To all the warnings: a rejoinder

We’re watching the Amazon Greg Daniels comedy (?) Upload. I normally have little patience for dystopias; I’ll get to that; but I have to say, this one is the most believable I’ve run across (with some willing suspension-of-disbelief on the technological details). It skewers our society’s worst characteristics. It’s a dystopic satire.

The satire part is why I go along with the dystopia. Usually, dystopias are based either on an implausible historical counterfactual, or seem like the creative expression of someone’s severe depression (I’ve struggled with depression all my life so I should know). Either way, they’re not usually compelling to me.

But there’s another problem with dystopias—the problem that lies at the root of any hope to avoid them. And that is the difficulty of imagining solutions to our problems that we haven't already thought of. If we’d thought of them, we’d probably be doing them. So, it isn’t that hard to imagine where things might go if we continue to have this same set of problems. It’s hard to imagine how we might solve those problems when we haven’t found those solutions yet.

And yet we do find them—over and over again. We can go to any point in written history to find the dire predictions of thoughtful, well-informed people about what would happen if we kept going down the road we were on.

These warnings are important. And I think that’s what dystopias are—warnings. They can serve a similar purpose to that served by the ancient Hebrew prophets, standing in the dusty street and warning the people to repent before it was too late, trying to make them confront their sins.

That last bit—trying to make them confront their sins—is also what satire tries to do. A dystopic satire takes two forms of warning and combines them. In this case, it’s effective.

We are, though, bombarded by warnings today—and most of them are in earnest. We cannot watch a good nature documentary without being shown the effects of climate change and the extinctions and near-extinctions it is wreaking. Unless you live in an alternate reality or bury your head in the sand—and plenty of people do one or the other—you can’t escape warnings about capitalism run amok, inequality that surpasses the Gilded Age, and the clear and present dangers to democratic polities.

I do CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), and my therapist uses that methodology to reframe negative approaches to problem-solving into positive ones, largely because positive approaches tend to be more motivating and encouraging than negative ones, helping to overcome the tendency we have to feel instantly overwhelmed, discouraged, and weary when we accept that we need to work on something about ourselves or a relationship. Instead of “I need to not do this so that I don’t make my partner feel unvalued,” it’s “I need to do this so that my partner will feel valued.” It’s not just spin or wordplay.

I think we get overwhelmed by all the warnings today, because we don’t get nearly enough positive solutions thrown in there with them. People who create “media” of all sorts are good at telling us what’s wrong, but not so good at telling us what to do about it, other than “don’t do this and don’t do that, and hope that billions of other people also abstain from those things along with you.”

Thing is, though, we humans are clever as hell. Yes, we’re also crazy and evil and stupid as hell, but we are smart and resourceful and adaptable and we can learn and transmit knowledge to others. I wouldn’t want to encourage complacency by saying “it’ll all work out OK,” because that’s passive; I want to point out that, while Ian Hodder may be right that we are constantly inventing things to deal with the unintended consequences of the other things we invented, those inventions (tangible and otherwise) have also elevated our existence far beyond where it was when we started, and there is no major threat to our planet that we do not have the ability to meet. We have met them before, time and again. We are still here. At the same time that so many species are under dire threat, others that were nearly extinct when I was a kid are now thriving or well on their way to it. Instead of “we can’t keep living this way or it’s all going to hell,” we might try “let’s do these things we can do so we can keep what we have and make things even better.”

There is the deepest understanding of the human condition in the Genesis story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. By eating its fruit, we humans took on the responsibility of that knowledge, and the choice of how to use it. We cannot live in ignorant bliss with that responsibility, but we can live with the power to choose the one over the other.

It’s encouraging that Upload is on Amazon while at the same time beating, gloves-off, on all the things we rightly fear about Amazon. We may live in a society with corporate capitalism run amok, but we do not live in Putin’s Russia or Jinping’s China or Khamenei’s Iran. We still live in a society that permits the telling of the truth. We live in a society that funds solutions to problems—even if it also funds the problems. We live on a blue and green planet teeming with life in all its forms, and we know how to protect that. We have never been more powerful or more knowledgeable about how to use our power. Yes, let’s keep telling the truth about our challenges and shortcomings, but let’s not forget that we still can’t predict the future. We don’t know what all the solutions to our problems are until we find them, and to find them, we need to encourage ourselves to keep looking.