The World Half Full

For the sharp-eyed among you: yes, I did more or less steal the title from TV Tropes. It's a more concise way of saying "the world's a steaming pile of crap, but there's still hope". Did what I just said sound like a contradiction? Allow me to explain and let off steam.

In this world...(insert dramatic pause here) there are a couple of camps of people. Some hold that the world is pretty much sunshine and rainbows and if we clap our hands a magical unicorn will come down from the sky and make it all better. Others hold that the world is depressing/mean/otherwise completely fucked and there's nothing we can do about it, except maybe slitting our wrists and writing shitty poetry, or throwing money at the aid movement of the week. And of course, there are the people that just don't care.

I say they're all wrong. I myself belong to a camp of people who basically say "fuck you, the world is crap but we can make it better" - or a world half full.

The thing is, the world's most definitely not sunshine and rainbows. Nuclear wars, deadly radiation, industries exploiting people for all they're worth and humanity collectively managing to screw up the planet kind of contradict that, I think we can all agree.

Equally - and this is the bit that's harder for people to accept - there's a ghost of a chance that we can pull ourselves back from the brink, or at least limit some of the damage we're doing. This is the part where the cynics say "that's a comforting myth you've made up because you don't want to face how bad the situation is", and this is the part where I have to come up with a rebuttal...

...Here it is. I'll start by conceding some ground to the cynics: yes, we tell ourselves that we have a way to limit some of the damage, albeit at great cost to our way of life, because we couldn't face having no way out of our own mess. That's called self-preservation. It takes great suppression of instinct to decide to lie down and die, and collectively we don't have that. But this self-preservation, this instinct to live, doesn't just drive empty fantasies - it drives people to develop solutions. This is where the cynics fall down. People are not completely delusional, contrary to their beliefs - us humans do actually have a clue. Yes, there are denialists and lunatics in this world, as well as alarmists, conspiracy theorists and the rest of the Delusional Idiots' Hall of Fame. Equally, there are people out there working to change things - because if it's possible to screw things up, it's also possible to patch it up to some extent, for example, CCS, geoengineering, carbon dioxide scrubbers...the list goes on.

I'm not trying to say that anything is a magic bullet for anything else, or even that magic bullets exist for our problems - it's most likely that they don't. I'm saying that through persistently fighting for a cause or working on a problem, one can come up with a solution which might potentially pull us back from the brink. Of course, then there's still the trouble of getting people to accept it, and implementing it widely, and of course the fact that it's a massive paradigm shift and will change the world as we know it...

...Having written this article, I'm forced to admit that the cynics have mostly won the argument. The world is crap and we're unlikely to change much. Even if we do end up managing to do something, we'll have lost a lot and it'll never be quite the same. For all that, there is still the proverbial cliché of hope on the horizon. The very fact that we're not completely screwed - that, however small the chance, we can do something about it if we work hard - is a sign of hope. In the interests of not completely dying out, we should fight for that hope.