The end of a year is a time for reflection, and it is easy to lose sight of the good and great in the world when all around us we see conflict, suffering, violence, need, and death.
But the future holds as much promise as it does uncertainty. So as we look forward, Newsweek asked some of the world’s philosophers: What is the biggest reason to be optimistic about 2025? This is what they said.
Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago
The energy, intelligence, and compassion of young people.
Rebecca Goldstein, Author and Philosopher
I take my solace in the infinite capacity of human creativity, both intellectual and artistic.
Sometimes it takes dark times to concentrate the mind. We so love our distractions. But forced to face intolerable facts, we do, and it can bring out the best in us.
I anticipate an outpouring of daringly innovative conceptual schemes that prioritize human flourishing and searingly revelatory works of art that prioritize the same.
Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics, Author, and Philosopher
The biggest reason to be optimistic about 2025 is the continuing decline in extreme poverty, defined as not being able to reliably meet your basic needs for food and shelter.
Two hundred years ago that was the condition of 80 percent of the world’s population. By 1990 that figure had been reduced to 38 percent, and in 2007, for the first time, it fell below 20 percent. Now, despite the rise in population, it is down to 8.5 percent.
The number of children dying before their fifth birthday has declined in tandem with the reduction in extreme poverty. When I wrote The Life You Can Save, in 2008, it was 9.8 million. Now it is just half that, 4.9 million. That’s 13,000 fewer children dying every day.
Definitely cause for optimism—as long as we avert our gaze from the likely future consequences of our failure to do enough to avert catastrophic climate change.
Newsweek asked philosophers: What is the biggest reason to be optimistic about 2025?
Newsweek asked philosophers: What is the biggest reason to be optimistic about 2025?
Photo-illustration by Newsweek
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Professor and Founding Member, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University
There is not a big reason to be optimistic about 2025. The only uncertain one seems to be the opening-up of Syria. This is because they are speaking, at least, of a tolerant society, and equality with women. Of course, there is Turkey looking toward Kurdistan, and Israel seeking to expand in the Golan Heights. So nothing may come of this, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed and keep hoping.
Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
Movement politics—#MeToo, BLM, Arab Spring, Dilli Chalo [the agricultural workers’ agitation in Delhi]—raise my hopes for justice and dignity in the face of polarized and paralyzed national parties.
Movements can be short-lived and organizationally precarious, but they quicken the pulse of political change by engaging with “real-time” emergencies that bring to light long-time deficits in democratic governance.
They are dismissed for their focus on “single issues”—immigration, the environment, gender-based discrimination, homelessness, free speech, a free press—but these are the singularly humane interests threatened by ethno-nationalist populisms.
Movement politics is not “identity politics” as woke-mongers will insist; it stands for the politics of human dignity and the aspirational ethics of solidarity.
Olu?fe??mi Ta?i?wo?, Professor, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University
It is very hard to generate much faith in the Enlightenment. I remain persuaded that it is exactly the time that we need its principles the most. And I think the situation may be more hopeful than we permit ourselves to think.
As someone who has worked in South Korea and continues to be a student of its ongoing transition to modernity, I waited with bated breath to see how the people would react to the recent declaration by their president.
The Koreans have a lesson to share with those whose intellectuals, driven by identity and the metaphysics of difference, declaim ownership of the Enlightenment and its legacy.
Witnessing successful elections which bespeak deeper faith in their philosophical undergirding in Mauritius, Somaliland, Botswana—which did to their ruling party of 58 years since independence what the British did to the Conservative Party—Senegal, Namibia, Mozambique, and Ghana, is much more than a balm in Gilead.
Our challenge is to continue to educate future generations to the strengths and weaknesses of this human heritage while seeking ever-new ways to move humanity forward.
The Biggest Reason to Be Optimistic About 2025, According to Philosophers
