In one of his bits, comedian Alex Edelman recounts talking to a family member who laments the state of current affairs, anxiously declaring, “This is the most challenging, worst time ever for Jewish people.” Edelman looks skeptically at the audience and then contemplates what a Jewish ancestor from the Middle Ages or 1930s might make of today’s Jew complaining about a “bad time.” The forebears coped with pogroms, plagues, and expulsions, while modern American Jews mostly contend with online trolls and uncomfortable political arguments.
Rapper Mr. Lif conveyed a more sincere version of the “worst time” theme at a recent Thievery Corporation performance, at which he encouraged the audience to collectively celebrate love in the face of one of the most challenging periods ever. If Mr. Lif, who is Black, was a comedian he might follow up by pointing out that slavery was also pretty bad.
The idea that we’re presently in extraordinarily fearful times floats all around us. During a presentation on artificial intelligence, futurist Maurice Conti recounted the U.S. Army’s use of “VUCA” during the 1980s to describe an especially volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous period, triggered largely by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which the U.S. had energetically championed. Notably, whether or not VUCA accurately describes the 1980s, events of that decade led to the economically prosperous and largely stable 1990s. Though it also ushered in, and quickly out, frosted hair tips and hip-hop style jeans worn so far below the waistline they exposed the wearer’s boxers, requiring an awkward, shuffling walk to keep them from falling down.
The fact is, times aren’t especially bad. They’re actually pretty good, historically. American life expectancy in 1918 was just 47 years; today it’s 79. Infant mortality rates in the U.S. were upwards of 140 deaths for every 1,000 births at the turn of the 20th century; now it’s less than six per thousand. Unemployment peaked at 25 percent in 1933, compared to the present roughly four percent. Of course, if it’s you who’s unemployed things may appear bleaker.
We do have serious troubles. All our own making. All solvable. These include a sharp rise in people killed every year in wars; roughly a quarter of a million presently, compared to fewer than 20,000 two decades ago. We’ve made the climate increasingly erratic and extreme. Our technological prowess – social media and AI – is bending culture, minds and relationships in unpleasant and unpredictable ways. And politics, at least at the national level, is largely awful, mostly due to the Trump Administration, its Republican Party enablers, and Democratic Party dithering.
We’re likely living in a VUCA period, with volatile economic and social environments, fanned by volatile political actions, social media and associated social isolation, as well as AI’s rapidly expanding capabilities. Things could go terribly wrong, including a collapse of the dollar as an international hedge currency, triggering a global financial freefall just when all hands on deck are needed to deal with sharply inclement weather.
The solution to many of these problems is to collectively build, educate and govern our way out of them. The Biden Administration was on its way to doing something like that, albeit clumsily and with too much ancillary ideological trappings and unnecessary shaming of the opposition. That process ended when the then president appeared to stroke out during a debate with Trump too late in the election for the Democrats to mount a compelling alternative.
Engineering and social projects – like modernizing transportation to leverage autonomous driving fueled by electricity – space and ocean exploration, and reinvestment in quality education and training at all levels for all minds would help cure what ails us. The latter needs to include thoughtful guardrails and development protocols associated with AI deployment, paid for by a hefty tax on AI enterprises, which, after all, are profiting from strip mining all human information ever created. These will only be accomplished if we dampen down extremism everywhere on the spectrum, return to a sense of personal integrity and give everyone space in the conversation to find ways to middle ground.
A group of people who might arguably escape a more expansive Edelman joke are young adults – Millennials and Gen Z – who are systematically in poorer financial shape than their parents were at the same age. Working class men without college degrees also have reasons to be grumpy. The rest of us should stop complaining and get to work solving our real troubles, which will also have the benefit of helping to solve theirs.
