Nihilism nixed - hope as a way forward

In crime prevention and community-building, perspective is everything! 

by Gregory Saville

I am struck by the optimism in the cases described in recent blogs – Beth’s story about the Portland TriMet community safety team; my blog on answers to homelessness, especially the miracle underway today in Finland; the numerous examples of successful solidarity in Mateja’s blog about how we have witnessed communities come together to rebuild after natural disasters.

And yet I am also struck by the political blindness people choose to accept when it comes to difficult situations, like high crime neighborhoods, and how hopeless things seem. I was told, before our recent training in Baltimore, that there are unsurmountable obstacles in that city with drugs, shootings, fiscal chaos, and hopelessness (said by people not from Baltimore). 

Yet, on the ground during training, residents and community-builders who live there had a different view. Yes, there were problems, but they dedicated themselves to doing something positive. Currently, they are doing just that. (We return to Baltimore next month to review the results).

It is easy to be distracted by news stories of wickedness around the world

GLOBAL TRENDS

In the middle of news stories about the doom and gloom around us, and the very real terror of nuclear war and environmental collapse, I often remind myself how easy it is to fall into a nihilistic, hell-in-a-handbasket funk. 

Then I read Ronald Bailey and Marian Tupey’s book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and dozens of charts, graphs, and data showing inexorable positive directions for dozens of social, economic, and crime trends around the world. Life expectancy, poverty, health, food resources… all getting better, not worse! How can this be so? So many people believe the doom and gloom story! 

Maybe, I thought, these authors got it wrong. Did they get caught in a confirmation bias trap and cherry-picked rosy data and ignored the rest. To answer that, I went on a deep dive into data on global trends to see if they were right. 

Here is what I found:

Life expectancy… going up. Even a downward blip during the global pandemic does not offset the enormous improvements over the decades.

Global access to technology like electricity, even in the poorest countries, has markedly improved.

Child mortality around the world has been plummeting for decades. Bailey and Tupey were right.

For over 500 years, global literacy rates have grown every century and continue to improve today.

And there it was, from one source after another, chart after chart, the list of positive trends goes on and on. 

NIHILISM NIXED

But you'd never know it! You’d never know so many trends are improving if you only watched the miracle of stupidity that is the 24-hour news cycle spitting out, as it does, tragedy after tragedy! With billions around the world, and cell phones in every nook, it is not difficult for news machines to find one “exclusive” horror after another. It may not be the full truth – and it is certainly not investigative journalism – but it sells!

In SafeGrowth, we teach neighborhood dwellers how to do basic field research, how to collect a wide variety of stats, and how to observe carefully. That is how they can get a complete picture before they devise a plan to make things better. You cannot fix something if you drink the noxious elixir of political ideology or popular nihilism. The truth emerges as we dig for ourselves, suspend our biases, and, as Jane Jacobs once described, cultivate the art of seeing clearly. 

Seeing clearly, beyond the opinions and biases,
means learning how to do research and conduct careful observations

I met a student during the Baltimore training with a family member who, once upon a time, was a famous drug dealer back in the day. Now out of prison, this person turned away from gangs and violence and is now committed to speaking publicly about other ways forward for wayward teens. It is an inspiring story.

There are many challenges facing us both globally and locally. We cannot fix them with doom-and-gloom shades or with rosy glasses. We must retain optimism and hope, but only with clear eyesight. Threats are real, but so too are solutions. Inspiration, as I found out in Baltimore, can come from unlikely places if you learn to see and listen clearly.