In the late 1980’s, the (then) teen-pop singer Tiffany scored a #1 hit with the searing “Could’ve Been,” in which she agonized over a relationship gone bad. A bit more than fifteen years later, the band Coldplay, in their song “Lost,” had a far more restrained approach when lead singer Chris Martin mused that in a given situation he didn’t get what he deserved, and that it could’ve been worse. These two examples sprung to mind when I started reading a book last night about the calculus of violence (review forthcoming at some point) in the American Civil War, and the author commented that while the Civil War was bloody and harsh, it could have been worse. For the record, I happen to agree with this thought in particular and in general I tend to think, even when examining the horror that is human history and experience, that as terrible as things are, they can (usually) be worse. But what sort of justification is that?

Grammatically speaking, “could have been” is a somewhat complicated verb construction in that it expresses something that was a possibility in the past but is no longer so because the conditions for it are now foreclosed. Tiffany could have enjoyed a lovely relationship with the boy she pined over, but he was presumably unworthy of such a thing. Chris Martin of Coldplay could have gotten what he deserved, but he got better than he deserved even if it wasn’t very good–a common fate for humanity, it must be noted. The American Civil War could have been worse, but given that it involved the death of 750,000 people, including around a quarter or so of the men in the rebelling states of military age, it was horrific enough. It does no good to compare the American Civil War to the Taipang rebellion that was winding its way concurrently in China, the Caste War of the Yucatan in Mexico, or the War of the Triple Alliance in Paraguay and say that, well, Paraguay lost 90% of its adult male population and the South lost only 25%, so it’s not such a bad loss, is it? Horror is still horror at a lesser scale than the absolute worst it can be. And it should be noted, for the record, that despite losing 90% of its adult male population, Paraguay survived (somehow) as a nation, because it was fighting both Brazil and Argentina and they preferred to keep Paraguay around as a buffer state rather than fight each other over who could control the country. Even in that case it could have been worse.

If you start from the point of view that things can almost always be worse, no matter how horrific the reality is, then saying that something could have been worse is merely expressing the obvious, that no matter how bad things are, at least something went better than was theoretically possible. It is the optimist’s version of Murphy’s Law, in that one can always say that because poppies grow on Flanders Field after the horrific slaughter of World War I, the war was not a total waste because some beauty came of it. We would consider this a matter of framing. If we frame a given example of a horrible reality but frame it with even worse possibilities, we only focus on the negative and see reality as less negative than even worse examples that could exist: ”You were born an Iranian. It could have been worse; you could have been born an Afghan.” We fail to account for the better examples, for the hope and envy that drive people to want better for themselves and often resent that others are taking for granted what they have to struggle to attain. Human beings are said to be loss averse, in that we prefer not to lose even at the cost of less success. As human beings we are more concerned that things not get worse than that they get a lot better at the risk of getting even worse. 

When we look at could have been as a justification, therefore, what we see is an example of the sort of framing that seeks to manipulate people to be content with the bad because it is not as bad as it could have been. Ultimately this is unsatisfying. We do not desire something better than the worst possible horror that existence could be, because in any possible future only one option turns out to be the absolute worst possible existence. Indeed, existence itself, no matter how terrible, is so rare that it is generally to be prized over the vastly more common options of the nonexistence of life, to say nothing of us in particular. By merely existing at all, we have already won an incredibly unlikely cosmic lottery, if we want to frame it that way. But once we exist, we tend to look beyond the lottery that we have already won by existing and then wonder how existence could be even better. To think of the possibilities that exist here and now for improving existence is the task of those who reach for better than what they have known. Sometimes we must acknowledge that opportunities in the past were lost, whether through our own carelessness or the fault of other people who should have done better, but those opportunities are dead and gone and no one can bring them back now. All we can do is press ahead to what could yet be in the future. And that we shall, if time and energy and circumstances permit.