The Pleasures of Pessimism by Moore Natasha;

Author:Moore, Natasha;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Acorn Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Polarisation: Our greatest safety

The enigmatic writer David Foster Wallace famously tells the story of two young fish swimming along one day when they pass an older fish, who says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ Swimming on, eventually one of them turns to the other and says, ‘What the hell is water?’

My ‘how’s the water’ moment – the point at which the pessimism we’re all swimming in suddenly became visible to me – came when I read these words from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson:

Cultural pessimism is always fashionable, and, since we are human, there are always grounds for it. It has the negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible. And from time to time it has the extremely negative consequence of encouraging a kind of somber panic, a collective dream-state in which recourse to terrible remedies is inspired by delusions of mortal threat. If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing.

Pessimism is perennially ‘in’, as noted already. Yet I want to suggest that one of the forces amplifying it in our own time is a growing partisanship.

It’s not simply that everything’s going to hell in a handcart; they are the ones driving it there. Whoever ‘they’ are, part of the pleasure we take in our pessimism lies in our outrage, our self-righteousness – the conviction that a significant portion of our fellow citizens are dangerous lunatics, or at least up that end of the political spectrum, and that they’re ruining everything.

Do a quick mental exercise here: think of an issue on which you deeply believe yourself to be in the right, and the views of those who disagree with you to be not only mistaken but harmful. Imagine your opponents got their way and had their policy put in place. If it turned out not to have the disastrous effects you feared – if it even made things better, by the measure you were using – would you be relieved to be wrong?

In other words, which do I (honestly) value more: the common good, or my side being right?

One symptom of this polarisation is to be found in the disconnect between people’s optimism about their own situation and their pessimism about the bigger picture.

Take the current epicentre of partisan politics, the United States. Back in 2016, as the presidential primaries kicked off, an Aspen Institute poll found that, while only 36 percent of Americans thought their country as a whole was headed in the right direction, 85 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with their own position in life and ability to pursue the American dream.

As the journalist James Fallows asks, reasonably enough: ‘What explains the gulf between most American’s hopeful outlook on areas and institutions

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