Chris Jepson: Skepticism vs. cynicism

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking

Everybody knows that the captain lied

Everybody got this broken feeling

Like their father or their dog just died

— Lyrics from Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows”

It is a very fine line between skepticism and cynicism. Every so often I am reminded of just how narrow is the gap between knowledge and despair. This would seem, on the surface, counterintuitive — that the more knowledge one (an individual, a court, a legislative body, a nation) has, the better are human outcomes. You have to wonder, is that but one more example of hope trumping reality?

We’ve reached a point, environmentally speaking, where the scientific consensus has us either aggressively acting to curb greenhouse gases or to experience horrendous human suffering.

The Industrial Revolution began around 1800. The population of the planet in 1800 was 978 million people. It took 150 years to reach two and one/half billion people. By 2050, world population will approach 9 billion human beings. I offer these facts to illustrate one point. Before human beings realized just how toxic their numbers were to the planet’s ecology, world population had reached a tipping-point of geometric proportions.

Environmental awareness didn’t “really” enter our consciousness until the late 1960’s to early 1970s. By then the proverbial horse had already left the barn before earnest discussions began on curbing our numbers and cleaning-up our environmental act.

The problem is extremely complicated. Any effort to balance population and correct the ongoing environmental desecration confronts the real challenge of economic dislocations. Everything we do is based on growth. We do not have serious conversations about sustainability. There are no economic models being promulgated that are not predicated on extracting more carbon from the earth, taking more fish from the oceans, cutting more old timber forests and selling more toaster-ovens than were sold last quarter. Besides, if we do not have more young people, who will care for (financially support, etc.) our aging population? If that is our condition, what is the solution?

In the U.S. any talk of “collective” action is attacked as socialistic and un-American. There is a sizable percentage of Americans who are not so concerned with this life (our planet, our environment) because it is the next life that matters (to them). There are those who eagerly genuflect at the altar of unfettered capitalism, that any infringement on one’s right to make a buck is, well, violating a basic human right. Then there is the vast majority who cannot believe that the way we live, the way we’ve structured humanity (if we consider it at all) is a house of cards, susceptible to any number of disruptive influences (see: political/economic corruption, climate, poverty, pollution, aggression, etc.).

My skepticism regarding human progress moved markedly to cynicism with the two recent Supreme Court decisions determining that corporations are people when it comes to speech and that, for all intents and purposes, the wealthy can legally purchase our politicians.

It is at this point that literature and history are informative. History illustrates, indeed, a certain repetitiveness—yet every instance of our perfidy is unique in its own way—to the human condition. This offers cold comfort.

I am comforted, however, by how earlier minds grappled with the human condition. A favorite of mine is Voltaire’s satirical Candide. It is a humorous tale of battered innocents who conclude after much suffering that when all is said and done, “we must cultivate our garden.”

I’ll take the ax. You, the shovel?