The U.S. Is Not Declining and 2020 Is Not the Worst Year Ever
The history of declinism and science of nostalgic preferences
It has become a fashionable sentiment that the United States is en route for its demise as a global power. In his very recent geopolitical book, Prisoners of Geography, journalist Tim Marshall challenges that viewpoint.
“The planet’s most successful country,” Marshall writes, “is about to become self-sufficient in energy, it remains the pre-eminent economic power and it spends more on research and development for its military than the overall military budget of all the other NATO countries combined.”
Marshall adds that even in the new age of “cheapening of political dialogue” and “populist leaders” (e.g. the arrival of Donald Trump in office), the U.S. is ultimately behaving how it’s always behaved. It’s prioritizing maintaining its place as number 1 on the global stage via diplomacy with Western Europe and treaties with countries (like Taiwan) to halt the progress of the running-up competitors such as China and Russia.
But the speculation is more or less this: The U.S. is preparing to self-detonate, implode on itself, collapse from within.
With nearly 4 years of Trump’s nasty, polarizing rhetoric, videos of police militancy/brutality like scenes from dystopian horror films (or perhaps Xinjiang), and the resurgence of hate groups said to be working for the president himself—is it possible that the U.S. is turning to an authoritarian model to more urgently pursue its agenda on the international level?
Certainly.
Yet, what if all this doomsday-provoking peril is merely more growing pains of a country (even if unconsciously) trying to outrun its discriminatory and tyrannical imperfections of the past?
Present Misfortunes, Past Misfortunes
Historically speaking, the U.S. has been through a myriad of rounds of autocratic abuse. Manzanar and other camps were built on U.S. soil and housed thousands of Japanese Americans. Hundreds of Americans were subject to aggressive investigations (and some were imprisoned) during the McCarthy Era and Red Scare. Revolutionary voices were silenced and repressed during the Vietnam-counter culture/desegregation era. All of these much-discussed historical injustices included much of what we’re seeing today: police surveillance/brutality, plenty of racism, and lots of ideological resistance to progressivism.
Are today’s events mere extensions of these abuses? Or have we learned and are we continuing to learn?
We can certainly say, as Ginsberg wrote in his 1956 poem “America,” that America's libraries are “full of tears.” New tears are wetting our cheeks in the face of yet more social injustices. Perhaps humans are diabolical fools incapable of reading and learning from history. Perhaps those in power would rather not learn from history. They’d rather jostle us around and trouble us over issues that should already be resolved. Instead, they continue to increase the class gap and store us smug in our polarized, political-party boxes—or so many are saying. Add the global pandemic to the mix and it’s no wonder we’re being engulfed in memes promoting 2020 as the most annoying, downright worst year of them all.
I bet, however, if the world had access to meme-generating technology during the 1918 Spanish Flu which killed nearly 1% of the world, we’d look back on them feeling somewhat overdramatic, at least over calling 2020 “the worst.”
Pandemics and epidemics aside, if you’re reading this, you’re likely living in a somewhat stable environment (unlike much of the world). 2020 may be the worst year ever for refugees fleeing war-torn nations, for people starving in Venezuela, and the over-700 million people worldwide without access to clean water—but it’s not so bad for us who are missing our nights out at the bar and for us who are canceling vacation reservations.
This isn’t meant to downplay the mental health crisis now exacerbated by the pandemic. It’s very real and what is “better” and “worse” is subjective; the inner worlds of individual humans can be universes away from each other.
But, overall, catastrophizing the present (which we’re arguably doing) is not a new phenomenon.
Declinism and Our Nostalgic Preference for the Past
Tending toward declinism, or the belief that society is retreating into its ultimate conclusion, is nothing new. The Middle Ages, for example, later coined the “Dark Ages” by ecclesiastical historian Caesar Baronius, marked a time of “intellectual darkness” between the fall of Rome and the Renassaince. During this time, war, pillage, and disease were extremely rampant and the “dark” in “Dark Ages” seemed to go beyond denoting a decline in access to knowledge. In turn, many people during medieval times (and even later during the Renaissance) thought the world was ending. There were various, widespread apocalyptic predictions. According to Jason Boyett’s book Pocket Guide to the Apocolypse, early French bishop Hilary of Poitiers predicted the world would end in A.D. 365.
Boyett’s book goes on to describe the once-extensive belief that the end-of-times felt near during the Black Death, the deadliest pandemic recorded in human history.
Present times always seem like end-times because humans appear to have evolved with a memory bias, creating nostalgia for the past and suspicion of the present. There’s even a scientific basis to this, a basis that researchers at Carnegie Melon University describe as “nostalgic preferences.” They write: “People believe everything from the general state of their country to the quality of their television programming has declined from its past zenith.” Following this logic explains why we catastrophize amid the throes of adversity even when such catastrophe was equally or even more prevalent in the past. It explains why we often remain skeptical of notions of “the end,” whether that be the end of civilization, the end of the world, or the end of enjoyment in 2020.
Our current standoffs with government authorities and widespread bigotry of the public can seem unprecedented to many. Seen on the grander scale of injustice, however, it’s hopefully more layers of social trauma unveiling themselves for our fixing.
Regardless, the present seems grimmer than it is, the past is rose-tinted, and predicting the worse has existed for centuries.
