Is everything so bad?

There was the COVID-19 pandemic and its social and economic consequences. Now there is war in Ukraine, the resurgence of the nuclear threat and inflation. And in the background, of course, there are always the worrying forecasts of climate experts. After two decades of relative calm, the future may look bleak. Philosophical looks at the time we are going through, which is perhaps not so dark as that.

Catherine Handfield
The Press

Never in his 25-year career has cartoonist Graeme MacKay seen one of his cartoons go as viral as this one.

It is that of a very small earth that will soon be hit by successive waves, bigger and bigger, more and more devastating: COVID-19, the recession, climate change and, to wrap it all up , the collapse of biodiversity.

Cartoonist for The Hamilton Spectator, Ontario, Graeme MacKay drew the first version of this drawing on March 11, 2020, the same day the World Health Organization declared a COVID-19 pandemic. Originally, it only counted the first two waves. Social networks seized it, and the image – powerful – quickly went around the world.

“It’s rare for a cartoonist to be able to create a drawing that can be understood in all countries, by all cultures,” says Graeme MacKay, joined by The Press. The idea of ​​these waves coming in and impending doom is common, universal. »

His drawing has been translated, reproduced, cut out, enhanced with new waves (collapse of the health system, Third World War, etc.). Graeme MacKay listened to suggestions coming to him from all sides and produced new versions, including this one, which ends with the collapse of biodiversity.

Vulnerability

A survey released this week shows that optimism is falling in the country. In 2016, 75% of Canadians said they were optimistic about the future; they were only 64% in 2021-2022, indicates Statistics Canada, recalling that the pandemic has upset the lives of many people.

Professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, sociologist Diane Pacom compares the pandemic to an evanescent war.

“It forced us to face things that we are not used to facing in today’s societies, that is to say death,” says Diane Pacom, who believes that these These questions are all the more difficult in the post-religious era, because society – “cynical and individualistic” – no longer supports them.

“It’s an incredibly difficult time, because we are dealing with our vulnerability,” she continues. We lived carefree, with this idea that we, the West, have science, medicine, researchers, laboratories… And then this virus arrives, and it’s been two years since we laid fallow our lives. There is something absolutely unacceptable. »

Professor in the philosophy department of the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), Christophe Malaterre points out that, in the last two or three decades, we had the impression of living in a “more pampered” period, and that today today, we are dealing with a lot of crises – the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis of which we are becoming more and more aware. Christophe Malaterre feels a certain disillusion in people, a destabilization, a disappointment, above all.

The philosopher is himself demoralized by another phenomenon: the propagation of “alternative facts”, of this anti-science and anti-reason movement. We find ourselves, he sums up, in a world where there is a great deal of fake news circulating, on the one hand, but also totally frivolous information, from the video of a cat falling in the bathtub to that of maskless influencers feasting on an airplane, on the other.

“There are these big crises, and there is this kind of disorder which is becoming more and more present, which absorbs us and which diverts us from our reality, and which is harmful both for individuals and for society” , says Christophe Malaterre, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Life Sciences.

If Graeme MacKay were to add a wave to his caricature, moreover, it would be that of polarization and misinformation, which he would place between the first two.

Fighting pessimism

It is always difficult to know in which era we live, underlines Jean Grondin, full professor of philosophy at the University of Montreal. We know better, he says, in which era the people of the past lived.

The three speakers we spoke to all wanted to bring a little relativism to the crises we are going through and to the anxiety that we can feel about the future. “Humanity has always lived in this atmosphere of crisis”, summarizes Diane Pacom.

For those who feel disillusioned with the future, Jean Grondin has some advice. “The answer is very clear. We educate ourselves. »

There are things – many things, even – that are better, recalls Jean Grondin, who quotes the book Factfulness, by Swedish physicist Hans Rosling, now deceased. In two centuries, the literacy rate has risen from 10% to 86% and the extreme poverty rate has fallen from 85% to 9%. Smallpox, once one of the biggest killers of children, was declared eradicated in 1980. The world has not seen a world war since 1945.

Jean Grondin also quotes his master, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who said that pessimism lacks probity. “We tell ourselves that everything is going badly or that everything is going to go wrong in the secret hope of being wrong,” he summarizes.

That said, we must take the warnings of scientists seriously and change our behavior accordingly, adds Jean Grondin in the same breath. We must also show vigilance and lucidity towards the Vladimir Putins of this world. “We are right to be worried and we should not look at the world with rose-colored glasses either. »

But when he thinks of the current crises, Jean Grondin also thinks of these vaccines developed in record time and capable of preventing the serious complications of COVID-19. He is also thinking of the ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles, in Canada, from 2035. He is thinking of techniques for gaining access to drinking water, of progress in agriculture. He also thinks of the ties that have been tightened in NATO and the Ukrainian flags hanging from Montreal balconies.

The philosopher Christophe Malaterre also believes that it is always easier to imagine the worst than to imagine the best. And he too thinks there is room for a bright future.

To help us live, to get through these crises, “we have to better realize, collectively, that we are very strongly interdependent with each other, says Christophe Malaterre. Between humans, between societies, but also with other species, with the ecosystem, with this planet that hosts us”.

And if we each have our noses in TikTok videos, we won’t notice, he says. “We only realize this when we manage to place man back in his humanity, but also in the whole course of the human species,” he says. And when we become aware of this special place that we occupy today, we only say one thing: we are dealing with something absolutely extraordinary. »

As for this crisis of the COVID-19 which assailed us, it should not be trivialized either, believes the sociologist Diane Pacom. “It’s not negligible, what we are going through, and we have to find the necessary resources within us and around us to be able to get through it. »