got ripped apart by machine gun fire at Verdun feel really good that they just represent a blip in an otherwise secular trend of global improvement. Strange as it may seem, more than one thing can be true at one time. The world has been getting better, but catastrophically bad things can still happen. Just because you’ve seen improvement over a certain time span, doesn’t mean we won’t find a way to mess it up massively in the short term. When we talk about events and trends like this, we discuss not numbers on a ledger but lives, human lives. A difference of a couple hundred lives lost in a battle isn’t just a couple hundred measurable units. It represents the stifling of far more hopes, aspirations, and fond memories. It represents more people deprived of what makes life worth living, and the loss that means to those who care about them.
If we can look at global trends and be optimistic, though, we can also look at the headlines and be too pessimistic. Precisely because of the tremendous progress we have enjoyed, we have accustomed ourselves to norms possible only because of our peace and prosperity. We have enjoyed stable transfers of power for so long than anything that might destabilize that even in the slightest alarms us greatly. It is an enormous blessing not to live in a country where the sight of tanks in a residential neighborhood bears no remarking upon. We have seen and have survived great instability in this country, and I’m not talking about the Civil War. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 destabilized the country in its own way. The election of 1876 was more controversial even than the 2000 election, resulting in ominous cries of “Tilden or Fight” from embittered Democrats, and paramilitary campaigns against southern blacks paved the way for further racial repression the legacy of which we still deal with today. We survived the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and his naked disregard for civil liberties just as we survived the election of 1800, when there was serious talk of the military resolving the dispute.
Even considering historical context, though, can lead us down a primrose path of excessive optimism. Yes, we survived all of these things, but not without paying great prices along the way or without great compromises. And by “we,” I mean “the people who survived.” A lot of people who enlisted in the aftermath of Ft. Sumter did not live to see Appomattox. Making it through the struggles of the early republic, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights era did not come about idly. Real people who made tough choices made those things happen. Behind every secular trend of social betterment lies of the sweat of hard-working people many of whose names we will never know. Yes, the world has been getting better, but it hasn’t been getting better by itself.
There are two easy ways out of the present mess we find ourselves in. One is to believe in the always progressing improvement of human society. We trust it will continue because continue it always has. The other is to throw our hands in the air and cry “enough.” Despair is an all too natural reaction when confronted with challenges. But sometimes, history hands you a shovel and compels you to dig. A nation that wants to solve its problems trusts not in vague promises of ongoing processes, but in its own will to solve its problems. We will survive as a nation only if we choose to, and only if we agree to forge the tough and sometimes unsatisfying compromises and bargains that requires. And if that is really what you want, I can only say this: shut up and dig.