Progress, and Christmas songs.
First, let’s note this.
Vox, Bryan Walsh, 22 Dec 2025: 2025 felt like a disaster — but the numbers tell a very different story, subtitled “From a CRISPR baby to a closing ozone hole, 5 actually good things from 2025.”
A recurring theme. Social media and the news highlight the bad things going on in the world, because people are psychologically attuned to potential danger. The error is in assuming just because bad things still happen, that the world is headed toward ruin. There’s plenty of good news, in various kinds of progress, if you pay attention to it.
Actually, the real error is letting that impression guide your political choices. There are always demagogues out there ready to play to your fears and promise a return to a glorious past.
2025 is just about in the books, and the reviews are in: It sucked.
Over at the subreddit r/decadeology, you can check out a long, long thread of redditors submitting reasons why 2025 was, in the words of the first post, “a long, disappointing year.” War in Gaza, vibecessions, chaos in the White House, growing AI fears, scientists slashed, anti-vaccination on the rise — it’s like someone took Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and asked a large-language model to update the lyrics. I mean, the Economist’s word of the year for 2025 was “slop.” As in, the content slop, much of it AI-generated, that has spread across the internet like black mold. That is not the sign of a good year.
The piece discusses these five stories:
- The CRISPR baby
- The bad trends are falling
- We’re losing weight and drinking less
- We’re closing the ozone hole
- It’s not 536 AD
This is all consistent with the themes of the two big Steven Pinker books I’ve summarized here recently.
On the last item:
The surest way to feel optimistic about the state of the world is often less about how good the present is than how bad — how terribly, unimaginably bad — most of the past was. And few years in the past were worse than 536 AD, the year Science magazine once memorably called “the worst year to be alive.”
What was so bad about it? Well, a fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and even parts of Asia into a noontime darkness for 18 months. Average temperatures in the summer fell by as much as 2.5 C, beginning what would become the coldest decade of the past 2,300 years. Harvests failed across much of the world, leading to widespread starvation. Oh, and the scene was set for the Plague of Justinian, an outbreak of bubonic plague that began in Egypt and ultimately killed one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire.
Due to an enormous volcanic eruption. Concluding:
So yeah, however bad you think 2025 was, I can tell you that 536 AD was way, way worse. But really, that’s true of nearly all the years of the past, when humans were poorer, less free, were more subject to violence, died sooner, and generally had to endure lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes.
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A second meaning of “good news,” of course, is what Christians call news of the birth and life of Jesus. And so I’ll take the opportunity to record here a thought I had some time ago, concerning Christmas carols. There are at least two subgenres of Christmas songs, secular and religious. I have no problem with the secular songs, which these days are probably the more popular. White Christmas, Winter Wonderland, Sleigh Ride, and so on and on. But I have a thought about the religious ones, especially those that purport to portray events right around the birth of Jesus. So I’m randomly scanning some lists on the web, e.g.
Parade, 24 Dec 2025: We’ve Got 25 of the Best Religious Christmas Songs—Go Tell It on the Mountain
My thought is this. Despite a few details in the gospels (the putative three wise men, etc.), there is not a lot about Jesus’ birth, and virtually nothing about his childhood or adulthood until he began preaching. If knowledge was so common at his birth — just listen to all those carols: Away in a Manger, O Holy Night, Joy to the World (“the lord is come!”), It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, and on an on — why wasn’t Jesus guarded over and protected for his entire life? Why no stories about his childhood in the gospels? Compare the Dalai Lama, where IIRC as the current one ages, a new boy is “discovered” to be his successor, and taken away from his mundane life and raised in the temples and trained into the way of his new life. If the world heard the news, as in these Christmas songs, that the savior of the world was being born, why didn’t anyone pay more attention to him as he grew up? Why did none of those accounts survive the centuries until the gospels were written down?
Well, of course, because they’re just stories. Retcons, in a sense; or artifacts of a massive vicarious RPG. Or simple fantasies.
