It’s good to be us
The news of the Nigerian election this week brought out predictable reactions from those lifelong enemies, the Party of the Optimists and the Party of the Pessimists.
Those of the optimistic persuasion are delighted that Nigeria chose a new president peacefully and legally. We are so elated that we’re willing to believe president-elect Muhammadu Buhari when he says he’s abandoned his old dictatorial tendencies and now believes in democracy. The defeated incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, has said he was honoured to be president as long as it lasted but now accepts the choice of the voters. “I promised the country free and fair elections. I have kept my word.” We believe him, too. Give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s our creed.
My own impulses, obviously, are optimistic, though I see a certain appeal in pessimism. For one thing, it’s funnier. Mark Steyn, for instance, is more amusing than a regiment of earnestly hopeful journalists. A favourite novelist of mine, the late Kingsley Amis, said “I think I’d rather have instinctive pessimism than its opposite.” He filled his books with hilariously grumpy characters. His best friend was the poet Philip Larkin, whose most famous poem began “They f--k you up, your mum and dad.” It was chosen in a U.K. poll as one of Britain’s best 100 poems and Larkin said he expected to hear it recited in his honour by a thousand Girl Guides before he died, which unfortunately did not come to pass.
Humour aside, optimism is also an easier target. Barbara Ehrenreich made the bestseller list a few years ago with Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. She argued that optimism encourages personal self-blame and national denial. Evil advice-givers make people think they can better their lives by their own efforts instead of subscribing to the leftish politics Ehrenreich favours.
Being a pessimist, Ehrenreich doesn’t notice that all socially ambitious schemes draw on the spirit of optimism for their success. Optimism is what makes people campaign for better schools; they believe, often with fierce optimism, that their children deserve good education. In the 1960s, the Canadian health service was devised out of a spirit of optimism, though I sense that most of my fellow citizens would rather grumble about it than utter the praise it deserves.
Optimism is what makes business people believe they have enough talent to wager their time and money in something the public might need. It inspires politicians to create better programs for the voters. It’s the energy that eases the way to a better existence, for individuals and nations. Without it, nothing much works.
No doubt it often overshoots the mark. Many journalists blush when we think of our cheerful response to the Arab Spring. In four years it has greatly exacerbated the already calamitous politics of the Middle East, providing one more proof of the be- lief (the pessimists get this right) that revolutions usually make life worse.
And yet, optimists can’t help trying to rescue a crumb of solace from that disaster: It showed that Arabs were not content to live forever under vicious tyrants.
It’s possible that we who belong to the Optimism Party have no choice of how we should think about such things: Perhaps evolution has left us no alternative. Tali Sharot, a professor of neuroscience at University College London, has argued that our brains are shaped that way. She speculates in her book, The Optimism Bias, that hopefulness about the future developed as a primitive response to the knowledge of death. Without self-generated hope, people would have been paralyzed. Instead, they busied themselves creating civilization.
If we follow Sharot, our inbuilt optimism underlies all the achievements of humanity. It colours two key narratives celebrated this weekend by Judeo-Christian civilization, freedom on Passover, redemption on Easter.
Guy Sorman, a much-published political philosopher in France, lectured at the People’s University of Beijing a few years ago. He talked about the crisis of the West — its faltering economies, its withering democracies, its uncertain cultural identity. When he finished, the first response came from a Chinese political philosopher, who declared that many Chinese would gladly accept the West’s crisis “if they could enjoy your freedoms.” Students and faculty applauded.
Perhaps, Sorman reflected, it’s time to love the West, and our times, if others envy us so much. And perhaps we should listen to Sorman the next time we’re tempted to think that income inequality makes our civilization despicable. Most places in the world would gladly choose our problems over their own.