Fresno State philosophy professor: Doom-scrolling in the darkness won’t fix our problems
A sense of doom persists. The pandemic no longer haunts the headlines. But people remain anxious. According to a recent CNN poll, “Just 14% of Americans say they’re either excited (4%) or optimistic (10%) about the way things are going in the country, with 65% calling themselves concerned and another 21% saying they’re scared.”
There is plenty of bad news, here and abroad. It’s enough to make you want to go back to bed and hide under the covers. But doom-scrolling in the darkness won’t fix these problems. The solution is to get up and get to work.
It helps to know that gloom and doom are common. The news has always been bad. Good news rarely makes the headlines. And poems rarely focus on “the happily ever after.”
Greek tragedy dwells in the darkness. So does Shakespeare. Modern art takes this to another level. T.S. Eliot published his poem, “The Waste Land,” a century ago in 1922, when the world had been shattered by the Great War and the Spanish Flu. He described a world in fragments and ruins, shaken by thunder and scorched by fire.
Eliot invoked Buddhism in his lament. The Buddha said, “everything is on fire.” You see, doom-saying is ancient and widespread. The Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes says, “everything is meaningless.”
One solution is to hope for a savior. Ecclesiastes is not the whole of the Bible. There is some comfort in hope. But another solution moves from hope to action. This is typical of the American philosophy known as “pragmatism.”
Pragmatism thinks that human ingenuity can improve things. Instead of wallowing in despair or passively waiting for a savior, the pragmatist gets busy. The roots of this idea are found in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s plea for self-reliance. It extends through the work of William James and John Dewey. We find traces of it in Barack Obama’s idea of the “audacity of hope.”
Rather than lamenting the ruins and fragments that surround us, pragmatists encourage us to patch things up and pull them back together. The key is creativity, experiment and exploration.
William James admired the active energy of a “healthy mind.” This is the opposite of what he called a “sick soul.” He explained that sick souls magnify the evils in the world. James would likely view our habit of doom-scrolling as a symptom of soul-sickness.
In 1895 James wrote, “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.” This affirmative spirit is healthy-minded. If you don’t like the world, fix it. Of course, your actions are finite and limited. But the effect is cumulative. In adding your twig to the fire, you keep the light glowing. And in doing something besides complaining, you model the solution.
Passivity breeds soul-sickness. When we are passive, the body and the mind atrophy. But human beings thrive on challenges, resistance, and work. Creative activity can manifest as political activism. It might also become poetry and art.
George Santayana, one of Eliot’s teachers at Harvard, where pragmatism was all the rage, once said that “the so-called real world is also a work of imagination.” This applies in politics and in art. The world we imagine becomes real as we work to make it so.
Pragmatism embraces change and risk. We cannot predict where things will end up. But it will be interesting to find out. Rather than pining for a past golden age, the pragmatist leans into the poem that is the future. This approach is curious to discover what human beings will create next. It trusts that in the long run, common sense will prevail.
Of course, not every change is good. And sometimes “we, the people” make mistakes. But rather than lamenting this fact and retreating under the covers, the pragmatist views the mistakes as opportunities for more and better creative activity.
The pragmatic imagination views the world as open and malleable. As James puts it, the world stands “waiting to receive its final touches at our hands.” We can improve the world. The future is an opportunity and a responsibility. If you don’t like the way things are going, imagine something new — and do something to make it so.