Congratulations on Your Unprecedented Crisis

🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.

While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.

You can buy my book Permissionless here.

"The historian, like everyone else, is forever trapped in the egocentric predicament, and 'presentism' is his original sin."

— Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

In 1348, a Florentine notary named Gabriele de’ Mussis wrote that the world had essentially come to an end, and the apocalypse was very much nigh.

The Black Death had just killed perhaps a third of Europe’s population within three years, and God, he insisted, had withdrawn his mercy.

He was convinced the devastation was without historical parallel, leaving the world wholly unprepared for the complete breakdown of its moral order. But that absolute certainty was wrong - or, at the very least, unverifiable.

Because the people who died in the Antonine Plague of 165 AD also thought they were experiencing something without historical parallel.

…and so did the survivors of the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century.

…and so did the people living through the smallpox epidemics that killed somewhere between fifty and ninety percent of the indigenous population of the Americas after European contact.

…and so, eventually, would the folks who lived through the Spanish Flu after the First World War and the COVID pandemic in 2020.

As it turns out, the experience of unprecedented catastrophe is a recurring feature of history.

We’re not short on candidates for moral emergency right now: AI, authoritarianism, populism, the rapid destabilization of informational environments, polarisation, inequality that has reached Gilded Age proportions in the world’s wealthiest countries, the decline in literacy and the bare-faced stupidity of social media’s loudest denizens, Mid Century Modern being canceled after one season, etc.

I’m not dismissing any of this (and please save your accusations of my bloodthirstiness to the end)

I’m trying to take an actual look at the validity of this near-universal feeling that the world is collectively worse than anything that has come before, that we are living through the end times // a rupture in history, that anyone not sharing the full panic is either uninformed, complicit, or a bootlicking, Armageddon-loving useful idiot.

Because I can’t help feeling like I’ve heard it all before…

The pivot point

William James pointed out that the sense of absolute certainty that accompanies a belief is not actually evidence for the belief’s truth.

The intensity with which you feel something doesn’t determine whether it’s accurate.

Or even valid.

Moral urgency has a phenomenology – a distinctive felt quality – and that felt quality is largely identical whether the urgency is calibrated or catastrophically overstated.

The generation that came of age during the First World War had, objectively, one of the better cases in modern history for the view that their moment was The Hinge™️. Seventeen million people dead; empires dissolved; the confident liberal order of the nineteenth century revealed to have been a mass self-delusion sustained by violence and diplomatic fiction. Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est” to convey that the language people used to describe war was an active lie, a machine for producing willing corpses.

And still, the certainty of that generation – that they had witnessed something that could not be survived again, that the human capacity for self-destruction had been revealed once and for all – was confounded by 1939. The generation that had declared “never again” after the armistice of 1918 found itself, twenty-one years later, at the beginning of a war that would kill three times as many people.

The WWI generation was right that something God-awful had happened; but they were wrong about what it meant for the future, in ways that made them horrifically unprepared for what was coming. The presentism of the interwar period – the certainty that the worst was over because nothing like it could be survived again – was a direct part of the failure to stop Hitler before 1939 when stopping him was still relatively cheap.

The willingness to believe that things had been uniquely terrible, and were now uniquely over, was a cognitive luxury that cost millions of lives.

What the record actually shows

Some historical perspectives comfort you; others drag you down. But the most useful form of historical literacy doesn’t care about your feelings at all. It just gives you the tools to analyze the present - which is exactly why it’s so hard to master.

People love to misuse Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. Those who find his data on declining violence politically inconvenient dismiss it entirely, while those looking for an excuse to stop giving a s**t use it as a crutch. Both camps get it wrong. Whatever you think of Pinker’s methods, his underlying point holds: you can’t measure moral progress using only your own lifetime as a yardstick.

Refusing to look backward doesn’t make you more righteous; it just ruins your ability to analyze the present. The same goes for Pinker’s critics. Scholars debating his metrics or the exact shape of progress might be having a productive academic argument; but those who reject historical comparison entirely - claiming it trivializes today’s suffering - create a dead end. They build an echo chamber where the current crisis is absolute, and anyone who questions its scale is simply accused of not caring.

I’ve been in enough arguments of this form to recognize the structure. It’s an immunization against argument. The claim that present suffering is categorically incomparable to past suffering is not falsifiable by any evidence, which means it’s not really a claim about the world at all. It’s a claim about who is and isn’t in the moral community.

The tribal function of shouting fire

Moral emergency has a social function that partially explains its persistence.

To be in the grip of appropriate alarm // panic is to demonstrate membership in a moral community. To express insufficient alarm is to advertise your moral deficiency, your privilege, your willingness to protect your comfort at others’ expense. This dynamic exists across the political spectrum – as tempting as it is to apply this analysis only to whichever side you find more annoying – and it produces the same result in every instance: alarm turns into a performance metric rather than a response to actual evidence.

Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral psychology makes the point that moral reasoning is largely a post hoc rationalization of intuitions held for tribal reasons. The specific mechanism he identifies – that moral claims function to signal group membership rather than to describe facts – seems mostly true and mostly applicable to the presentism phenomenon. When the primary cost of expressing skepticism about the magnitude of the current crisis is social excommunication, the people who express skepticism are not a random sample of the population.

They’re the people with a sufficiently high tolerance for social cost.

Which is a strange // s**ty filter to put on your evidential base.

A fallacy at a price

Presentism impairs your ability to reason about scale.

When every crisis is unprecedented and the worst it’s ever been, you lose the capacity to distinguish between crises that are actually severe and crises that are severe only by the standards of recent memory. A person who has only ever experienced headaches will describe a particularly bad headache as the worst pain imaginable; a person who has also experienced kidney stones will calibrate differently, etc.

The practical consequence is that presentism tends to produce responses pitched to the feeling of an unprecedented crisis rather than to the actual features of the specific crisis.

If you believe that what’s happening is something completely new, something that has never happened before, and that history offers no guidance for it, then historical guidance looks irrelevant, and the people offering it look ignorant or dishonest. You end up, in effect, refusing to consult the only evidence base you have about what actually works. Every response to every past crisis, however relevant, gets filtered out as inadequate to the unprecedented present, and you end up making it up from scratch, badly, with tremendous urgency and very limited information.

The abolitionists knew that slavery had existed in many forms across many cultures for thousands of years. Frederick Douglass drew extensively on historical knowledge; his speeches reference Roman slavery, ancient Hebrew law, the Scottish Covenanters, and contemporary European liberalism. He argued that American chattel slavery was a specific and severe instance of a category of wrong that had been identified and contested throughout human history, and that this history gave both the moral framework and the practical toolkit for contesting it. That historical consciousness made his argument more powerful, not less. The idea that the horrors of slavery should be treated as sui generis, incomparable, outside the reach of any prior moral framework, would have stripped him of his best words // strongest arguments.

The only tense that works

The feeling of living at the hinge of history is, I suspect, a permanent feature of conscious life, inseparable from the way human beings experience time.

We are always at the edge of what we know.

The present is always the place where uncertainty is highest, and stakes feel most real.

To a degree, this is just what it’s like to be finite and alive.

What is a defect is treating that feeling as information about the world rather than information about consciousness.

I don’t think I’m immune to this pattern.

What I’ve settled on, provisionally, is something like this: the alarm is probably worth feeling, and the action it motivates is probably worth taking, but the certainty about historical uniqueness is almost certainly unearned.

You can be alarmed and humble simultaneously.

I’ll leave you - if I may - with the novelist and playwright James Baldwin.

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive."