Should we be more pessimistic?
In dark times, dark thoughts have a certain appeal. Our eyes adjust. We want to know how deep the shadows go, and what sort of thing awaits beyond light’s comforting boundary.
Recently, that boundary has seemed to be receding. Darkness is hard to escape. In the United States, more than 116,000 people and counting have died from the coronavirus. Around the world, the death toll is more than 440,000, with more than 8 million infected. Economic collapse has swept away more than 40 million U.S. jobs, creating the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. And raw, haunting footage of police brutality proliferates online, providing fresh evidence of something rotten at the very core of our society.
These overlapping national crises invite a conceptual one. Common assumptions of special protection from suffering — whether by virtue of nation, species or era — begin to unravel. Little about the pandemic and its consequences was genuinely unforeseeable, according to researchers. But too many among us — including decision-makers in the White House — found themselves unprepared to imagine them, exacerbating the damage.
In the early 19th century, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer paid special attention to the capacity for suffering in human life. Rather than something to be played down or absolved, he thought it revealed an underappreciated truth about the universe and our place in it.
“He did this big reversal in ethics where he put pain at the center of experience, rather than pleasure or well-being,” said Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “That turns the tables on you in a way that I think has real implications for how you live your life.”
In his central work, “The World as Will and Representation,” Schopenhauer described human suffering as the byproduct of the fundamental indifference of nature. Every living creature is the unwitting victim of this indifference — the essence of a blind, ubiquitous and inexorable force that Schopenhauer called the Will — but the human is the most unfortunate of them all, because she is aware of herself as a pawn of a mindless game.
In today’s culture of infinite content and venture capitalbacked “moonshots,” it’s much easier to be seduced by the optimistic impulse.
“If you really want to emphasize opportunity and innovation and the possible benefits of the new, as Americans do, then you’re very much going to downplay the necessary obstacles that exist in human life,” Callard said.
In some ways, President Donald Trump, who likes to describe himself as “a cheerleader for the country,” and who made his name by selling gold-painted fantasies of capitalist invincibility, represents the apotheosis of this foundational American optimism. But the virus, with its vast and inscrutable path of destruction — its fundamental indifference — is a natural foil.
“It challenges our presumptions about being able to fully control things, and it raises existential issues about our very ability to relate to the world outside of a human-centric point of view,” said Eugene Thacker, a professor of media studies at the New School, in New York City, and the author of books on pessimism, including “In The Dust of
This Planet” and “Infinite Resignation.” “It’s at once awe-inspiring and scary. You have a sense of wonder at something bigger than the human, but also a sense of the ground giving way beneath your feet.”
Of course, some thoughts are buried for a reason. And anticipating the hour of grief alone is no more likely to subdue it than pretending it can never arrive. Schopenhauer, a lifelong misanthrope who lived by himself, thought that the only way to cope with the misery of existence was to actively retreat from it.
But facing darkness doesn’t have to mean surrendering to it. Tamsin Shaw, a professor of philosophy at New York University, self-described pessimist and survivor of COVID-19, said that being attuned to the potential for suffering in the world should elicit empathy and stir us to action.
“An enormous amount of suffering, including that caused by infectious disease, is avoidable,” she said. “So you can assume that it’s all futile and sit around and mope about it, or you can think that we should be doing everything that we can to eliminate what’s unnecessary.”
And there are some kinds of suffering that we may actually welcome. Callard put love in this category.
“Part of what makes human life good is loving things that can be taken away from us,” she said. “You can live a smaller, more solitary life that has less pain in it. But there isn’t a way to fully love someone and care about them while shielding yourself from the pain of their loss.”
For Schopenhauer, living on these terms, perpetually under the cloud of suffering, meant a kind of endless nightmare, escapable only in death.
But what makes it a nightmare? It becomes one only if you assume that things should be otherwise — that pain is an insult to pleasure, rather than its fuel, that darkness is a refutation of light, rather than a testament to its mercy. The hard part of being alive is accepting that it’s never one way or the other.