We have overcome the greatest biological attack in the history of Chinese communism and we have succeeded in spite of our politicians. Cancer mortality rates are dropping at a rapid rate. We can photograph all the beauty that rises suddenly before our eyes. Cars still don’t fly, there are no birth chips in our brains, and we still read paper books. No jumble of wires and plastic has yet been able to match the warmth of a loving kiss. We still have poetry, music, and classic cinema.
Social networks have not succeeded in dynamiting all possible types of friendship. We have the best road communications in history. Any corner of the world is at our disposal at the click of a button. The great wars with ships full of coffins on their way home are no longer in fashion. And there are still religious men and women silently cleaning bedpans every morning and carrying the spirit of love to the places where there is most neglect. May the hopelessness of the century in which we live not prevent us from considering that there are plenty of things that are right around us.
The Good Does Not Stop
As you read this article, in every corner of the world there are millions of people doing good. There is a father watching over his son’s fever in the wee hours of the morning. There is a girl writing to her boyfriend that she loves him. There is a teacher giving his life to instruct his students. There is a soldier giving a drink to the enemy he has just captured. There’s a boy carrying shopping bags to an old lady in the building. There’s a man risking everything to tell the truth. There’s a patriot trying to unite his nation. There’s a junkie carrying his backpack across the threshold of a rehab center. There’s a businessman donating expensive equipment to a children’s hospital. And there’s a band recording the album that will give strength to those who don’t yet have it.
Somewhere there is now a young man throwing himself into the pool to save a baby. There is a politician trying to preserve tradition. There is a field bursting into beautiful flowers, a pill that will ease the greatest pain, and a farmer who will harvest his best crop. There’s a courageous woman refusing to have an abortion. There’s a grandfather building a playhouse for his grandchildren to play in. There’s a radiologist confirming that, after much struggle and ingenuity, the tumor is gone. There’s a shy man overcoming his stage fright. And there’s a volunteer building a school in a poor country.
In some distant latitude there is a programmer inventing something that will make our lives easier. There’s a bunch of cloistered nuns praying for you. There’s a cold-hearted young man crying with emotion. And there’s a misguided man asking for forgiveness. There’s a beautiful woman giving a good suitor a chance. There’s a gentleman winking at a woman in need. There’s a footballer giving away his jersey to rival fans. There’s a child finally coming out of the ICU. There’s a priest hearing the confession of a converted thief. And there’s a policeman protecting the target of a shooting with his body.
It’s not all bad and nothing good happens because of our daily repetition of the rosary of misfortunes. There are, of course, manifold tragedies on this side of heaven. But how quickly we forget that, in the wake of the pandemic, the world was still there, waiting for us, with all the beauty of Creation wide open in springtime, surprised that the most precious inhabitant was missing in its corners. Ugliness has not been able to extinguish beauty. Not even ruin has been able to destroy the happiness of some families. Europe is starting to awaken from its globalist lethargy. Friendship remains the salt of all bitterness. And hatred still does not have the last word against love. To quote Pope John Paul II, “love always wins.”
Gagging the Cynic For A While
“A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin,” wrote H. L. Mencken, and perhaps it is time to stop turning our heads, at least for a while, in search of the funeral procession. To silence the cynic who comments rudely on everything that happens before our eyes, who warns us that everything will go wrong, who warns us against friendship, against trust in others, against the possibilities of changing things with a vote, against the hope that a love will work out, against the options of achieving a personal challenge, against good news—in short, who suggests to us in a low voice, like a vinegary old man, that “something bad is coming.”
Perhaps no one in the history of Spanish music glossed and experienced sadness as Enrique Urquijo did. How fitting that his last big hit, with which he shocked all and sundry in 1995, went like this: “I have died and I have risen / with my ashes I have planted a tree / its fruit has borne / and from today something has begun.” It must be done. From time to time it must be done.
Our natural negativity bias sees to it that the aesthetics of fatalism are never out of fashion. By the same token, optimism has somewhat unfairly acquired a bad reputation. Horrible predictions, scathing criticisms of the world we live in, seem wiser than silence, a light smile, or a discreet and serene ‘everything is not so bad.’ Total disaffection with the world becomes a way of setting yourself apart. Incurable moroseness seems to elevate you to an Olympus of wisdom and distinction. Criticism of the young, of the old, of those who try their best in politics or journalism, of those who do not go out to set the streets on fire and also of those who do. Thomas Paine was right to observe that “nothing under heaven is impregnable to vice,” but there is a special kind of life-denying cynic who feels a dark sense of pleasure at the presence of any misfortune. Maybe it is what Gabinete Caligari sang years ago: “Dear sadness / I have fallen in love with you / and I am no longer / a poor wretch / by your side, by your side.”
It Wasn’t Too Bad
The world has not burst on account of overpopulation, as they said yesterday. Human life was not so badly designed that it became ‘necessary’ to prohibit offspring. Today, the West is tearing its hair out thinking that the Malthusians were wrong, and is looking in the interwebs of politics for a way to solve the demographic winter that seems to lurk ahead.
In the first 15 years of this century, the number of hungry people in the world fell by more than 100 million and by more than 200 million since 1990. This is great news. Cooperation? Solidarity? Maybe. But it’s more than likely that development has something to do with it.
For decades, the West has dealt with Third World hunger as if it were a misfortune that has fallen out of nowhere on millions of people, just because they were born in one country and not in another. That and the usual game: making those who have food feel bad because others do not, as if that would solve something. It happens that the problem of hunger is more complex than all that. To be precise, it is more complex than the simplistic progressive verbiage of the last sixty years. “The African famine is not a bad twist of fate,” wrote P. J. O’Rourke in the 1990s, ”it is largely man-made, and the men who caused it are mostly Africans.” Could anything be at once truer and more cancellable today?
If you misidentify the problem, you will choose the wrong solution. It is the small steps toward development, new opportunities, openness to freedom, international trade, education and training, and the end of tyrannies that bring prosperity to Third World nations. Not everything is going wrong there.
The advancement of science and medicine is improving the lives of all. With the exception of the progressive’s satanic addiction to cultures of death, medicine is serving a glorious era for mankind, giving us the best quality of life and life expectancy in human history. Is there any reason for pessimism? More years to enjoy, more years to serve, more years to earn heaven, which we will need.
And then there is technological evolution and its associated dangers. It has undoubtedly brought a host of new problems that we all lament every day: social media bullying, hatred, cyber theft, exposure of minors to pornography, insecurity, and all the rest. But we often overlook the good things about digitalization. We have gained in freedom and autonomy, in communication, in affective closeness with those far away, in the efficiency of daily procedures, in training and information possibilities, in leisure and cultural alternatives, in productivity, in economic management, in cooperation and organization for good purposes, in knowledge of other cultures, in work possibilities without borders, and in many other things.
Most of the scary prophecies about the digital world have not come true. And after all, what has kept us busy this year in the Internet universe has not been anything specifically novel to the emergence of Wi-Fi, but older human frailties: the temptations of censorship and cancellation.
The cell phone is a good example. It would wreck marriages, eat the heads of teenagers, and become a kind of television, possessing the souls of humans at every moment. Has it been fulfilled? Sure, in part. But there’s more: now you can call when you have a traffic accident and maybe save your life, now you can send a resolute message without having to pick up the phone to an idiot, and your daughter can come home alone because she goes with you to the phone if necessary. Tell this to the parents of teenagers in the 1980s and see how it turns their heads.
What Is Objectively Wrong
I don’t want you to think that I’m on some unthinkingly cheerful crusade or that I’ve just plugged a joint. Far from it. There are many things going wrong besides the current state of Western governments and there are a lot of problems to solve besides extirpating communist gangrene and replacing it with freedoms and principles that will serve us better. There is a thoroughgoing cult of ugliness, violence is much more palpable in the streets than before the pandemic, we face a hidden plague of psychiatric illnesses, and the world continues to be afflicted by hunger, suffering, terrorism, hatred, theft, and poverty
Yes, there are also new problems and most of them are a direct result of globalist scheming. But there is no room for despair. For wherever there is an ashen man trying to implement an aberrant way of life, wherever there is a smartass trying to convince us that eating bugs is the moral lifestyle move, wherever there is a sellout destroying the sovereignty of nations, wherever there is a psychopath advocating the mutilation of children, there is a growing legion of citizens working to prevent it, to propose godly alternatives in their place, to protect the world from its madness, its ignominy, and its demons.
Perhaps we should just look around and read G.K. Chesterton more. “The most extraordinary things in the world,” he once wrote, “are an ordinary man and an ordinary woman with ordinary children.” There are still millions like that, millions of reasons not to fall into despair.
