Dec 21 JDN 2461031

When this post goes live, it will be (almost exactly) the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. In our culture, derived mainly from European influences, we associate this time of year with Christmas; but in fact solstice celebrations are much more ancient and universal than that. Humans have been engaging in some sort of ritual celebration—often involving feasts and/or gifts—around the winter solstice in basically every temperate region of the world for as far back as we are able to determine. (You don’t see solstice celebrations so much in tropical regions, because “winter” isn’t really a thing there; those cultures tend to adopt lunar or lunisolar calendars instead.) Presumably humans have been doing something along these lines for about as long as there have been humans to do them.

I think part of why solstice celebrations are so enduring is that the solstice has both powerful symbolism and practical significance. It is the longest night of the year, when the sky will be darkest for the longest time and light for the shortest—above the Arctic Circle, the night lasts 24 hours and the sky never gets light at all. But from that point forward, the light will start to return. The solstice also heralds the start of the winter months, when the air is cold enough to be dangerous and food becomes much scarcer.

Of course, today we don’t have to worry about that so much: We have electric heating and refrigeration, so we can stay warm inside and eat pretty much whatever we want all year round. The practical significance, then, of the solstice has greatly decreased for us.

Yet it’s still a very symbolic time: The darkness is at its worst, the turning point is reached, the light will soon return. And when we reflect on how much safer we are than our ancestors were during this time of year, we may find it in our hearts to feel some gratitude for how far humanity has come—even if we still have terribly far yet to go.

And this year, in particular, I think we are seeing the turning point for a lot of darkness. The last year especially has been a nightmare for, well, the entire free world—not to mention all the poor countries who depended on us for aid—but at last it seems like we are beginning to wake from that nightmare. Within margin of error, Trump’s approval rating is at the lowest it has ever been, about 43% (still shockingly high, I admit), and the Republicans seem to be much more divided and disorganized than they were just a year ago, some of them even openly defying Trump instead of bowing at his every word.

Of course, while the motions of the Earth are extraordinarily regular and predictable, changes in society are not. The solstice will certainly happen on schedule, and the days will certainly get longer for the next six months after that—I’d give you million-to-one odds on either proposition. (Frankly, if I ever had to pay, we’d probably have bigger problems!)

But as far as our political, economic, and cultural situation, things could get very well get worse again before they get better. There’s even a chance they won’t get better, that it’s all downhill from here—but I believe those chances are very small. Things are not so bleak as that.

While there have certainly been setbacks and there will surely be more, on the whole humanity’s trajectory has been upward, toward greater justice and prosperity. Things feel so bad right now, not so much because they are bad in absolute terms (would you rather live as a Roman slave or a Medieval peasant?), but because this is such a harsh reversal in an otherwise upward trend—and because we can see just how easy it would be to do even better still, if the powers that be had half the will to do so.

So here’s hoping that on this longest night, at least some of the people with the power to make things better will see a little more of the light.