We’ve all seen those saccharine videos on social media where the world works the way we want it to. The bad guy pays the price. The good guy is rewarded. Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein wrote about these popular moralistic stories in the NY Times a while back.
“These are stories we already know, having watched the real-life versions go viral. Mann, recognizing our appetite for more, obliges by staging it. But he also comforts us by ensuring that the antagonists always get their comeuppance, the smooth conclusion we are denied in the real world. And he flatters us by making the problematic characters so obviously wrong that we have no choice but to identify with goodness — and, often, to feel bizarrely moved by the uplifting outcome we always knew was coming.”
These morality tales predate social media. They aren’t always so blatant. Or even so direct as to be about people.
How many times have we been told the story of the peppered moth? They were white until pollution in England made it more advantageous to be black. The black moths blended in with soot covered trees and survived. The white ones were eaten by predators. Soon they were all black.
It’s easy to get the impression that belief in evolution is the same as belief in progress. In a world where only the fittest survive, it’s easy to imagine that each generation is better adapted to the environment than the next, that inferior traits are weeded out.
I wonder if stories framed like the peppered moth’s color switch are the reason people insist that disability rates are higher today because of progress. They insist there are more disabled people because of medical advancements and improved quality of life. People are living better, longer lives and thus there are more people living long enough to become chronically ill and require decades of support. That’s why caregiving is a problem and why we haven’t accounted for it.
Only we’re not moths. Even for moths, the story is more complex than a tidy anecdote.
Looking around a modern city, there are a limited number of species, but those I see are incredibly diverse. I marvel at the differences among pigeons and people. Both have been bred to encourage specific traits. Both have been set free to choose their own mates.
If certain traits are more adaptive — like size or build or color — it certainly doesn’t appear to become widespread. Millions of years into evolution, several generations into city living, we don’t seem to be narrowing down our traits to select for the optimal ones.
The thing is, evolution and eugenics are not the same theory. So often it seems like they are. Evolution includes disability and diversity. They’re not a mistake. They’re not things to be elimiated. There is no optimal human in evolution, only in eugenics.
Humans created the modern city. Even the things we like to imagine are natural, like the landscapes of Central Park, are artificial. Yet the built environment doesn’t seem adapted to meet the needs of human life.
Spending a little time watching people move about the city reveals people struggling over curbs and uneven sidewalks, being unable to decode signage, slowing down to navigate narrow spaces, being unable to tell which way a door opens. There are sidewalks that become comically slick when it rains, steps that reliably catch people off-guard, corners where one group after another stops to get their bearings.
Why don’t we seem to know how to build for people? Spaces are designed with an ideal person in mind. Unfortunately, none of us seem to be that person. We aren’t the scalies they use in architectural renderings. We aren’t homo economicus. We aren’t the end result of someone’s utopian vision.
I’m skeptical about the idea that there are more people living with disabilities today than there were previously. The idea that in the past disabled people simply didn’t survive doesn’t seem convincing, aside from a few noteworthy conditions that were previously invariably fatal and those in long-term ICU care.
My hunch is that disability has always been widespread, except for cases where societies opted to fatally neglect the disabled. That nutritional deficiencies, accidents, and the disease landscape would have made disability so widespread as to be seen as a normal part of the human condition.
Many diseases that can now be cured once took a very long time to kill people, giving them decades to navigate the world with a disability. Untreated syphilis caused widespread neurological issues and dementia. Consumption certainly wasn’t a speedy way to go. Cancer may be more common now, but it’s hardly a new invention and it’s hardly a category of disease restricted to the elderly.
Trying to make sense of historic disability rates has led me down rabbit holes of reading about daily life in different ages. I’ve found myself intrigued by the real scoop on the bathing habits of the Tudors and what regular people ate.
Pestering my mom with questions as we walked to Penn Station, I realized it was nearly as difficult for me to imagine her experience of taking the bus into Manhattan as a middle schooler as it is for me to imagine life in Victorian England.
I’m not sure I understand other people’s experiences in contemporary life, either.
A while ago, a couple I’m friends with had a minor argument. Both partners happened to tell me, individually, their version of events. I imagined I had a pretty good understanding of what had happened until a week or two later, when one of them referenced the argument and I realized there was so much more to the story that neither of them had included in what they told me. Life is rich with details. It’s impossible to convey.
People are so relieved to join support groups and find people who understand what they’re going through. Yet so often there are still misunderstandings. We’re inclined to hear what we expect to hear. We make sense of things based on what we know. The human experience is universal and unknowable.
I don’t know if everyone is inundated with these clickbaity headlines or if it’s what the algorithm has chosen for me:
This is the optimal amount of exercise. Do these three things for a marriage that lasts. This is how much water to drink every day. This is how to keep someone interested in you. This is what you need to never get cancer. This is the right way to do things. Follow these steps. Use this life hack. Do this. Don’t do that. Do this and live forever. Do this and you’ll be happy.
I love when people tell me a story they’ve told me before. I’m fascinated by what details change and which stay precisely the same. The stories we tell get smoothed out over time. The more times we’ve told a story the more coherent it is. The number of characters is reduced. Their relationships to each other are streamlined. Only the pertinent details stick around. The moral becomes more clear. The punchline stays the same.
I’ve been tempted to write eight equally true stories of the end of my marriage. Or thirty. Or one hundred. I’m not sure what the moral would be, though.
Still, I sigh and roll my eyes when I come across the same handful of anectdotes in books and articles. The moths. The Tylenol recall that happened before I was born yet is still the favorite example in every marketing book. That study where people shock themselves rather than sit with their own thoughts for a few minutes. Our lives are full of morality tales disguised as science.
It’s a fairly common idea that people enter our lives to teach us something. That difficult coworker or the date that ghosts you or the cousin who frays your nerves isn’t merely annoying, they’re a learning opportunity sent by the universe. In this view, something like cancer is both what happens when you ignore too many of these learning opportunities and the ultimate learning opportunity.
I’m more inclined to believe we make sense of the challenges we face because that’s what humans do. We’re a storytelling species.
There’s no guarantee that we’ve noticed the salient details or that the lessons we take away are helpful. What are phobias and trauma but maladaptive life lessons? We pick up bad habits as well as good ones.
It’s easy to understand why people keep watching morality tales, buying books promising to decode the things that baffle us, and hoping this will finally be the thing that works.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were clear answers? If the world made sense? If things were fair? If things were within our control?