Congratulations on Your Unprecedented Crisis

In 1348, Florentine notary Gabriele de' Mussis was sure the Black Death was an unprecedented end of the world. He was wrong — and so were the survivors of the Antonine Plague, the Plague of Justinian, the smallpox that killed most native Americans, the Spanish Flu, and COVID.

Certainty is not truth

William James pointed out that the absolute certainty accompanying a belief is no evidence for its truth. Whether calibrated or wildly overstated, moral urgency feels the same.

The WWI generation, having seen 17 million dead and empires fall, thought they'd witnessed humanity's ultimate self-destruction. Twenty-one years later, WWII killed three times as many. Their belief that the worst was over and unique contributed directly to the failure to stop Hitler while it was still cheap.

Alarm as a performance

Moral emergency serves a social function: showing appropriate panic proves membership in a moral community; insufficient alarm marks you as privileged or complicit. So alarm turns into a performance metric rather than a response to evidence.

When expressing skepticism about crisis magnitude risks social excommunication, the skeptics are only those with a high tolerance for social cost — a poor filter for your evidence base.

The price of overconfidence

Presentism makes you refuse history, the only evidence base you have. You end up improvising from scratch, badly, under urgency. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass drew heavily on history — Roman slavery, Hebrew law — to make his case for ending American slavery stronger, not weaker.

The author concludes: the alarm is probably worth feeling, but the certainty of historical uniqueness is unearned. You can be alarmed and humble. As James Baldwin wrote, books taught him that what tormented him most was what connected him to all people who ever lived.