For as much time as I spend kvetching about my own petty problems (and I know that it is a not insubstantial amount of time), I am what my husband calls a macro optimist.
This is somewhat in contrast to him, who is on a day-to-day basis, a micro optimist but doesn’t quite see the long-term horizon as positively as I do.
Different temperaments are a good thing when it comes to balancing outlooks and outcomes. This is arguably why we are a good team and have managed to stay married for a decade.
I look out for the macro level future and optimize for it being successful and he optimizes the day-to-day, making sure that the micro level is successful.
I titled this post “Burying Ehrlich” because Paul Ehrlich passed away at the age of 93 last Friday. You might know him as the co-author of the 1968 best seller Population Bomb.
An entomologist by training, his book jumped to much bigger claims saying Earth faced imminent mass starvation urging governments to reduce population. That has not so far proven to be true. Even now the New York Times obituary said his claims were premature. We just love an impending disaster.
It’s a cruel historical irony that a man who wrote his thesis on butterflies would end up having such an enormous butterfly effect on the number of human beings being born. His neo-Malthusian insights were a huge hit.
And unfortunately we will experience the consequences of his public intellectual adventurism. We will have fewer humans and the famine he predicted never materialized. And now if we have more troubles facing us, we have far fewer humans able to take up the task of finding the solutions we will need.
Maybe if he had been a little bit more of a macro-level optimist, he would have been able to see what I see everyday. Despite daily travails due to my chronic disease, I see the micro-optimism of humans like my husband every single day. While I can’t always be positive every day, I remain positive that together we can find a way to improve on yesterday.
Humans are incredible at finding a way around life’s intractable problems. We produce little innovations, little inventions, little tweaks and little solutions. And they add up.
We are social animals whose evolutionary pressures seem to have yielded a culture of engineering. These little fixes we constantly produce when added up together have made for major improvements.
We even occasionally see extraordinary catalysts that allow us to go much faster with our improvements. We’ve had a number of revolutions, industrial and otherwise. Indeed the last 50 years or so have shown the Malthusian fears of food production to be histrionic in comparison to the progress we’ve made.
We have fed the planet but we will never get back the babies who were not born either because of China’s one-child policy or simple cultural attitude acceptance that one or two children should be enough. In my generation it may end up being more common to not have children at all.
Now it may seem rich that someone who goes in for quite a bit of preparedness should speak against a man who saw the value of taking action in the face of what he saw as long odds.
But next time someone tells you that the end is near and all is lost, remember that Paul didn’t end up being correct in any of his assumptions.
Not because at the time it was so crazy to think we weren’t producing enough food, but because he couldn’t conceive of a world in which we were able to solve our problem.
So I pray as his family buries him that we as a species can remember to bury some of our own alarmism. Our job is to keep on going in the face of long odds, just as every one of our ancestors has done before us.