In May 2024 Nicholas Kristof wrote an opinion piece in the NYT that included the statement “The truth is that if you had to pick a time to be alive in the past few hundred thousand years of human history, it would probably be now.” Kristof is well known for his journalism in the service of humanitarian causes around the world that has helped raise our awareness for all the good and bad of human behavior and experience. So, if I choose to offer a critique of his statement is only because it raises interesting questions about how we make judgments about our human achievements and failures. By what criteria, to what end, and by whose perspective.
The first thought that comes to mind and one I have floated in a past blogpost is this: If we have not lived in past times how can we tell whether our times are the best ever? To answer a question like this, we first need to have some benchmark against which we make comparisons; and, second, we need to set the criteria by which we decide how close we are in meeting the benchmark. Neither of these – benchmark and criteria – offer themselves to easy answers.
So how can we tell humanity is at its best state? Should we set a benchmark relevant to the human species or to the whole natural world? Are we going to apply an individual or a collective benchmark? Since ancient times philosophers and religious thinkers have dealt with such questions. One answer is that humans attain happiness when they live the “good life.” But what is the definition of the good life? Is it enough to define it as a set of virtuous behaviors without accounting for the subjective experience of humans? Even the normative definition of the good life differs across cultures in the same era. It has also varied within cultures over time. In the Western tradition the good life has been understood differently during the Greco-Roman times than during the medieval times under the influence of Christianity. And it changed under the influence of the Enlightenment as it has in our times. And if we push the historic horizon further, we need to reckon with what the good life was for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Until the industrial revolution the good life was primarily defined by moral markers. Then gradually the good life came to be mainly identified by indicators of material wellbeing. As a writer put it the task of defining the good life moved from the philosophers to the marketers. Thus, GDP per capital, educational attainment, health, life expectancy, literacy rates, new discoveries are among the most popular criteria we use to judge the quality of human life. And it is true that in all these measures we are doing better now than in previous periods of human history. Does, however, progress in all the above measures result in experiencing the good life? Aren’t we confusing means for ends?
Even setting apart the above difficulties, when we proclaim our times as the best ever for humanity, we run the risk of ignoring the price we pay for our modernity. We also run the risk of glorifying our present economic and social arrangements and losing interest in seeking better ones.
A little more than a century into the industrial revolution, at the turn of the 20th century, the eminent sociologist Emile Durkheim developed the concept of anomie, a state of weakened social bonds and individual alienation, as the consequence of rapid social change under the influence of material and scientific progress. If anything, social cohesion and individual interconnectedness have declined since Durkheim’s days. A World Health Organization report shows that in a world of eight billion people, one billion suffers from some mental disease and only a fraction lives in countries where professional help is available. Loneliness, in particular, is fast becoming a social illness, especially in the US, contributing to diminished lives.
Material abundance also comes at a significant cost to its producers and our planet. Technology was supposed to ease the burden of labor and free time for nobler occupations. On the contrary, work remains a source of stress and unfulfillment. Global survey data show wide-spread job dissatisfaction and falling worker engagement with their jobs. A recent opinion piece in the NYT, had the sobering heading “Young Workers Are Miserable for Good Reason.” Among other evidence, it referenced a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research which found that despair among young workers has reached dangerous levels. The rapid growth of wants and the relentless pursuit of economic efficiencies translate into more work and less fulfilling and enjoyable conditions.
And while we try to meet the demand for greater consumption, much of it often excessive, the more we degrade the natural environment and contribute to the demise of our ecosystem. Ten years ago, the world set the maximum rise of global temperature at 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Recent measurements show we have already warmed the planet by 1.3 degrees.
Since the end of the paleolithic period about twelve thousand years ago, our remarkable achievements have moved us from a state of being threatened by the forces of nature to a state where we are a threat to nature. Ironically, though, we now stand at the cusp of being threatened by our own scientific prowess. This is due in big part to our failure to match our cognitive and scientific progress with the necessary moral courage to harness our extraordinary discoveries for the good of all humanity. Even now, too many of our fellow men and women are oppressed, too many die in wars and violence, and too many live in poverty.
Finding happiness in the good life as a species will continue to be elusive and will hardly mean the same thing for each one of us. As a writer put it, it requires space for individual fulfillment while holding us all together. To accomplish that we need the courage to change course when necessary. Against all the mental numbness created by our present predicament of material and technological abundance we should resist being trapped into thinking we have no other alternative.
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