Dire times

The author Michael Chabon wrote this year about the conviction that the world is going to hell.

“These feel like such dire times,” he wrote, “of violence and dislocation, schism, paranoia, and the earth-scorching politics of fear.”

His essay was called “What’s the Point?” and toyed with the idea of laying the blame for this “precipitous decline” at the feet of the current American president, while recognizing that things may have been bad even before Donald Trump—we’re just more aware of it now that all news seems constantly like bad news.

Many of us in the Philippines might relate.

It’s difficult to be objective and avoid ’90s nostalgia given our subjective experience of the transport crisis, poverty, political division and diminishing trust in government institutions, as well as an overall feeling that laws, due process, presidential statements and values are mere noise and nothingness.

I wouldn’t be alone; optimism is in short supply even for those living comfortable lives free from violence, poverty and disenfranchisement.

I’ve run across several articles explaining how we think the world is doing much worse than it really is, because negative news tends to weigh on our consciousness more than positive news does. Writers of upbeat decade-ender articles talk about how poverty, health care, child mortality, lifespans, literacy and technology are better than they ever were.

We’re told that ours is a skewed picture of the world, and that, echoing Barack Obama’s sentiments in 2016, “if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now.”

Even as the Philippines lags behind its brothers, it has still experienced improvement in several spheres. A column in the Business Mirror recently listed improvements in local statistics like infant mortality, adult literacy, poverty rates and undernourishment.

So why doesn’t it feel like anything is better? Is it really because all of our attention is occupied by negative news—such as the re-emergence of previously eradicated disease? Or the country’s poor results in reading comprehension? Or distortion of truth and manipulation of facts? Or our deteriorating relationships with foreign nations?

Maybe there are no empirical data or indices for the things which give us the most hopelessness. How can I quantify the low-key daily fear that human rights might soon be completely meaningless?

How can I quantify rampant hostility on social media and the divisiveness in Philippine society, split up as we are into camps and echo chambers?

How can I measure the microaggressions of those emboldened by the misogyny, bigotry and thirst for violence of Trump and his Philippine counterparts?

Have we surveyed fears about constitutional change?

Even as we tout advances in technology, are these not counterbalanced by the fact that connectedness and information have become a tool for surveillance and political manipulation?

Maybe some things continue to get better even as vast portions of society continue to experience otherwise; but the things that are getting better are not getting better fast enough, and it’s easy to feel we’re not doing enough to stop those other things from getting worse.

If there’s a lesson for the new year, it might be that we can’t be blindly optimistic, but that we can’t let the weight of world news drive us into hopelessness either, as this in itself leads to inaction.

My fellow millennials and I thrive on using black, existential humor to deal with a sense of doom that our children might grow up in a world immeasurably worse than the technicolor years we grew up in, when adulthood promised fulfillment and opportunity rather than debt, fear and isolation.

The memes are funny, but the underlying sentiments are bleak. From the way things are going, it seems like there’s going to be more bad news abounding at the start of the new year; but we can greet it and the decade to come, if not with optimism then at least the knowledge that human progress isn’t entirely destroyed, and that there’s time yet to turn the tide.

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