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
Total Lies and Half-Truths
One of the places I go to hear alternative points of view on what’s going on in the world is Russell Brand’s podcasts on YouTube. Usually, I appreciate his irreverent but compassionate take on things. But in a recent podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=595Esg6Mz0U) on the war in the Ukraine I found myself being very troubled by something he said.
Brand claimed that we are so ‘knowing’ about the ways of the world that we recognize that “everyone’s a ‘bad guy’ now.” He meant we can’t any longer sustain the illusion that any war is fought between ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, as was the case, say, during World War Two. We are too aware of how any claim to the moral high ground conceals mendacity, greed, and the will to power. For instance, Brand mentioned the way in which the mainstream media stokes the fire of war because it increases ratings, how the armaments industry is set to make huge profits, and how the USA and NATO may have forced Putin’s hand.
But to claim that this means we must proceed in general to make judgments from a position that considers everyone is a ‘bad guy’ is obviously a failure of the imagination. First of all, it’s logically impossible, because if no one is a ‘good guy’, then no one is a ‘bad guy’ either, insofar as the two positions must be relative to each other, and possess their meaning by being in a binary pairing. You can’t have a sense of what is bad without also having a sense of what is good. Brand’s comment is like saying that because not everyone passes the moral test 100%, then no one does.
As if to help me get my head around Brand’s comment, I came across a piece by the professor of journalism and political science Peter Beinart in The Guardian entitled ‘Russia speaks total lies. That doesn’t diminish America’s half-truths’ (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/26/russia-lies-america-half-truths). Beinart seemed to be reflecting on the same problem – that of claiming moral equivalence because we can no longer see issues in clear black-and-white terms. He quoted the Hungarian-born journalist Arthur Koestler, who in 1943 at the height of the war against Hitler, wrote: “In this war we are fighting against a total lie in the name of a half-truth.” Beinart noted: “That’s a good motto for American progressives to adopt in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”
Implicit in Koestler’s wise insight is the recognition that morality is a spectrum not a see-saw. You can be very far from speaking the unblemished truth and still be a lot closer to it than someone else – Putin, for example. In other words, there are ‘bad guys’ and ‘good guys.’ You just have to see that some are more bad than others, and some are so bad that they must be condemned wholeheartedly, even though one also recognizes that this means bracketing out a lot of the misgivings that under less extreme circumstances would challenge one to dissent.
This is obviously not the time to be berating the USA, Europe, or NATO for all their many failures. In fact, amongst much else, this crisis is a reminder that the critical intellectual and activist juggernaut that exposes systemic racism and sexism, political chicanery and greed, within our own society is a luxury of peaceful times made possible by the relatively smooth functioning of the ‘open’ society that is the focus of the progressives’ critique.
Which isn’t to say that such critique shouldn’t be undertaken!
What is ultimately at stake here is a way of seeing things that reduces them to simple moral choices - the fallacy that Brand himself is so adamant to draw attention to. He is usually excellent at revealing how complex any given issue is, but is clearly not up to the challenge in this case.
This recognition also led me consider how Brand’s usual focus of criticism – that most crises are usually caused by people wanting money and power – cannot be a sufficient explanation in many cases. Putin, for example, is not primarily motivated by either money or power. His motivation lies somewhere near the kind that religion channels, but in our secular age are more commonly driven by ideology. An Ideology is not just a cloak under which to conceal the desire for money of power - although it is also this. An ideology is not only about abstractions. Rather, an ideology addresses very basic and very real human anxieties – above all, perhaps, the need to have a confident sense of mastery, security, and attachment to others. Totalitarianism’s enforcement of ideology, as Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968), “differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man." This is what gives Putin the capacity to lie.
Brand knows that today we cannot ignore all the plentiful signs of violence, war, genocide, sexism, slavery, economic exploitation, inequality, dehumanizing technology, and catastrophic ecological despoliation. He is aware that there is a huge distance between how things should be and how they actually are. Wars proliferate endlessly, racism and sectarianism is on the rise. 1% of the planet’s human population own 82% of the wealth; if the United States was an apple pie, the top 20% are currently helping themselves to 90%. The fragmentary and speeded-up nature of our culture distinguishes it from all others in ways that have shattered the old hierarchies. Especially in the west, for those educated within the secular humanist ideology, modernity is characterized by disenchantment and disillusion. The experience of what Heidegger called ‘groundlessness’, the loss of faith in a convincing ‘grand narrative’ through which to securely establish and maintain faith in the meaningfulness of existence, has led to a pervasive yet intangible feeling of disillusionment, anxiety, resentment, and inner void.
Let’s not beat about the bush: Brand is flirting with nihilism, literally, ‘nothing-at-all-ism’. The term defines one of the most significant tendencies in modern culture. In the nineteenth century, as the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev has one of the characters declare In Fathers and Sons, it became a way of describing “a man who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith, no matter how much that principle may be surrounded by respect.” For Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism was an inevitable consequence of the Enlightenment. The idea of the Christian God furnished the faithful with a sense of absolute worth in a world in which they believed they were masters, and where there was the possibility of attaining knowledge of ultimate meaning. But science left no place for such an omnipotent God, and the value system which belief in God produced. Everything could now be explained without him, and so, “God is dead, and we killed him.’ But as Nietzsche also saw, while this Christian God may be ‘dead,’ modern people still mainly clung onto a mindset that forged centuries before around God’s image. As a result, nihilism bred in the empty void created between what modern humans value and how the world appears to be. Being a nihilist requires removing God from the world and then recognizing that the world is now lacking something. Life now seems devoid of meaning, because the old values are absent. Those who collectively gave birth to the secular Enlightenment had believed that it was possible to transfer the values of the religious world to the purely human realm, safeguarding citizens from the dangers of a loss of meaning, inequality of life, and the rule of the strong over the weak. But the project tragically failed. No credible metaphysical framework was created to replace the one once provided by Christianity. Slowly but surely, faith in progress was replaced by a pervasive sense of dread.
But Nietzsche believed that nihilism was not only a disaster. It does not simply have to be a passively endured condition, and could also be an opportunity. Nietzsche identified what he termed ‘passive’ and ‘active forms of nihilism. Nietzsche saw that ‘passive’ nihilism involved the perpetual search for the original values that were once embodied in religion and tradition. In this sense, nihilism is inevitably wedded to pessimism, and to the disjunction between the world we can imagine and the one we must live in. The passive nihilist sees that the world they inhabit does not correspond to the one they recall or have been led to expect, and so they accuse this world failing to provide them with the sustenance they need. There can only ever be temporary distractions from the crushing reality of the empty void within which they are forced to exist, and this offers no enduring consolation. The passive nihilist is forced to live in a world that doesn’t provide them with a sense of purpose, but at the same time seems to them to suit others very well. It is the world that is at fault, or rather the people who seem to be profiting from this world while they are made to suffer. It is the politicians who control government, the one percent who get ever richer, the wreckers of the planet, the wired cosmopolitans of the global network, the foreigners who steal jobs.
But Nietzsche also identified what he saw as a second kind of nihilism, which he called ‘active.’ The recognition of life’s fundamental meaninglessness then serves to free those strong enough to embrace nihilism, who know that they can do whatever they want, and can create their own purpose. Nihilism then empowers. The ‘active’ nihilist embraces destructive action against what they recognize to be an empty value system. Because this system is based on reason, they pursue the irrational, and because it is founded on obedience to the moral law, they flout conventional morality. They embrace the will to power, and through their actions prepare the way for the overcoming of nihilism. They no longer conform to the values and standards of the society within which the unenlightened masses live like obedient cattle, because they have seen through the sham.
‘Active nihilism’ seems to be what Brand endorses. But it is tragically evident that this posture of defiance becomes the pretext for believing that the most ‘honest’ and ‘honourable’ actions are those that are taken in pursuit of one’s own self-interest. If there is no purpose to existence - if everyone is a ‘bad guy’ - then one may well conclude that only one’s own profit counts. In this sense, so-called ‘active’ nihilism becomes little more than an intellectual justification for behaving in ways that are immoral and selfish.
Now, I of course know Brand would wholly disagree with this prognosis, and his goals are far from immoral and selfish. But it is the unforeseen consequences of holding the views he does that worries me. The course of history since Nietzsche’s time has revealed that the commonest outcome of a sense of meaninglessness has been destructive violence motivated by the anger and resentment that arises when there is an unbridgeable chasm between hopes and expectations and the social reality that always thwarts these aspirations.