Clearly, there’s no room for complacency about the unique convergence of profound challenges facing humanity today. But we have previously faced fearsome global threats and survived. The dread of unmanageable overpopulation and nuclear annihilation I grew up with in the 60s and 70s hasn’t come true. Factors expected to deteriorate—such as access to food, levels of violence, and so on—have in fact greatly improved overall.

Mentioning this slice of history recently to a younger colleague had a big impact on her. Since then, she tells me, “I haven’t felt as swept up in the helplessness and paralysis that previously came up for me every time I read about something like climate change, because the spell, so to speak, has been broken.” 

Breaking the “spell” my colleague points to goes beyond gaining freedom from emotions of helplessness and mental paralysis. The fact that the forebodings of a previous era of “novel” problems with “no solutions” failed to come to pass awoke her to a deeper mental malaise underlying these feelings—a fear that problems could be unsolvable. As a Christian Scientist, used to leaning on the divine Mind, God, for healing fears in her own life, she recognized this suggestion of unsolvability as an argument of the opposite, material mentality—the carnal or mortal mind, which the Bible says is “enmity against God” (Romans 8:7).