The best world ever (so far)

Gathering documentation for yesterday's post I realized how powerful the Japanese animation industry truly was. Besides Marco and Heidi, which go back to my earliest childhood, there where many other series that I learned to love and well also produced in cooperation with Japanese studios, such as Vicky the Viking and Maya the Honey Bee (both in the late 1970s), or Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, Around the World with Willy Fog, and Sherlock Hound (all in the early 1980s). All these had a remarkably Western flavor, particularly when confronted with other indisputably Japanese animations such as Mazinger Z or Battle of the Planets. Of course, there were also competing producers of animated series, such us the hugely important French industry (with titles such as Once upon a time... Man or The Adventures of Tintin) or the American classic cartoons of Warner Bros., Hanna-Barbera or Disney, but for me there is no doubt that my childhood would have been completely different without the benefit of the Japanese characters.

Surprisingly, this influence turned out to be trans-generational: when I mentioned to Jason this morning that Sherlock Hound had been drawn in Tokyo he exclaimed: "Remarkable! So I liked anime even before I knew what anime is!". Of course this would not have happened without Karen's and my own contribution, who remembered the old animated series and tracked them on YouTube for our kids to watch. And I can only confirm that, in spite to the years, they are still every bit as appealing and well written and they seemed back then, when we sat glued to the TV in the early Saturday afternoons.

Photo: NASA Flight Opportunities

But nostalgic as this post my sound, I wanted to stress precisely the opposite effect. It is not that the past was great (i.e. better than now), but that it was good already and things have only gotten better. As Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker points out throughout his works, there has never been a better moment to live than right now. Ancient Rome was brutal, the Middle Ages were illiterate, the Renaissance was short-reached, the Industrial Revolution cruel. The living conditions have steadily improved over the last 20 centuries and they are still going up. Life expectancy is still increasing in many countries around the world (even if in some others it seems to have stabilized) and the number of people dying by violence or poverty keeps decreasing, so it is clear that, for the average person, there has never been a better time to live.

This does not deny the fact that we are facing serious challenges, such as the supra-national corporations, the challenge of globalization, the imminent threat of climate change or the political polarization and the rise of populists, but it is obvious that we have managed to overcome past difficulties working together either as nations or as the entire humanity, so I believe we can repeat the feat and leave these behind too.

Just this weekend Richard Branson managed to (almost) reach the frontier of outer space in Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity, and Jeff Bezos is poised to do the same in a few days aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket. The human ingenuity knows no boundaries, provided that the time and the resources are enough. Even the current pandemic has demonstrated that we can overcome serious obstacles, even if it is not over and the effect over the population has sadly been worse on the worse-off, but it is still a major success for what could have been an existential threat.

The last year has certainly not been the best in recorded history, but overall things are not that bad and there seems to be decided will to improve the things for the better. It is possible that in twenty years I read these lines with a disenchanted and bitter-sweet taste, or even there is now Internet to read them anymore, but here is my hope that the upward trend will continue, even with its ups and downs, to improve the quality of our lives. Have a nice evening.