2025–Wreckage of the Tower of Babel by Tim J. Myers

What species is forced by its own biology to live simultaneously in different time frames?

Only one we know of: Us.

          That astonishing, trillion-celled, three-pound lump of meat in our skulls is a kind of time machine, since past, present, and future always exist in our consciousness.

          And lately, up in that mysterious cranial space we all inhabit, the future’s been looming large.

Though not in particularly pleasant forms.

          I think there are five reasons we’re currently more future-obsessed than usual, and more pessimistic.

          First, powerful anti-democratic forces currently threaten our nation, and with “firehose” regularity.

          Second, we’re in a global crisis. The “rules-based order” hasn’t been destroyed, but it’s wobbling. Putin’s brutal imperialist invasion of Ukraine is part of this. And because our current administration has withdrawn from its world role to put “America First,” much of its current international action is simple bullying.  

Add Gaza to the mix and sometimes it’s hard just to breathe. 

          The third reason for our unease is the rise of AI and the general souring of the tech pipe-dream. Like digital tech itself, AI brings enormous benefits, but also terrible problems; read Shannon Vallor, Nita Farahany, and Adam Becker. Consider too the existential threat to education whereby ChatGPT allows students to cheat rather than learn—with ease.    

          The fourth is, obviously, the environmental crisis, hovering over our every heartbeat—and made maddeningly worse by climate-deniers moving us backwards as fast as they can.

          The fifth is more general.  It’s the way the accelerating pace of change overall also focuses us more on the future.

          I don’t fully blame the many today who wallow or doomscroll; I’m worried too.  My artpiece 2025: Wreckage of the Tower of Babel expresses my horror at the way some contemporary groups and nations are falling out of sync with each other, mutual misunderstanding leading to increased conflict.  

          But doomscrolling only makes a bad situation worse.  For one thing, intense negativity

can skew our actions, become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Not to mention the great cost to mental health.  

          If we learn to think more clearly about how we perceive the future, however, we can find some degree of inner balance. 

          First, even our best thinkers aren’t good at predicting the future.  All kinds of factors get in the way, including our emotions and assumptions.  So some people today obsess about a particular future that may seem certain—but isn’t.

          Second, the old “thesis plus antithesis = synthesis” is also at play.  The “pendulum effect” refers to counter-extremes, and there’s plenty of that around.  But it’s also about hitting the sweet spot, finding a clearer, more informed view.  Our current president is pushing hard for authoritarianism, if not outright fascism.  But this has inevitably sparked significant resistance, a resistance that’s easy to underappreciate.  We can’t know how all this will turn out.  But we can count on the rise of counter-forces, especially in a nation like ours, with deep traditions of freedom.

          And many are learning to re-appreciate things we took for granted.  Uncontested elections—Constitutional balance between the three branches of government—a globally committed USA—the list goes on. Sometimes threats to common goods reveal just how precious they are, rededicate us to protecting them.

          Finally, consider the long arc. I don’t mean this as a panacea; many people are suffering terribly right now.  It’s easy to stand on the sideline and say, Don’t worry; everything’ll work out.  But that’s heartless.

          Human progress, on the other hand, is real. I think it proceeds in a three-steps-forward/two-steps-back fashion. But that one forward step matters. I’m profoundly supported in this by Daniel Pinker’s monumental The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker is a decidedly hard-science guy, and the evidence he marshals is massive. But he shows that, though humanity is continually brutish, violent, domineering, and blind, we’re actually making measurable progress, which when viewed over centuries, is no less than astonishing.  

Dickens was right with his “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

          In the light of all this, even our shadowed present, with its threats, confusions, and contentiousness, doesn’t have to paralyze us or drape us in continual gloom.  

          Understanding the way we think about the future can bring both realism—and hope.

          Not the kind of hope that has me dancing around the kitchen table every morning. But the kind that lets me sleep at night, then wake up ready to live my life and do all I can against the forces now threatening human prosperity, happiness, and justice.

Hope Rising Out of Darkness With the New Sun by Tim J. Myers