MAINSTREAM MEDIA has quite a bad habit of portraying that our world is going to crap and that this is the whole story. Daily news about terrorism, homicide, and our nation’s political situation seem to define the state of the entire world we live in. Given this, we should change the way we look at this kind of news.
Many of what these articles and sites report are indeed true. Large-scale corruption indeed continues and plagues many countries and governments today; climate change is absolutely one of the defining global problems of our times; and inequality definitely still persists in every single society across the globe, regardless of form and scale. Concerning events in our world take place every day—this is a fact. These are as real as it gets, and we should rightfully not undermine these issues as it would be a delusion to do so. But being satisfied and having a positive outlook are two different things: I would argue that there is value in viewing the state of our world—specifically in contrast with the past—with a more positive outlook, which is significantly different from merely ignoring these issues.
If we try to look beyond our immediate surrounding environment and social media feeds and see how far the world has come in terms of economic progress, health, peace and security, and technology, we can easily see that there’s a lot to be hopeful for. Just to name a few from this Vox article: Extreme poverty, child labor, child mortality, smoking, teen births, global hunger, and nuclear weapon supply have all been on their own steady declines for decades— and all of these are at their lowest points in the entirety of human history. The number of nations at war now is just a fraction of what it was a few decades back. At the same time, more and more people have been gaining access to many basic rights such as education. Access to information, thanks to its democratization through the internet, has driven industries and fields to exponential progress, leading to scientific findings and technologies that benefit the human race. The good news is that all of these aforementioned aspects are just scratching the surface of today’s feats in comparison with how the world was in the past.
I say this from a privileged position. It’s more possible for someone who hasn’t experienced oppression in any form to see the world in such a manner that’s favorable and hopeful. But having a positive outlook doesn’t invalidate or undermine these pressing issues and the realities of those who suffer greatly under such problems, especially if it will allow us to tackle these problems more efficiently and humanely. By looking at how we’ve been able to accomplish such progress in certain dimensions, we may be able to identify key patterns and factors in history that can help us tackle today’s most urgent problems. By understanding how far we’ve gone with problems that seemed apocalyptic before, we can have hope and trust in our species’ capability to do it again through action.
