Cassandra, Meet Pollyanna

Three hundred-odd years ago Jean-Jacque Rousseau wrote "Almighty God, thou who holds all spirits in thy hands, deliver us from the Enlightenment and fatal arts of our fathers and give us back ignorance, innocence, and poverty, the sole goods that might create our happiness and which are precious in thy sight." You'll find similar sentiments in Plato.  They've been echoing down the ages since the Fall, I guess. The contradiction they harbor is most succinctly conveyed, perhaps, by the old Italian saying: "We were better off when things were worse."

In an article that appeared recently in the New York Times, free lance psychologist Adam Mastroianni makes an effort to explain why we so often feel that everything's going downhill—even though by most statistical measures the opposite is true. It carries the title "Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse." He bases his argument on what he calls two "well-established psychological phenomena."

1. We often seek out and pay attention to negative information. Our news sources, whatever they may be, emphasis such information. I'm referring here not only Fox News but also the more well-researched, mature, and reliable liberal press. The issue of the Times in which the article I'm referring appeared also carried headlines on page one informing us that nutritional science "is failing us"; that very few states includes climate change education in their curriculum for all twelve grades; that the night sky as we know it is disappearing due to light pollution and wildfires; and that the late Cormac McCarthy's celebrated writing career "would never happen today."

I have grown increasingly sensitive over the years to the fact that headlines and lead paragraphs, whatever the news happens to be, often carry adjectives such as "alarming," "unsettling," and "surprising." Alarming to whom? To the economists, pundits, scientists, and pollsters whose prognostications more often than not turn out to be wrong, one way or the other?

2. Mastroianni's second point is that over time we tend to forget about the bad stuff, and as a result, the past develops the sheen of a Golden Age. No argument there. In fact, thirty-five-odd years ago I made the same argument in a piece titled "Cultural Requirements." And due to the marvelous powers of desk-top computing, I can easily find the text and reproduce a few lines here. (You can read the entire essay in my book Mountain Upside Down.)

It is of the essence of culture, I think, in its nutritive capacity, to be exemplary rather than typical or symptomatic. Those who argue differently face a Catch-22, the illogicality of which has not in any way diminished its popularity as a journalistic hook. It goes like this:

A) Culture is in decline. Look at TV, look at films, etc.

B) But no, look at this fine book, or this jazz performance.

A) Yes, but the things you’ve just mentioned aren’t truly representative. The masses know nothing about them. They’re the tastes of an elite. Therefore, culture is in decline.

 The flaw in this line of analysis stems from a stubborn determination to equate mass culture, which is only occasionally significant, and exemplary culture, which may well be unpopular or obscure in its day, although it increases in significance with the passage of time. Anyone who expects popular culture to rise to the level of that body of resilient works of art and thought which, having retained their vigor through time, offer us a vision of the past, is bound to be disappointed. No one in our day is likely to be as cryptically profound as Heraclitus, as proper as Confucius, as compassionate as Christ, as noble as El Cid, as observant as Jan van Eck, as cosmic as Giordano Bruno, as feverishly romantic as Cervantes, as clever as Shakespeare, as sublime as Mozart, as charismatic as Napoleon, as melancholy as Leopardi, as guileless as Therese of Liseaux, as intellectually perverse as Wittgenstein, or as humane as Jean Renoir. When we examine the climate of our own times the commonplace habits and artifacts we meet up with daily or read about in the papers, and not the isolated ideas and images that posterity will remember us for, tend to dominate our field of view. Therefore, it would appear that our culture is “in decline.” It’s a simple matter of perspective.               

Nicolas of Cusa, writing at the end of the fifteenth century, argued that the infinitely large and the infinitely small amount to the same thing, which is God. It’s a thought worth pondering; yet I must say that in the end the idea of “infinity” in either form, being mathematical and abstract, leads us away from the truth. Whatever else he, or she, (or they?) may be, God is not an abstraction. Nothing real is abstract.

I’m more inclined to endorse the remark of Thomas Aquinas that “we know God implicitly in everything we know.” But this slant presents us with problems as well. Perhaps we ought to dispense with the theological nostrums altogether, (though they’re always there, in the logical substratum of our personal attempts to show or to explain the way we feel about things) and merely echo the sentiment of an odd and now slightly obscure French novelist, Henry de Montherlant, who once wrote: "Life is a wonderful thing. When you turn it over and examine it thoroughly, when you see that which is, you feel like getting down on your knees. That which is—three remarkable syllables!"

Mastroianni extends the argument to other aspects of modern life, including politics and morals, but the reasoning is the same. Yet he bases his argument, not on reasoning, but on 574,000 survey responses. He writes:

While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity and to explain where it comes from.

Well, it hardly seems necessary to interview that many people to get at the truth. All you need to do is look inside your own head. 

Modern life presents us with plenty of serious challenges, needless to say. But I think Flaubert was right when he remarked, two hundred-odd years ago: "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times."

One avenue I might recommend to improve the doom-and-gloom mood would be to scuttle the grade school lectures about climate change and develop a K-12 curriculum devoted to poetry, not only as a literary genre but also as a mental discipline designed to open the richness of daily life—"that which is"—to wider view. The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani once expressed the belief that poetry should "empty into the reader's heart a charge of spiritual energy that contains all parts of the soul, making all life fall into place." Of course, the effect isn't permanent. As we shift our perspective or expand our field of view, we are reminded once again of the many parts of life that remain painfully out of joint. But both perspectives are valid, and the refreshment we take from one makes it easier to face, and change, the other. 

Building upon that foundation, it might be possible to develop a deeper understanding of what history is, bending it away from the currently popular but historiographically jejune "hermeneutics of suspicion" toward a deeper and more mature "hermeneutics of recovery and understanding."

But that's a subject for another time.