Shallow Pessimism
Laurence Olivier as Hamlet.
In my post from March 16th, I ended by asking the question why is it we – by which I mean intellectual progressives - seem to enjoy ruthlessly deconstructing everything and finding our society “rotten to the core – that it is racist, sexist, imperialist society, one which can’t be trusted an inch”, to quote again the philosopher Richard Rorty. In this post I’ll explore a possible answer.
Yes. Western culture and society is very far from perfect. But around the time Rorty wrote his essay – the 1980s – the west lost confidence in its humanistic belief that the future will necessarily be better than the past and the present. It lost a special kind of social hope. But this loss of faith was already well under way by the second half of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche declared: “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” Albert Camus’ concept of the ‘absurd’ perfectly capturing the Zeitgeist of the 1940s and 1950s. The absurd is an experience so visceral Camus said it can hit anybody in the face at any time. The ‘sweet indifference’ of nature, as he calls it at the end of ‘The Outsider’ - challenged both religious faith in divine purpose and humanist faith in the inevitable melioration of humanity guided by the light of reason that aimed to replace it.
The process of disillusionment speeded up at the end of the Cold War, which pretty much definitively put paid to the Marxist utopian dream of a ‘classless society’, a social hope that had sustained many radicals for most of the twentieth century. But there was also an increasingly pervasive loss of confidence in the liberal democratic dream of the welfare state, as well. Both ideals, which are traceable to the eighteenth century Enlightenment, were now judged to be deformed birth, because, as Nietzsche had already announced over one hundred years earlier, the Enlightenment itself - the whole basis of modernity - was a sham. One only needed to look around to see that the so-called democratic ‘system’ was permanently rigged to let a tiny percentage of greedy and insecure people accumulate a huge amount of wealth and power, and that there was profound crisis of meaning, a slide toward nihilism.
In the past two decades, the recognition of existential meaninglessness and of failure to bring about social justice has been joined by the disaster of climate change. This situation now means that, quite literally, there will be no better future. The future we are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren will almost certainly be worse than this present one is. Just how much worse its going to be depends on the amount of residual faith you can muster in a narrative of social hope that still attempts to build a rickety bridge - using alternative sources of energy, probably - to a less than terrible future.
But why aren’t we as a society genuinely responding to these awful truths? Why are we going to war and binge viewing shows of Netflix? Because mainstream society, the status quo, is based on keeping it all at arm’s length through incessant optimistic messaging, designed to shield people from the truth. It disguises the loss of the hopeful dream of a better future by replacing it by shallow optimism. Western society hasn’t imploded. Instead, in genuine hope’s it place there was installed a shallow kind of optimism. What’s the difference? As I noted in a previous post, optimism implies wish-fulfillment with the aim of pacifying the present, while hope involves imaginative responses to reality and faces up to the real and potentially cataclysmic challenges the uncertain world inevitably presents. This shallow optimism is generated mostly through the mass media, which throughout the twentieth century become more and more efficient and skillful in cranking out the kinds of positive messages that serve to distract people from a tragic reality. Hollwood is called the “Dream Machine’, and has played an especially significant role. But the emergence of the consumer society with its fetishization of consumer products, it’s subliminal message that to shop is the way to give life purpose (As Barbara Kruger has it in one of her artworks, ‘I SHOP, THEREFORE I AM’), its assumption that it’s alright to be selfish and to horde, to strive for happiness without caring about anyone else, meant that shallow optimism in the form of countless distractions and pointless goals managed to paper over the fact that we have lost faith in a better future for everyone. The value in the short term of optimism for society is that it brings a sense of social coherence by making everything seem comprehensible and controllable. As a result, people feel strengthened through being able to make sense of, manage, understand, and feel masters of adversity. Optimism encourages the idea of hardiness, making a stressful circumstance seem an opportunity for growth and strengthening. It helps ensure preparedness by encouraging readiness to confront setbacks and successfully take advantage of opportunities. It also brings self-affirmation making decision-making in the present more efficient and collectively directed.
But all this comes at a high price. The façade of optimism has permitted the west to maintain its global supremacy and sense of self-efficacy and self-assurance while it has been rapidly collapsing from within. Optimism is a debased and less challenging substitute for the genuine hope that is almost no longer within reach. For, as Terry Eagleton writes in his excellent book Hope Without Optimism (2015): “the most authentic kind of hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees from a general dissolution. It represents an irreducible residue that refuses to give way, plucking its resilience from an openness to the possibility of unmitigated disaster. It is thus as remote from optimism as could be imagined.”
Which leads me back to the problem with the progressive’s default attitude of perpetual social critique.
Isn’t it simply the flip side of the west’s shallow optimism? Isn’t it shallow pessimism? For it surely can’t be genuine pessimism. After all, some of the most audible advocates of cultural critique - the tenured professors at prestigious universities - occupy extremely comfortable niches within society, and carry on their day-to-day lives pretty much like everyone else – like all the dumb optimists, in fact.
Just as shallow optimism is a way of shielding oneself from failure and misfortune, so too is shallow pessimism. It simply embraces the failure, disillusion, and disappointment in advance so as to forestall the risk involved in having one’s hopes dashed.
Image Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ6ec4V6AJ4