But even as a defence of a general pessimistic argument, lists of bad things fail. Showing that there were wars, currency crises and so on doesn’t work – you would have to show that these were worse in the second half of the 20th century than in previous times.

But Kafka (and Faulkner) are so much more fun once you realize that they are realist writers.

Life is Beautiful.

Which is why I supported the statement with a rather lengthy (for a blog response) explanation for why I think the theory is ‘nuts’.

A second hint. Lists of events don’t work as a criticisms of claims about trends.

There were two points to the lists of events—first to show that the idea of the last half of the 20th century as a unique time for optimism is unsupportable. The second point was that even with respect to trends it doesn’t work as the 1990s was rather full of dismal, pessimism-inducing events—to recap:

The 1990s featured the wars/genocides in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda. The extraordinarily deadly war in the Congo also started in that decade (in 1998). And it’s hard to remember them all, but didn’t the brutal Algerian civil war also take place in the 1990s? Yes it did (a side effect of which was terrorist attacks in France—one thwarted plot was to crash a jetliner into the Eiffel Tower). Throughout the decade Al Queda grew in reach and lethality. The Taliban took over Afghanistan (which, of course, was closely intertwined with Al Queda). Clinton’s failed ‘Blackhawk Down’ intervention in Somalia was in 1993 (a failure that emboldened Bin Laden).

The 1991 Gulf War, initially a reason for optimism in the ability of the international community to respond to aggression turned sour with first, Saddam’s wholesale slaughter of Shia opponents and then a sanctions regime that did not weaken Saddam’s grip on power but caused a great deal of misery for Iraqis and produced the corrupt ‘oil for food’ program. In the U.S. the 1990s featured Waco, Oklahoma City, and the rise of the militia movement. The stock market boomed, but the boom was, even at the time, known to be frothy with absurd market valuations that defied all logic. The question was not if but when the bubble would burst (as, of course, it did). Or we could look at Russia where initial dreams of liberal democracy couldn’t stand the ‘shock treatment’ and we saw nationalist authoritarian politics, oligarchs, and the brutality in Chechnya. There’s plenty more (we could talk about currency crises, or in the U.S., about “don’t ask, don’t tell”, the “defense of marriage act”, and impeachment), but I think what we have so already is probably overkill.

In my experience people feel bad when things don’t go how they like. One the other hand, if one like things absurd, one is rarely disappointed.

I mean have you ever met someone who really, truly believed that things are SUPPOSED to be absurd, that wasn’t having a grand time in life?

But than again, what on earth do I know?

The Luddite spin on this is that reason gives us all those splendid technologies like nukes, life-extending medicines, and global communications that extend our reach into places they don’t belong.

The nihilist-pessimist political spin on it seems to be that humans lack the political and moral capacities to deal with the effects of our reasoning. Among these failings are that we choose inept leaders because they reflect our own sense of frailty. We are less interested in canny problem-solvers.

On this basis, pessimists understand that the mass of humanity is self-deluded, and wants to remain that way, despite the consequences.

The irony is that ‘pessimist’ is the word chirpy Pollyannas use to describe anyone with a considered (cf. ‘reasoned’) perspective on the situation. (As pointed out above, ‘reason’ is subject to politics, where the Rush Limbaughs and Ariel Sharons, the proponents of ID and opponents of abortion all have their reasonings set out in the supermarket of ideas.) Pessimists are disadvantaged because they’ve already lost the labelling game. Better that we be known as pragmatists, or post-Enlightenement rationalists, or bloody-minded people who care enough to change our ways.

A second hint. Lists of events don’t work as a criticisms of claims about trends.

Riffing on the opposition between Darwin-influenced taxonomy and the pre-eminence of teleology in the Aristotelian study of living beings, I’d say that the distinction between “pessimists” and “optimists” is not nearly “morphological” enough, and too “functional”.

Now, Aristotle had a keen eye for the morphological traits of animals, and the “ghost” of teleology will never be exorcized completely from the language of biology. And separating mood from discourse in philosophy is far more difficult and far less useful. However…

According to Dienstag, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, say, are both pessimistic “land-dwellers”, distinct from and opposed to optimistic “flyers”. That’s perfectly fine, but when you try to delve a bit further you’ll be tempted to say that pessimists are furred and optimists feathered, and then you’ll be frustrated by the hen, the bat and the penguin. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics have a lot in common with Berkeley’s, whom I wouldn’t rate as pessimistic on a number of issues.

To study the relationship between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche you get more mileage in the traditional fashion (i.e. Wille/Vorstellung vs. Dionysus/Apollo and all that) than with references to their pessimism. First you notice the morphological similarities and differences between elephants and rhinos. Then you mention that they both live in the savannah.

The opposition between optimism and pessimism is (rightly) deemed to have moral implications, yet the differences in the moral philosophies of e.g. the above two pessimists (re: Mitleid) are arguably far more profound.

The debased use of the term “optimism” (mostly, but not exclusively, by Americans) does not make me want to rehabilitate its less cheery vis-à-vis. I don’t take issue with Thomas Friedman’s optimism. I take issue with the fact that his are the musings of an overblown simpleton.

The rejection of utopianism has both “pessimistic” (people are just too recalcitrant) and “optimistic” overtones (people are too complex, too “big”, to fit into your ideological narrative).

And so on.

I’ll check in with you again in 2008 & 2012 when Americans again elect the leaders they deserve.

During the 2000 campaign people felt so complacent about America’s premiere status in the world that they gave little thought to the idea that America still had to be run by responsible and capable people. Many thought that America didn’t need running, it ran itself.

Perhaps America got too optimistic about itself during its salad days and its winning the Cold War. That is why this bout of pessimism, because of a laziness and a arrogance that developed, which didn’t translate into utopia.

America has to go through these episodes now and then because it has to relearn the lessons of its past, lessons it forgot, what works and doesn’t work. In electing Bush it got lazy and complacent. But Bush and his antics is now reawakening America.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in the efficacy of applying human reason to the world’s problems. I’m having trouble imagining such a radical idea getting any popular support.”

…does not really reflect “pessimism, as defined here” if “defined here” references Dienstag’s sample.

“A crucial element of this deception is the contention made by optimistic philosophy that our capacity to reason is something that gives us power over the world and thus a means of alleviating our suffering. In order for this to be true, the world would in some sense have to be aligned with or amenable to the force of reason when, to the pessimists, it simply is not. Thus, to Nietzsche, the “optimism” of Socrates is contained in “his faith that the nature of things can be fathomed, [he] ascribes to knowledge and insight the power of a panacea””

“This is not to deny that reason exists or that it has certain powers; but in order to know in advance that our powers of reason could ensure our happiness (that is, in advance of the day, yet to arrive, when it actually did so), we would also have to make assumptions about the nature of the world in which reason finds itself.”

“Put another way, we can say that there is a kind of pragmatism buried so deeply in Western philosophy that it is almost impossible to root out. This is the notion that there must be an answer to our fundamental questions, even if we have not found it yet, and that this answer will deliver us from suffering.”

“But the pessimistic critique helps to make visible how widely such a pragmatism is shared. Even modern liberalism, which offers no grand narrative like Hegel’s, assumes that justice is the achievable object of political philosophy and that the patient application of reason to human society will result in political structures that increasingly approach such a condition.”

All Dienstag.

I will just embellish on Sullivan’s point. Few if any of the trends that Quiggen finds pessimism-inducing in the 21st century find their origin in this century. Our ability to deal with the threat of nuclear war and global poisoning was laudable in itself, but we had reason to understand global warming prior to Kyoto’s rejection or Katrina’s arrival. We had reason to understand that nuclear proliferation needed more attention back when Kissinger warned that we might not like the world better after the Cold War ended – and the idea was not original with Kissinger.

The Hudson Institute has recently published an article in “Policy Review”

(http://www.policyreview.org/137/mcginnis.html)

that makes Albert’s point painfully obvious, too. The author claims that the internet and education will allow for a flowering of empiricism, that we will stop getting things wrong so much and start making better choices, so that partisans and demagogues will lose their grip. All along the way, the author is disproving his own point, citing only those cases in which rightwing causes are shown to triumph due to the flow of facts, claiming that cases in which the right has not prevailed are not vulnerable to empricism, and I suspect, claiming victory where the result is in dispute. The author is a walking advertisement for pessimism, as defined here.

Chesterton on G B Shaw:

“After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.[7]”