There is a pervasive and growing feeling that the human enterprise is in a death spiral.
Across the political spectrum, there is a pervasive and growing feeling that the human enterprise is in a death spiral.
Young and old struggle with a pandemic of fatalism, a feeling that we have no future. An extraterrestrial anthropologist scrolling through Gen Z’s Instagram memes, or watching the dystopias of popular fiction, might reasonably conclude we are a moribund species. We are thinking of the ancestors who survived the Toba volcanic catastrophe, around seventy-five thousand years ago. This mega-colossal eruption, one of the worst ever experienced by human beings, took place in what is now Indonesia. It darkened and cooled the whole planet.
Still, they endured. And Toba is but one of the calamities — ice ages, plagues, famines, droughts, floods and much more — that our species has overcome. Our ancestors’ strength to carry on in the face of gnawing hunger and hopelessness delivered you this very moment. It’s a moment fraught with dangers, but unlike the generations who came before us, we have the power to understand these phenomena and mitigate their consequences.