Peril and Progress:
A Historical Lens on Current Crises
Reading time: 5 minutes
punditman says…
I was a toddler during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I learned later from my Mom how distressing those two weeks were, especially for young mothers who wondered what the point of having kids was if we were all going to die?
One objective truth that appears ever present is that the world has always been a hot mess. Year in, year out, decade to decade, epoch to epoch, humanity lurches from one crisis to the next. Torn and frayed, the human experiment endures.
And every now and then things reach a flash point.
The present era — from COVID-19 and all its societal impacts, to Ukraine to Gaza, to A.I., to the global housing, mental health and opioid crises, to the existential threats of climate change and 13,000 + remaining nukes — can be agonizingly depressing, infuriating and immobilizing.
It’s hard to tell where the current trajectory is headed, other than to say it’s looking fairly grim.
That said, peering into the past can provide valuable insights and, I hope, a needed perspective.
First, I think it’s worth exploring why we always think everything is falling apart in the present, as we look at the past through rose-tinted specs.
To begin, everything is always falling apart. Let’s get that out of the way. The “good old days” only ever really exist in our minds, often privileged ones. Sure, there are plenty of lucky souls who sail alongside history’s tempestuous storms relatively unscathed, but countless others absorb the full impact, suffering unimaginable horrors.
It would be hard, say, to convince some hapless bloke who went “over the top” on July 1, 1916, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, that the “war to end all wars” was anything but an utterly wretched ordeal that marked the utter collapse of civilization.
On that fateful day, British forces suffered approximately 57,470 casualties, including 19,000 killed — marking the deadliest day in the history of the British Army.
History is littered with countless examples: The Blitz, Dresden, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, napalm, carpet bombing, Rwanda, Shock and Awe, the Russia-Ukraine meat grinder.
Imminent Doom: An Ongoing Human Odyssey
One vague memory of awakening to the reality that larger forces may dictate my destiny — and not in a good way — places me as a youngster listening to a front hall chat between my Dad and my older sister's rebellious girlfriend. The discussion involved Cold War tensions and America’s bloody war in Southeast Asia.
“Once China gets into it, we're all dead anyway,” quipped Debbie the hippie chick.
On another occasion, church friends of my parents — a couple — were visiting and we were watching the news. America was literally on fire, as civil rights and anti-war protests had ignited a tinderbox.
“I don't know, all I can say is we have a helluva lot better country up here than what they have going on down there,” commented Mrs. Morris — her sentiments a mix of revulsion with America’s decaying social order and a burgeoning Canadian patriotism.
A few years later, I found myself delivering the Sunday Sun newspaper when the Yon Kippur War began. The headlines looked truly apocalyptic. Around that time, I started hearing rumours about the end of the world as foretold by literalist Biblical interpretations of the Book of Revelation.
Dad, a man of quiet faith, assured me that there had always been people standing on rooftops waiting to be lifted up to heaven. Ignore them.
A couple of years after that I heard on the radio that according to the predictions of some wing nut, the world was to end the following Sunday.
Not only would I have to forget about the school dance, but sure enough, on that divinely decreed day, the winds began to howl, the sky turned grey and my teenage angst quietly cranked up. It's all fun and games until you start to lose your sense of reason. As luck would have it, Monday arrived.
Society staggered forward. There would be crazed suicide cults, more wars and rumours of wars, and by the mid-1980s the number of nuclear weapons in the world reached over 70,000. Then the Berlin Wall came down and the “end of history” was declared by Francis Fukuyama who perhaps should have listened to Mr. Spock in The City on the Edge of Forever when he explained to Captain Kirk that “…time is fluid, like a river, with currents, eddies, and backwash.”
And so the meandering stream of history continued, soon to include more genocide, ecoside, Y2K, 9-11, Forever Wars, Surveillance Capitalism, the Censorship Industrial Complex — punctuated by rounds of seemingly intractable Middle East bloodshed.
Not to mention a torrent of lies and propaganda, injustices, scandals, coups, revolutions, incursions, protests and reforms.
In reality, human progress is achieved haphazardly: one step onwards, several steps back, a great leap forward followed by a check step, a side shuffle, a dance with the devil and a waltz with the better angels of our nature.
Meanwhile the “end is nigh” has been proclaimed by every doomsday prophet and catastrophe peddler since the first cave grifter predicted calamity in order to sell stone tool insurance. These scammers are history’s party poopers. Ignore them too.
Facing the Omnicrisis
I’m not trying to diminish the multitude of interlocking challenges, polarizing problems and ontological threats we presently face.
But to meet this “omnicrisis” it is helpful to look in the rear view mirror from time to time.
Because when we do, what history tells us is that violence begets violence, escalation leads to unforeseen consequences, humiliation leads to revenge and the cycle of hate and destruction goes round and round.
But history also shows us an abundance of human courage, resilience and compassion. Those directly victimized and traumatized by today’s cruelest calamities deserve nothing less from the rest of us.
And hopefully more — history’s roller coaster be damned.
As fellow Substack writer Patrick Mazza over at the The Raven wrote: “Dark times can crush us or summon the best in us."
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Reminds me of a night I spent under the stars listening to YoYo Ma and Emanuel Ax sending Beethoven's Cello Sonatas into the universe. We're a mess but we also have moments of the sublime.
What you’re saying is true that we’ve always been on the edge of disaster and there have always been horrific wars and atrocities and humans generally being awful to another “tribe”. HOWEVER, never before have we actually faced the extinction of everything we know because of what we’ve done since the Industrial Revolution with releasing so much carbon into the atmosphere that we’re continuing experiencing extreme weather events around the planet. Nobody can escape this. We have passed the tipping point and I don’t see things changing. We have collectively decided to go off this cliff together like Thelma and Louis.