For Sandra Bullock, however chance may find her (a dream interlude)

I was in a bar with friends, and Sandra Bullock was there too. (It wasn’t a sex thing, though. She’s very attractive, but she’s the epitome of not-my-type. Not sure why it was her.) She had just finished explaining how we are destroying the planet with our wasteful and polluting ways, the horrible inequality and poverty, and the general hopelessness that a thinking person must feel in America today.

Shaking my head, I said to her, “We are so close.” Then, with some sketches on the back of a paper menu to help show the timelines, here’s what I said to her.

We’re so close. So, so close to all the things we dream of.

Think about history for a moment. Take your mind back to the ancient civilizations that gave us the foundations of law and philosophy and politics, the social templates that shaped the world for thousands of years. Think about the technology that built their civilizations: domestication of plants and livestock, irrigation, the wheel, and writing. That’s about it.

Moreover, giving or taking a few marginal changes, the life of an Egyptian in 1700 BC was not all that different from your great-grandfather’s life. Both were lives characterized by backbreaking labor, rampant disease, and unsparing mortality. People in both times mainly tilled small plots of land, farming first to feed themselves, with some surplus to trade for specialized goods – but they often still made their own clothes, from shearing sheep to spinning wool to stitching the garments themselves. Preserving food through smoking, drying, pickling, and canning wasn’t merely hobby time for hipsters. It was all that stood between them and winter starvation.

John Tyler was president in the 1840s, just around the time the great changes were beginning, and as of 2017 he still has living grandchildren. Three generations of Tylers ago, even the president of the United States lived like a peasant. True, he would have had servants to ease things a little. But the White House was cold, drafty, and smoky, heated only by fire, with no running water or electricity. Three generations ago, the most important man in America lived in a manner that we would abhor if we saw the poorest person today enduring.

Even later, in 1875, John Harvey Kellogg was studying medicine in New York City, the most modern place in the nation, and at Bellevue Hospital, the medical epicenter of America. He lived in a cold attic, trundling downstairs and outside to stand in line waiting his turn to shit in a freezing, insect-infested outhouse. Even in Rome, more than 2000 years before, public latrines had running water (recycled from the public baths, no less) to flush away the waste. Moreover, Kellogg would be taught almost nothing about sanitation in medicine. Advocates of washing hands after touching a sick patient were still voices in the wilderness, bloodletting was still common.

Until very recently, the improvement in the work, health, and comfort of a typical person was so slow as to be nearly non-existent. Perhaps the magic moment was in 1869 when Leland Stanford drove the golden spike that opened the Union Pacific transcontinental railroad. Goods and people could now move cross country with speed. (A horse drawn wagon of goods making good time could cross the continent at roughly 20 miles per day, or roughly five months.) Even so, it would take many years for the average person to make use of this mobility. At that moment, more than half of the people in the country still worked as farmers.

It is less than 150 years later and our world is unrecognizable. In the U.S., decent sanitation is nearly universal, as is the comfort of clean heating in even the poorest homes. Technology that would have been indistinguishable from witchcraft is ubiquitous. When I sat down at a computer for the first time, it was likely the only one for miles and miles. My friend’s father worked at IBM, and he had a computer at home. Now nearly everyone has one in their pocket.

Pollution of air and water is down dramatically, which no one ever mentions. The poorest wage worker lives better than John Tyler did. For every unit of fossil fuel we use, we go further, do more work, provide more overall benefit. Of the top 10 causes of death just 100 years ago, 6 of them – pneumonia, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, bronchitis, and meningitis – are either virtually eradicated or easily treated. And one more cause of death, violence, is nearing a historical low (roughly tied with the 1950s).

How can we look at this and feel hopeless? Think what we could be tomorrow.