Confessions of a Reformed Coronavirus Skeptic
By: John Halstead
Tags: Civilization, Personal Growth, Perspective, Climate Change, Coronavirus

It’s one thing to believe that industrial civilization is on the decline. But it is another thing to recognize it happening in my own life. And it is another thing altogether to find the wisdom to live through it.

More and more, I am coming to believe that we are not nearly so rational as we like to think. We accept facts when they confirm our preexisting worldviews, and when they don’t, we go looking for other facts — which are plentiful nowadays. I am no less prone to it than anyone else.

Simple answers have to be earned by working through complexity.

And so, while I think I am right about the things I write on my website, Another End of the World is Possible, while I think my beliefs are supported by “the facts,” I am just as prone to self-deception as the next person.

We live by stories. Call them “worldviews” or “paradigms” or “myths,” but they’re basically stories. Stories we make up—by ourselves, but mostly together. At best, we’re only partially conscious of these stories as stories. These stories shape all our perceptions. Some of them are better representations of reality than others. Some of them are better guides to action than others. But all of them are constructions, limited by individual perspective, historical situation, and human fallibility.

Recently, Roy Scranton, author of We’re Doomed. Now What? and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, suggested that we should strive for complexity in our stories to better reflect reality, even while knowing that this is no guarantee. The idea reminds me of a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.:

For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.

When I first read this, I was struck by the idea of a simplicity that exists on the far side of complexity. It occurred to me that simple answers have to be earned — earned by working through complexity. Simple answers that precede such wrestling with complexity are not earned and therefore tend to be wrong, or at least misleading.

This has been true in my own life. I was raised in a religion (Mormonism) that denies complexities and paints the world in stark monochrome. I believed it was heroic to deny ambiguities and thus ignored life’s complexities. Life seemed much simpler then, but it was a simplicity I had not earned. And in the end, it turned out to be false—as fundamentalisms tend to be. I still long for simple answers, but I find that when I grasp for them too quickly, I am left holding the fool’s gold of a certainty cheaply bought.

Years after I left the Mormon church, I was visited by a friend from that church. I was impressed by his wisdom. It was a wisdom of simple truths, but a simplicity I suspect was earned by a life of struggle with complexities — which included being a Black man in an overwhelmingly White church with a history of racist policies. He spoke several times of love, how love is “the answer.”

I think there are simple answers out there, answers like “love.” I don’t think I have earned them yet, though. But I hope that, one day, I might win my way through the complexity to the simplicity that the wise know.