Was the French Revolution a disaster? Well, it did send Europe into 26 years of horrific bloodshed and misery. Standard estimates put the body count of the Napoleonic era alone in the vicinity of 5 million victims. Yet even well-informed people will often furrow their brows and muse that it was, on the whole, a good thing. Or at least too complex to confidently condemn. Ask people about the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the partition of India, or the decolonization movement, and you’ll get similarly mixed-to-positive reactions.
You might think these non-condemnations reflect a healthy aversion to hyperbole. Strangely, though, it is pretty easy to get people – even well-informed people – to name clear-cut “disasters.” Just read last year’s top five headlines aloud. Almost everyone will eagerly identify as least one of these headlines as a “full-blown disaster.” This is true even though the body count of the putative “disaster” is usually in the hundreds, not millions.
Why the difference? You can’t cite generic pessimism; that would lead people to overreact to both big past events and small recent events.
It’s tempting to blame left-wing bias, but it’s very hard to see why modern leftists would want to downplay the misdeeds of Napoleon or the House of Saud.
So what’s going on? The best explanation I know of is what psychologists call construal level theory, also known as “near-far effects.” Recent bad events don’t just feel worse than distant bad events; they feel more avoidable – and therefore more blameworthy. The “correct” reaction to recent bad events feels clear-cut; the “correct” reaction to distant bad events, in contrast, feels debatable. So debatable, in fact, that seemingly bad events could easily be blessings in disguise.
Consider people’s reactions to life extension. Is it bad if a healthy 82-year-old suddenly drops dead? Of course. But what if doctors figure out how to give everyone 120 years of healthy life? Suddenly people start fretting, “It is death that gives life meaning,” and other macabre absurdities. Indeed, when you ask people to imagine a world of universal immortality, many people go full Dada: “Perhaps the universe would be better off without mankind anyway.”
So which view is right – near or far? Frankly, they both seem mad: Humans make molehills out of mountains and mountains out of molehills. In near-mode, we angrily rush to judgment. In far-mode, we calmly entertain the absurd. Numeracy could save us. But the greatest disaster of all is that numeracy only helps those who help themselves.
READER COMMENTS
nobody.really
Jul 31 2018 at 5:10pm
I suspect Caplan has a point about how people normalize past events while pathologize recent ones. But I can think of other dynamics as well.
Ignorance: People may simply know more about recent events, or at least feel that they have a framework from which to judge recent events. They may be less confident about past events, and thus lack any powerful convictions about them, pro or con.
The Inevitability of the Actual/Endowment Effect: People who do know something about past events may well regard those events as a given, and they may not invest much effort speculating about how long-past events might have turned out differently. In contrast, people who lived under circumstances where they experienced surprise, or were forced to wrestle with contingencies, may invest the outcomes with more emotion. I’ve spend countless hours with friends speculating about the outcome of the Harry Potter books, but not the Lord of the Rings books—simply because the outcome of the Lord of the Rings books was already a foregone conclusion by the time I encountered them. This will forever influence how I perceived those stories.
Perspective? Years ago, if you had asked me about George W Bush’s presidency, I would have told you that things could not possible get worse. And don’t get me wrong—I still have a lot of gripes. But the passage of time has done much to rehabilitate Bush’s legacy, hasn’t it? Without the press of immediate events (and the incentive to find fault with an active agent opposed to my agenda), my mind is freed to consider both his strengths and weaknesses. I can entertain more nuance. In contrast, if you were to ask me about Trump’s presidency….
Recall how Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai responded when asked about (allegedly) the consequences of the French Revolution: “Too soon to tell.”
Jeff
Jul 31 2018 at 6:44pm
I think you’d find that educated conservatives, having read Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, know very well how awful the French Revolution was. And some left-wingers probably think more favorably of it than they would otherwise just because Burke was so critical of it. There’s a lot of tribalism among ideologists.
On your life extensions scenario, you can bet that most of the people wringing their hands over the effects of the treatment would also be among the first to sign up to get it. They’d only be worried about the bad effects of other people getting it, not themselves.
Weir
Jul 31 2018 at 8:26pm
A version of immortality already exists. I could read anything. Every book on my reading list is, one way or another, within reach. Also every movie that I’m vaguely interested in seeing. Every James Benning movie. Every Fassbinder. I could make a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody. Every Niagara record on German import.
“I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose–but it was impossible to choose because I could live anywhere.” Geoff Dyer.
Isn’t there something absurd about that? Choice in the absence of scarcity? Playing golf in heaven without end?
Julian Barnes: “My game has improved no end, I thought, and repeated the words no end to myself. But that’s, of course, exactly what it couldn’t do: there had to be an end to my improvement. One day I would play a round of golf in 18 shots, I’d buy Severiano a couple of drinks, celebrate later with sturgeon and chips and sex–and then what? Had anyone, even here, ever played a golf course in 17 shots?”
Endless accumulation actually is absurd. The stock market moves up slightly one day and down slightly the next, and it doesn’t matter either way. You’re weightless. You have all the time in the world, and what do you do with it? All day breakfast and blogs? So the only thing weighing you down is the responsibility of having chosen one thing over an infinite number of other things. Nothing’s stopping you from doing something of value with your life, but you don’t. So life is meaningless precisely to the extent that you’re rich, comfortable, at ease, unconstrained.
The French Revolution was a disaster because it wasn’t necessary.
Alan Goldhammer
Aug 1 2018 at 7:50am
The Thirty Years War was far more destructive, albeit over a smaller geographic area, than the Napoleonic Wars. C.V. Wedgewood’s fine book on this war is a very good chronicle of it all.
Aside from this I confess to not understanding the point Professor Caplan is trying to make here.
Matthias Goergens
Aug 2 2018 at 7:37am
You can come up with lots of wars worse than the French Revolution.
The question was whether the French Revolution was bad, not whether it was the worst.
Robert Wiblin
Aug 2 2018 at 5:11pm
Hi Brian, a related philosophical debate is around moral ‘cluelessness’:
“Decisions, whether moral or prudential, should be guided at least in part by considerations of the consequences that would result from the various available actions. For any given action, however, the majority of its consequences are unpredictable at the time of decision. Many have worried that this leaves us, in some important sense, clueless. In this paper, I distinguish between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ possible sources of cluelessness. In terms of this taxonomy, the majority of the existing literature on cluelessness focusses on the simple sources. I argue, contra James Lenman in particular, that these would-be sources of cluelessness are unproblematic, on the grounds that indifference-based reasoning is far less problematic than Lenman (along with many others) supposes. However, there does seem to be a genuine phenomenon of cluelessness associated with the ‘complex’ sources; here, indifference-based reasoning is inapplicable by anyone’s lights. This ‘complex problem of cluelessness’ is vivid and pressing, in particular, in the context of Effective Altruism. This motivates a more thorough examination of the precise nature of cluelessness, and the precise source of the associated phenomenology of discomfort in forced-choice situations. The latter parts of the paper make some initial explorations in those directions.”
https://philpapers.org/rec/GREC-38
@nobody.really “Recall how Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai responded when asked about (allegedly) the consequences of the French Revolution: “Too soon to tell.””
Not that it matters to the point, but I believe Enlai thought he being asked about the contemporaneous student riots in Paris.
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