02 Jan 07 Great Men & Women Explain Their Optimism
Why should we be optimistic? Some of my favorite answers inside.
Paradoxically, one of the biggest reasons for being optimistic is that there are systemic flaws in the reported world view. Certain types of news — for example dramatic disasters and terrorist actions — are massively over-reported, others — such as scientific progress and meaningful statistical surveys of the state of the world — massively under-reported. [...] In fact, most meta-level reporting of trends show a world that is getting better. We live longer, in cleaner environments, are healthier, and have access to goods and experiences that kings of old could never have dreamed of.
Lately, though, I see signs that people realize the limits of the zombie identity ["the intuition that people do things because of their membership in a collective identity or affiliation"]. Pop culture is rich in stories and images that remind people of overlapping identity. More importantly, political rhetoric is giving way to realism about human psychology.
[T]here’s a core decency in people that even the worst machinations of governments can’t entirely hold down. The Evelina hospital is the first new children’s hospital that’s been built in London in a century. There’s a giant atrium in the middle, and the contract with the company doing the cleaning says that the window cleaners need to dress up as superheroes. The children in bed—many with grave illnesses—delight in seeing Superman and Spiderman dangling just inches away from them, on the outside of the glass; apparently for the cleaners it’s one of the best part of their week.
The most successful businesspeople in the world have decided to put their brains and bank accounts toward fixing the world, leaving politics and politicians on the sidelines. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Richard Branson, John Doerr, and Pierre Omidyar — among many others — are demonstrating that the true goal of winning is giving. The brass ring has moved from private aviation and mega-yachts, to making a mega-pledge at Bill Clinton’s annual summit.
Thomas Kuhn put it much better than me when he introduced the concept of a paradigm shift. Sometimes we manage to convince ourselves that we have a handle on what is going on, when in fact we’re just turning a blind eye to a mass of contradictory information. We discard it or ignore it (or can’t get funded to look at it) because we don’t understand it. It seems to make no sense, and it can take us a while before we realize that the problem doesn’t lie with the facts but with our assumptions. Paradigm shifts are wonderful things. Suddenly the mists clear, the sun comes out and we exclaim a collective “aha!” as everything begins to make sense.
I am optimistic for the simple reason that given the incredible odds against the existence of brains that can ask such questions, of laptops on which to answer them, and so on — here we are, asking and answering!
All of us in the particle physics community are eagerly awaiting the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a proton-proton collider being built in Switzerland that will turn on in 2007 and begin its real operation in 2008. I’m optimistic (with calculations that support my optimism) that this machine will tell us about the nature of mass and explain to us the weakness of gravity relative to the other known elementary particle forces. I’m optimistic that we’ll learn something truly new and exciting about the fundamental nature of matter and our world-maybe something as exciting as extra dimensions of space—or perhaps something no one has even thought about yet. Whatever the results will be, the LHC gives reason to be optimistic.
(Lawrence Krauss, Frank Wilczek, Karl Sabbagh, and Maria Spiropulu, as well as many others, are quite excited about the LHC as well.)
Quite simply: hope. Life is though, people suffer, and, rightly or wrongly, religion offers something for people to hold on to. Yes, it’s wild to believe in supernatural influences in the world, yes it’s crazy to devote your life to a God that seems to have vanished from the world for, under conservative estimates, “at least” 2000 years. But scientists cannot forget that most people need some sort of spiritual guidance, a kind of guidance science, at least as is taught today, cannot offer. Science has shown, and keeps showing, that we live in a cold, hard universe, completely indifferent to us and to life. And yet, people love, die, connect, fight, and must come to some sort of inner peace, of acceptance. What can science offer these people? It is futile and naive to simply dismiss the real need people have for spirituality.
The most phenomenally successful film series of the recent era – the “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter,” “Matrix” and “Lord of the Rings” movies – are all driven by a faith in human cussedness, from Han Solo’s grudging heroism to little people with furry feet vanquishing the combined forces of Darkness.
If the ageless way humans process information is by telling stories, what does our belief in this recurring story say?
It is an instinct that the human response to vast change will involve strange bounces.
This assessment of our species displays a faith that even in the face of unprecedented threats, the ragged human convoy of divergent perceptions, piqued honor, posturing, insecurity and humor will wend its way to glory.
New children will be born. [...] Everything in the room I write in now — not only the computer and the electric light but the right-angled wall and the ceramic cup and the woven cloth was once imaginary — no more than an optimistic pipe dream. And I myself, a scientist, a writer, and woman literally could not have existed in the evolutionary Pleistocene past, or even in the only slightly less neolithic atmosphere of the universities of fifty years ago.
The design of a computer user interface can influence whether the outcome of an election is fair, a patient receives the right medicine, or a helicopter pilot makes a safe landing. Perhaps even more importantly, when technology is designed to mesh well with how people think and how they want to live, then it enhances and enriches their lives.
If I had lived in the year 1007, [...] I would not — because I could not — have imagined the music of Mozart, the painting of Rothko, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the novels of Dostoyevsky. . . It means I would have failed to see one of the best reasons of all for being optimistic: which is, the power of human artistic genius to astonish us again and again.
As Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi once said, “There is more good than evil in the world—but not by much.” Unexpectedly “not much” is all that is needed when you have the power of compound interest at work—which is what culture is. The world needs to be only 1% (or even one-tenth of 1 %) better day in and day out to accumulate civilization. As long as we create 1% more than we destroy each year, we have progress. This delta is so small that it is almost imperceptible, particularly in the face of the 49% of death and destruction that is in our face. Yet this tiny, slim, and shy differential generates progress.
It turns out that the human brain can learn to control radically different bodies with remarkable ease. That means that people might eventually learn to spontaneously change what’s going on in a virtual world by becoming parts of it.
Of course, some may have misunderstood the idea of the project:
A few years ago, I wrote a short book entitled Our Final Century?. I guessed that, taking all risks into account, there was only a 50 percent chance that civilisation would get through to 2100 without a disastrous setback. This seemed to me a far from cheerful conclusion. However, I was surprised by the way my colleagues reacted to the book: many thought a catastrophe was even more likely than I did, and regarded me as an optimist. I stand by this optimism.
