The Uses of Catastrophe
Do not fear the hobgoblins
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
—H. L. Mencken
The twentieth-century essayist Mencken, in typical fashion, made his point hyperbolically, but he made it nonetheless. While it is not true that every threat described by politicians is entirely imaginary, it is true that incentives push them in the direction of exaggeration.
Political reward is one, but far from the only, factor explaining the phenomenon of what has been called “catastrophism”—the tendency to inflate dramatically the negative importance of one issue or another. (This term used in a cultural context should not be confused with catastrophism as a geological theory, which is entirely unrelated.)
Another factor, as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, is presentism—the common tendency to emphasize what is recent and immediate over what is past and remote. Goldberg cites a 2024 YouGov survey on the economy that demonstrates that most people’s perceptions are, to use Goldberg’s words, “by any objective measure, wrong. Spectacularly wrong.” Almost a third of respondents identified the 2020s as the decade with the worst economy in the last hundred years. Another 10 percent pointed to the 2000s or the 2010s, meaning that over 40 percent thought that a decade within this century endured the “worst economy” since 1930. Some small consolation is that 23 percent—the largest number outside the 2020s—identified the 1930s. But considering that that decade, by any reasonable accounting, should have received 100 percent, this result clearly reveals a powerful combination of the related distortions of historical ignorance and presentist bias.
Political manipulators stand to benefit from public panic, and the public’s lack of historical perspective make them susceptible to it. “The use of fear to gain power is a tale as old as time, but our unprecedented access to information has not made us any less vulnerable to it,” Elizabeth Melton recently observed. “Each decade of the lives of the modern citizen has brought about its own moral panic with the accompanying ‘solution,’” she notes; and “fear has driven consistent relinquishment of our individual rights over time.”
As a result, we live in what social scientist Brendan Dooley has aptly called an “Age of Trivial Panic.” Dooley identifies certain factors of contemporary life that have served to intensify the perennial problem. The expansion of bureaucracy and the centralizing of activity and decision-making in national government, combined with the power of the Internet and social media to shape perception, has created a “chasm between our own experience and the list of problems that are socially constructed for us in the Digital Age.” Dooley argues that “insignificant problems are constantly magnified,” while experts advise us that “the truly existential problems are beyond our capabilities to address. Trapped in this dilemma, society slides toward dissolution.”
Human beings, it seems, have an innate desire for drama. Many thrill at the sensation that they confront a life-or-death situation. When our lives are conducted in an environment that is, in fact, relatively safe, we are tempted to inflate the danger of any detectible threat. That threat might involve climate change, disease, big tech, or big government. Whatever it is, the danger, we are told, is “unprecedented.” This election is the most important ever. This person (or institution or movement) will destroy America. This person (or institution or movement) will save the world.
When people speak in these terms, they are probably selling something. There are plenty of people, of every political persuasion, who recognize the opportunity in catastrophe and who are loath to let “a serious crisis to go to waste.”
In addition to the drama of impending catastrophe, there is the pull of the narrative of decline. The impression that we are somehow worse than our ancestors, that we have failed to live up to the standard of the past, is widespread—and nothing new. “Declension” is a prominent theme in the historiography of colonial New England. The Boston Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather (1663–1728) worried that succeeding generations had squandered the inheritance of the New World Promised Land founded by the Pilgrims, and he saw the youth of his day as drifting further from that ideal. Three centuries later, a common trope is that the heroes of the “Greatest Generation” are gradually passing from the scene and the rest of us are unworthy to replace them.
These narratives of decline are attractive in part because there is real evidence for them. There is some basis in experience for the “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” adage, whereby the first generation, hardworking and entrepreneurial, gains wealth; the second generation builds on it; and the third generation, oblivious of the sources of success, squanders the inheritance of its forebears. There is always evidence for decline, just as there is always evidence for advance. The world is a complicated place, and reasons for both optimism and pessimism can always be found. This is true in the spheres of morality, economics, intellectual and cultural pursuits, and every other dimension of human experience. We can create either narratives of progress or narratives of regress, by choosing which data to explore and emphasize. This means that we should be wary of any depiction of reality that is one-sided, hyper-focused on either the negative or the positive.
There may well come a day when catastrophe strikes. Stock market valuations may evaporate. Civil war may erupt. A meteor may collide with our planet. But chances are that none of these are right around the corner, and focusing attention and energy on “an endless series of hobgoblins” distracts us from the good that can actually be done, here and now.