Given the circumstances of its founding, you’d think America would be an optimistic, forward-looking place. Yet according to Pew Research, most Americans believe that life was better 50 years ago.
True, the margin is not huge: 41 percent to 37 percent. Even so, what an astonishing finding.
I wasn’t yet born then, but here are a couple of things I know about 1968: There were no cellphones; color TV was a luxury; and jet travel was for the rich.
The Vietnam War was at its most monstrous: 1968 was the year of the Tet offensive and the My Lai massacre. American women did not have much of a life outside the home. Watch, say, the classic horror film Rosemary’s Baby, released that year, and you see a world where wives don’t work. Martin Luther King was murdered, provoking mass rioting.
Widen the shot a little, and the world in 1968 was a brutal place, full of dictatorships, famines and atrocities. Civil wars were raging from Nigeria to Malaysia. China was undergoing the collective insanity of the Cultural Revolution. Soviet tanks were crushing Czechoslovakia.
How can Americans be nostalgic for such a time? How can anyone? Yet they are.
Nigerians pine, by 54 to 41 percent, for 1968, the year their country was convulsed in the Biafran war and their people had a life expectancy of 41 years.
Peruvians long — 46 to 29 percent — for the year that Juan Velasco launched his baleful military coup, plunging their nation into years of poverty. Thirty-nine percent of Hungarians pine for the days of János Kádár’s dictatorship, and only 32 percent think things are better today.
Part of the explanation has to do with the aging process. Elderly Hungarians aren’t nostalgic for queues and secret policemen. They are nostalgic for their youth, for the intensity of their first adolescent crush, for the bright primary colors in which young people live their lives, even against the backdrop of grimy Communist-era tower-blocks.
And news is inherently pessimistic. All human beings emphasize recent and gory events over distant and undramatic ones. “Bad is stronger than good,” as the psychologist Amos Tversky summarized it. Day after day, we see stories about murders and massacres. We never see headlines about the absence of war in Vietnam, or the crimes that didn’t happen but would have under the older, higher crime rates, or the fact that 135,000 people a day are escaping from extreme poverty.
Steven Pinker spends the first part of his latest book, Enlightenment Now, trying to explain why so many people have refused to accept the reams of data in his last one, The Better Angels of our Nature, which proved that wars, homicides and other forms of violence were declining. “The objections revealed not just a skepticism about the data but also an unpreparedness for the possibility that the human condition has improved.”
Since he wrote those words, a team of Harvard researchers has shown why our brains are configured to be gloomy. It turns out that as a problem gets smaller, we tend to exaggerate what’s left of it. Asked to identify angry faces, for example, respondents began to glimpse them more frequently as they became rarer, reclassifying expressions that they had previously called neutral. Similarly, when unacceptable remarks became rarer, they began to find fault with remarks that they had previously categorized as inoffensive.
The Harvard team gives this trait the ungainly name “prevalence-induced concept change,” and it’s the key to understanding politics. As long as people are temperamentally unable to accept that things are getting better, they will be drawn to candidates who, for example, tell them that crime in America is rising (it’s falling), that immigration is out of control (in 2015, for the first time, more Mexicans crossed the border southward than northward) and that ordinary Americans are getting poorer (they’re getting richer).
Equally, the phenomenon explains why so many people refuse to accept that racism is declining. In 1968, one-third of Americans said they wouldn’t vote for “a qualified negro” as president, and a quarter of white Americans supported segregated schools. Those figures are now, to a single approximation, zero. Measure it in any way you like — mixed neighborhoods, interracial marriages, a decline in racial violence, the election of a mixed-race president — race relations have never been better.
There are occasional lapses, of course, as when a white cop shoots an unarmed black man. But to see those lapses as proof that things are getting worse — in 1968, there were shoot-outs between cops and back radicals — is to use the same faulty mental wiring that made respondents classify bland faces as threatening when threatening faces became rarer.
The researchers found that, even when warned against the tendency — indeed, even when offered money to compensate for it — people still exaggerated dwindling problems. Which is why, in politics, optimists rarely win.
