Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

People have also lost their comforting faith in the goodness of their institutions. The historian William O’Neill entitled his history of the Baby Boomers’ childhood years American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960. In that era, everything seemed great. Belching smokestacks were a sign of prosperity. America had a mission to spread democracy around the world. The atom bomb was proof of Yankee ingenuity. Women enjoyed domestic bliss, and Negroes knew their place. Though much about America was indeed good during those years (the economic growth rate was high; rates of crime and other social pathologies were low), today we see it as a fool’s paradise. It may not be a coincidence that two of the sectors that underperform in happiness—Americans and Baby Boomers—were the sectors that were most set up for disillusionment in the 1960s. In retrospect we can see that a concern with the environment, nuclear war, American foreign-policy blunders, and racial and gender equality could not be put off forever. Even if they make us more anxious, we are better for being aware of them.

As we become aware of our collective responsibilities, each of us may add a portion of the world’s burdens to our own worry list. Another icon of late 20th-century anxiety, the movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), opens with the baby-boomer protagonist sharing her angst with a psychotherapist:

Garbage. All I’ve been thinking about all week is garbage. I can’t stop thinking about it. I just . . . I’ve gotten real concerned over what’s gonna happen with all the garbage. I mean, we’ve got so much of it. You know? I mean, we have to run out of places to put this stuff eventually. The last time I started feeling this way is when that barge was stranded and, you know, it was going around the island and nobody would claim it.

“That barge” refers to a 1987 media frenzy over a barge filled with three thousand tons of New York garbage that was turned away by landfills up and down the Atlantic coast. The therapy scene is by no means fanciful: an experiment in which people watched news stories that had been doctored to have a positive or negative spin found that “participants who watched the negatively valenced bulletin showed increases in both anxious and sad mood, and also showed a significant increase in the tendency to catastrophize a personal worry.”⁸⁵ Three decades later I suspect that many therapists are listening to patients sharing their fears about terrorism, income inequality, and climate change.

A bit of anxiety is not a bad thing if it motivates people to support policies that would help solve major problems. In earlier decades people might have offloaded their worries to a higher authority, and some still do. In 2000, sixty religious leaders endorsed the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, which addressed the “so-called climate crisis” and other environmental problems by affirming that “God in His mercy has not abandoned sinful people or the created order but has acted throughout history to restore men and women to fellowship with Him and through their stewardship to enhance the beauty and fertility of the earth.”⁸⁶ I imagine that they and the other 1,500 signatories do not visit therapists to air anxieties about the future of the planet. But as George Bernard Shaw observed, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

Though some amount of anxiety will inevitably attend the contemplation of our political and existential conundrums, it need not drive us to pathology or despair. One of the challenges of modernity is how to grapple with a growing portfolio of responsibilities without worrying ourselves to death. As with all new challenges, we are groping toward the right mixture of old-fashioned and novel stratagems, including human contact, art, meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, small pleasures, judicious use of pharmaceuticals, reinvigorated service and social organizations, and advice from wise people on how to lead a balanced life.

The media and commentariat, for their part, could reflect on their own role in keeping the country’s anxiety at a boil. The trash barge story is emblematic of the media’s anxiogenic practices. Lost in the coverage at the time was the fact that the barge was forced on its peregrination not by a shortage of landfill space but by paperwork errors and the media frenzy itself.⁸⁷ In the decades since, there have been few follow-ups that debunk misconceptions about a solid-waste crisis (the country actually has plenty of landfills, and they are environmentally sound).⁸⁸ Not every problem is a crisis, a plague, or an epidemic, and among the things that happen in the world is that people solve the problems confronting them.