Open for business

A piece of startling good news interrupted the string of doom-and-gloom summations on the year 2016: In December a team of doctors and scientists published their findings from a two-year trial of an experimental Ebola vaccine involving 11,000 African subjects in Guinea. Not one single person involved in so extensive a testing contracted the Ebola virus. The vaccine for the deadly virus produced a rapid immune response after only a single dose.

The news gets better. The trial (using the same approach used to eradicate smallpox) took place in a coastal region of Guinea still experiencing new Ebola outbreaks when it began in 2015. Confirmed cases were halted, new cases prevented, plus hundreds of children were successfully immunized as participants. The success won’t compensate for the more than 11,300 lives lost during West Africa’s 2013-2016 outbreak—which also brought Ebola to the United States for the first time. But comprehensive medical successes like this, and in so challenging an environment, are both remarkable and rare.

Defeating one of the world’s most lethal pathogens—one known to live on for months in the tears, breast milk, and semen of survivors—is a landmark achievement. Yet it made few headlines, especially compared with the headline-dominating news of the deadly outbreak itself in Guinea, Liberia, and elsewhere. We news gatherers and news consumers seem hard-wired for what Oxford economist Max Roser calls a “negativity bias.”

That bias has become more skewed with a 24/7 news cycle that feeds us the bad news from the moment it happens, and in minute-by-minute updates. It’s distorted further by failure to educate, a collective loss of memory of our history, of where we’ve come from and how time and events ebb and flow.

To counter the trend, Roser over the past year has launched Our World In Data, an online resource rich in information visualization and research, showing things like the dramatic rise in global democracy and literacy along with dramatic declines in extreme poverty.

In 2016 life expectancy in the United States dropped for the first time in decades—a significant news event. But in the last 50 years life expectancy has doubled for nearly every country in the world. Consider Japan, where in 1945 average life expectancy was 30.5 years and today is 82.7 years. A paper published every half-century would report such trends with astonishment, while our scrolling Twitter feeds brim with celebrity gossip and political scandal.

Those of us with Biblical grounding have good reason for a long-lens perspective.

Globally there was other good news in 2016. In Colombia, government officials and guerrilla leaders pledged to end the longest-running civil war in the world. Central African Republic turned from a three-year crisis and violence with the election of a new president. In Iraq, church bells rang for the first time in two years across a Nineveh province largely freed from ISIS. Besides setting the stage for eradicating Ebola, researchers made important advances using antibiotics and antivirals to treat cancer and sound waves to liquefy tumors.

Those of us with Biblical grounding have good reason for a long-lens perspective. The Scriptures are our constant source for calibration with the day’s news, telling us a broken, fallen world where evil reigns is our reality—yet we have a Creator who in time past, present, and future has overcome the world. The zeal of the Lord, the prophet Isaiah instructs, accomplishes justice and righteousness, not Supreme Court justices, UN peacekeepers, or the World Health Organization. Zeal! We ought to think less of God as a bearded old man pacing knock-kneed about the heavens, brooding over global calamities, and more of Him as a strapping young dance lead, letting His great worlds spin.

A new year brings to mind the words of author Anne Lamott on the old negativity bias: “If you say, ‘Well, that’s pretty much what I thought I’d see,’ you are in trouble. At that point you have to ask yourself why you are even here. Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.”