Light at the End of the Tunnel?

"Light at the End of the Tunnel?" is an essay first published in the November/December 1988 edition of Lear's. It was later reprinted in Fates Worse Than Death in 1991 and the third volume of the Library of America's Vonnegut set in 2014.

Summary

In James Thurber's children's fable The White Deer is a Royal Astronomer in a medieval court who reports that the stars are going out. In fact, the aging astronomer is going blind, which was Thurber's own condition at the time. Vonnegut thus proposes calling any "old poop" who thinks the whole world is doomed simply because he is dying as engaging in "Royal Astronomy". Now that he himself is growing older, Vonnegut contemplates writing his own version of this formula which is likely at least as old as writing itself. Its common themes are that things were better in the past, the youth are all ignorant, and society has entered a decline. However, in his youth, lynchings of black Americans were common, his hometown of Indianapolis was effectively racially segregated, Ivy League schools rejected most Jewish students, and members of these two ethnicities were rarely allowed as faculty. So he's forced to wonder if those were, in fact, the good old days, as then President Ronald Reagan and his followers assert.

The Great Depression proved to many Americans that economic prosperity was not a natural by-product of political liberty. Books at that time argued that society was collapsing because people no longer studied ancient classics like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and so forth, whose collective wisdom were the foundation of any civilized society. The United States, they said, had become nothing but radio quiz shows and music made by black savages, just as they now say the nation is nothing but television quiz shows and rock and roll. Vonnegut, however, argues that uncritical respect for works by so-called "great thinkers" who accepted the natural superiority of whites and males—and this includes the Bible—is "unpleasant" at best.

At a recent luncheon for the vice-president of the filmmakers' union of the Soviet Union, many people asked him about glasnost. He replied that experiments with more freedom were only beginning, but more previously suppressed books and movies were being released. While the western artists and intellectuals in attendance were overjoyed to hear this, in the Soviet Union most ordinary workers were more interested in economic benefits. Unfortunately, they will probably also now learn that freedom and prosperity are not connected. Like alcoholism, which afflicts both nations, it does not respond to "whether the sufferer is politically free". Soviet citizens may soon learn that liberty, like virtue, is its own reward, which is disappointing to the great mass of humanity, which has more substantial and basic needs.

After the luncheon, Vonnegut remarked through an interpreter that given that the Soviet Union was less than seventy years old, perhaps it wasn't doing so badly, considering that when the United States was that young slavery was still perfectly legal. He didn't mention the genocide of the Native Americans, which he tries not to think about often and which, thankful, "isn't taught in school much". The United States is in fact undertaking a glasnost experiment of its own, granting rights, civility, and respect to women and racial minorities which had previously been the exclusive possession of white males. This would be repulsive to the great thinkers of the past, whose works are now neglected by the youth in favor of rock and roll. Vonnegut states a proper American reply to these Royal Astronomers is that none of their revered figures believed in real equality, and neither do they, but Americans do.

The only thing Vonnegut misses about his youth is ignorance of the fact that human beings are now utterly destroying their home planet to the point that it will soon be uninhabitable. As a species, we will continue to breed irresponsibly, deploy dangerous technologies without thought of their consequences, fail to maintain what we have already built, or clean up the horrific messes we've made. Should aliens arrive on Earth in the future to find us extinct, an appropriate message carved into a wall of the Grand Canyon might be: "We probably could have saved ourselves, but were too damned lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap". Thus, Vonnegut fears that as he faces an immanent death, so does the rest of the species, just as a Royal Astronomer would.