Toward a shallower future

Adversity isn't worth the price of adversity.

Art by GPT-4. Prompt: “an image that evokes ‘The Triumph of Death’, with similar buildings and a similar layout, but where everyone is healthy and happy”

“I would love to live to be 50 years old.” — Keith Haring

Yes, this post starts with the latest ridiculous contretemps on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. But I promise, it gets more interesting!

The latest contretemps revolves around a famous painting: Keith Haring’s Unfinished Painting. Painted in 1989, it represented the artist’s impending death from AIDS. Haring died the following year, at the age of 31.

Art by Keith Haring

It’s an incredibly haunting, tragic image. The streaks of paint falling from the fragment of a pattern immediately evoke tears, blood, disintegration, futility; they emphasize just how much of the canvas was left blank. It’s a reminder of how much of our potential as individuals is wasted, and of an almost-forgotten pandemic that claimed 700,000 lives in the U.S. alone.

The other day, a pseudonymous account named DonnelVillager¹ posted an AI-generated image that “completes” the pattern in the upper left of Haring’s painting:

DonnelVillager’s post — perfectly calculated to simulate ingenuousness, while actually poking fun at art appreciators — was itself a masterwork of internet pranksterism. It was instantly condemned by tens of thousands of angry Twitter users for “desecrating” Haring’s art. Defenders responded that DonnelVillager’s trollish tweet was itself a work of art, and that the furious response proved that AI art has the potential to be transgressive and to tweak the cultural orthodoxy’s tail.

Normally I would just shake my head at one more social media food fight and move on. But this reply by my friend Daniel caught my eye:

Of course, Daniel is also poking fun, but in a very important way, he’s right. If AIDS had never existed — or if HIV treatments had come just a little sooner — Haring might have created something like DonnelVillager’s AI image. After all, a fair amount of Haring’s other work did look like that.

And yes, without AIDS, Haring very well might never produced anything as haunting or evocative as Unfinished Painting. His art might have remained forever cheerful and whimsical, peppered with the occasional political statement. This June, William Poundstone wrote that “Everybody loves Keith Haring, but nobody takes him seriously…The [latest] exhibition does not exactly demolish the notion that Haring was repetitious.” The AI image that DonnelVillager created is an incredibly shallow thing — an unthinking regurgitation of meaningless patterns in a Haring-like style by a large statistical model. But without the pressure of a life cut short, Haring’s art might never have been as deep as it was.

Yet that would have been a good trade. Unfinished Painting is a great work of art, but it wasn’t worth the price of Haring’s life. Without AIDS, the world might have been a bit shallower, with less tragedy for humans to struggle against. But no one in their right mind wishes for tragedies to continue just so that human life can continue to be filled with pathos. Adversity is not worth the price of adversity. Even a world where Keith Haring lived to old age, but every one of his paintings was pointless AI-generated crap, would have been preferable to the world we actually got.

This got me thinking about the meaning of progress.

One of my grandfathers was a bombardier in the European theater of World War 2. He came back uninjured, but the stress of so many near-death experiences, and so many dead friends, drove him to lifelong alcoholism. Once, in the 1990s, I heard a conservative pundit claim that young Americans had become soft and weak because they had never had to face adversity like the World War 2 generation did. I asked my grandfather what he thought of that. After uttering something unprintable, he said: “I did that [stuff] so you wouldn’t have to.”

In a letter to his wife in 1780, John Adams, one of America’s founders, expressed a sentiment that was very similar to what my grandfather felt — and with which many veterans undoubtedly agree. He wrote:

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

Embedded in these statements is the belief that the trials and challenges of the world are potentially impermanent; that rather than something to be endured again and again ad infinitum, they are something that can and should be conquered and put behind us forever. It’s the belief that with effort, we can create a durably better world.

That’s not a trivial assumption. Humans have always dreamed of creating a better world, but for most of our history, the world stubbornly refused to get better at anything faster than a snail’s pace. A human in China or Europe or the Middle East in the year 1400 didn’t live a significantly better life than one in 400 B.C. Civilizations would rise, but then they would fall, smashed back to earth by something that looked suspiciously like a Malthusian ceiling. As a Frenchman in the year 1000 you could dream of creating God’s kingdom on Earth, but short of supernatural intervention, you could not reasonably dream of a world without smallpox, bedbugs, or senile erectile dysfunction.

Then, of course, something changed. By now you’ve all seen the graph where world GDP creeps along and then explodes upward like a hockey stick; I won’t post it again. Instead I’ll post this one:

For American women to die from pregnancy used to be a normal occurrence; then in the 1930s and 1940s it became an extreme rarity. Suddenly, a fundamental fact of human suffering that had stubbornly resisted change since time immemorial simply gave way. We fought and lost, and fought and lost, and then one day we fought and won.

The proximate reason for the abrupt decline in maternal mortality was the invention of antibiotics in 1928, and the development of medical practices like blood transfusions whose safety depends on antibiotics. But although penicillin was discovered by accident, it didn’t simply appear out of nowhere; its discovery required the edifice of an industrial society that took centuries to build. The victory over maternal mortality was achieved by a long struggle, not by a happy accident. (In fact, in some countries, maternal mortality began to fall in the 1800s, thanks to the wealth created by industrialization.)

A romantic could argue, if they were so inclined, that the conquest of maternal mortality has made the world a shallower place. In the early 1800s, you could tell stories whose emotional power rested — explicitly or silently — on the universal knowledge that childbirth meant mortal danger. Today, our high school English teachers have to explain this to us when we read Jane Austen or Emily Brontë, just so we understand, on an intellectual level, how brave the women in their novels were.

Such conquests have become commonplace. HIV was a death sentence in 1995; the next year, David Ho and his team unveiled a new combination drug therapy that turned it into a manageable chronic disease. And now, almost three decades later, Unfinished Painting is already becoming something that most people need explained to them; we still understand the meaning of terminal disease, but the context of AIDS, and especially what it meant to gay people in the political climate of the 1980s, is already fading from living memory into dry history.

As the world becomes safer — as one after another edifice of human suffering crumbles before the collective might of science, technology, and industrial society — it becomes harder to harness the emotional power of tragedy, risk, adversity, and heroism. The lives of more individuals become childlike, pure, and unmarked — or at least a little bit more so than before.

I first realized this years ago, while watching Disney’s The Little Mermaid. In the original 1837 Danish fairy tale, the mermaid wagers her life on a chance to win the love of a prince; she fails, and her life is forfeit to the evil sea witch. In the 1989 Disney movie, the same exact thing happens — except instead of passively accepting defeat, the mermaid and the prince simply stab the sea witch in the chest with the broken prow of a ship, and live happily ever after.

Perhaps this is the kind of resolution that could only feel natural and satisfying in America, a country that grew up after the Industrial Revolution. Some call Hollywood endings shallow, but they reflect our everyday reality in the modern world; what is David Ho’s defeat of AIDS, but the stabbing of an evil sea witch in the chest?

Nor, I think, are we simply on a temporary upswing. Some romanticists imagine that society is a cycle, where hard times create strong men, who create good times, which creates weak men, who create hard times. But whether or not that sort of institutional cycle exists, the technologies discovered during the last upswing will be preserved. Countries may collapse, but humanity will not forget antibiotics.

Nor is there any sign that this process will be naturally limited by humans’ inability to appreciate the improvements in their material lives. There is no upper limit on the correlation between life satisfaction and GDP. Contrary to popular myth, suicide rates tend strongly to fall as countries become richer. The higher measured rate of depression in developed nations is likely due not to ennui, but to better diagnosis.

Some romanticists feel the urge to knock over the edifice of industrial society intentionally, in order to kick against the seeming shallowness of modern life — to return humanity to a world of toil and struggle, in order to ennoble us. But these dark romantics are rightfully recognized in fiction and public discourse as villains. The heroes of our stories are the people like David Ho — the ones who fought to hoist humanity up from the muck so that future generations could be a little more childlike, the ones who studied politics and war so that our grandchildren may study statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Romanticists need to accept that the nobility of suffering has always been a coping mechanism — a way to sustain hope through the long twilight of apparent futility. And they need to accept that heroism is always inherently self-destroying — that saving the world requires that the world is worth having been saved.

And they must at least try to understand that in a more general sense, happiness isn’t truly shallow — it just has a different kind of depth. The passions of people raised in a kinder, gentler world may be alien and incomprehensible to the older generation, but they are no less intense, and the culture around them is no less complex. Adversity forces us to rise to its challenge, but abundance allows us to discover who we might become, and that is a different sort of adventure.

Looking back on my own life so far, I remember the happy child I was, before clinical depression changed me. Depression is horrible, but it added a richness and depth to the person I am today, and I appreciate the value of those changes. But if that happy child had gotten a chance to grow up without depression, I think he would have been changed in different ways, and under the tutelage of gentler teachers, would have become no less worthwhile and interesting of a person.

So it must be with humanity. The modern world of push-button marvels has lost something, but it has gained more than it has lost. By celebrating it, we honor the countless millennia of heroes who worked in some small way to bring it about, even as we dedicate ourselves to continuing their great enterprise. Our legacy is to fill the Universe with children who laugh more than we were allowed to.

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1. Interestingly, DonnelVillager’s handle is one of the things that inspired me to write this post. It’s a reference to one of my favorite video games, Fire Emblem: Awakening. The character Donnel is a simple villager who is forced to go fight in an apocalyptic war after his father is killed by bandits. If you take care to level him up, he becomes a very powerful hero, but at the end of the war he goes back to his farming village and lives out a simple life, giving up fighting and adventure forever. His story serves as a reminder that struggle is not done for struggle’s sake.