Climateer Investing: Gratitude Or Grievance, It's A Choice: "Why We Are Better Off Than a Century Ago"

Thursday, November 27, 2025

Gratitude Or Grievance, It's A Choice: "Why We Are Better Off Than a Century Ago"

First up, in my humble opinion, The Best Thing About Being A Utopian:

“Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not.”
― Jean-François Revel, Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era

And from the science & technology fanbois and fangrrls at The New Atlantis, Fall, 2025:

Our ancestors built grand public systems to conquer hunger, thirst, darkness, and squalor. That progress can be lost if we forget it.

I began this series of articles by describing a destination wedding that made me think of Thomas Jefferson. As I was writing this afterword, I went to another wedding in a faraway place, which put me in mind of another president, Calvin Coolidge.
The groom was a career military man from a conservative Catholic family. The bride’s family was liberal and Jewish. As I talked with the families, it became clear that they had strongly diverging ideas about issues like crime, immigration, religion, economics, and the environment. It is commonplace to observe that in the United States, and every other Western nation, these divisions have become so heated that threats of civil war and government collapse have become familiar news headlines. But at the reception there was a shared sense of happiness as the bridesmaids, beautiful young women in flowing dresses, and the groomsmen, handsome young men in dress uniforms, danced together under a splendid full moon.

The political fights that beset the nation are real and important. But at the same time people would have to be pretty far gone not to join in celebrating two nice young people beginning their lives together.

But the people at the wedding had deeper commonalities, too. All of them — like all the inhabitants of the United States and every other Western nation — stand together atop a mountain of successful efforts to improve human well-being. Conservative and liberal, atheist and believer, every race, age, and social class — each and every one has benefited from the great systems built up in the last century and a half that deliver to us good food, clean water, instant electric power, and advances in health. In every material sense, the people at the wedding were far better off than their forebears.

I was bluntly reminded of our good fortune the day after the wedding, when I visited friends who lived nearby. When I took a shower, I looked down and noticed that one of my calves was flushed and swollen. One of my legs is bigger than the other, I thought. That can’t be good.
A few hours later, I went to the emergency room, where a doctor diagnosed the swelling and redness as a skin infection: cellulitis. I asked if cellulitis is risky. “Oh, yes,” the doctor said. “These things have an excellent chance of killing you.” He prescribed antibiotics, which I bought afterward. Within a few hours of taking the first pill, the swelling had subsided. The episode was over — which put me in mind of Calvin Coolidge.
In the summer of 1924, Coolidge’s sixteen-year-old son, Calvin, Jr., played tennis on the White House grounds. For some reason, he wore sneakers without socks. He got a blister on his toe, as one might expect. It quickly became infected. The White House physician took Calvin, Jr., to Walter Reed General Hospital, then as now one of the nation’s finest health care facilities. Unsurprisingly, the son of the president got the best care available. Multiple specialists visited and the full resources of the hospital were devoted to his care. But none of this did any good. Within a week, the president’s son was dead. Coolidge went into a deep depression from which he never fully recovered.

Staphylococcus aureus, a common bacterium, was the cause of death. Staph was responsible for my infection, too. It was striking to realize that a) a century ago I might well have died; and b) the cost of maybe saving my life was three hours in the ER and $4.16 worth of antibiotics.

Another way of saying this is that I, like billions of others, have benefited from the progress humankind has made during the last century.
Progress today is a loaded word. The idea and its name both arose during the Enlightenment, when modern ideas about science first became widespread. Progress’s most important exponent was probably the French philosopher and mathematician Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, who wrote Outline of a Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind in 1794. The Outline is a triumph of hope over experience. Its author initially supported the French Revolution, believing it would lead to more freedom, including freedom to criticize the government. But the revolutionary junta branded Condorcet as a traitor after he criticized it. He wrote about progress while hiding from the police. Soon after finishing the book, Condorcet was caught and thrown in prison. He died in his cell — possibly murdered, certainly still dreaming of progress — two days later. The Outline appeared posthumously.

Condorcet saw the increase of scientific knowledge as leading unavoidably to greater political freedom and well-being. So did most of the framers of the Constitution. But the awful wars of the twentieth century called this idea into question. In a celebrated passage written in 1940, the German writer Walter Benjamin imagined the “angel of history” turning backward to look at the past. “Where we perceive a chain of events [leading to the present], he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” The angel would like to stop to fix the disaster, Benjamin wrote. But he can’t, because he is caught in a violent storm that hurls him helplessly forward “into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”....