The Town of Babylon

by Alejandro Varela

“No. I worry about how aging makes humans conservative. I think it has something to do with fear. Fear for one’s own safety, fear of damage to one’s property, fear of new and unknown things. Adult-onset conservatism is also just exhaustion. A lifetime of being optimistic about life’s unsolved problems fosters disappointment and, eventually, pessimism. But no one wants to believe they’re pessimistic, so they switch perspectives and move the goalposts. The injustices that could have been remedied with more resources or more empathy transform into intractable dilemmas that we then argue must be addressed with austerity and hard knocks, when the truth is that we never pumped in enough resources or empathy to have truly solved anything. Boom: conservative. Or maybe it isn’t a consequence of fears, but a fear in and of itself. The very fear of examining the past and our complicity in that past.”