In Defence of Pessimism
Pessimists have never been popular, even when telling the truth – in fact, especially when telling the truth.
The ancients first drew our attention to this phenomenon by showing that those who foretold disasters or defeats were either done to death, like Laocoon who distrusted the Greeks when bearing gifts and was swallowed by serpents; or Cassandra, who foretold disasters but was condemned never to be believed.
Mindful of the Greeks’ experiences, we have wisely agreed never to ‘kill the messenger’ – advice more honoured now in theory than in practice because there are more ways of killing the messenger than by drawing blood.
Because we shrink from bloody murder, we turn to murdering a reputation instead.
This is achieved by either denying the pessimist a public voice or, if too prominent and talented to be ignored, then dubbing him or her a reactionary, a fascist, a has been, or worst of all, a conservative.
There has always been amongst Catholics and other Christians, an inherent dislike of pessimism because it seems to run contrary to the doctrine of Hope, and the assurance that we have the promise of God that He himself will be with us even until the end of time.
This engenders great confidence that adverse circumstances will turn out all right in the end.
Hope enables us to withstand the slings and arrows and the buffetings, and the insults, that we suffer notably in the media and in public life. It follows that Christians by nature are optimists.
But a reliance on spiritual hope – being optimists – should not breed in us a complacency and a blindness in the face of a deteriorating situation, or an attack on our freedoms, and the decline of Christian civilisation such as we face today. On these occasions, the pessimist has his function.
A pessimist alerts us to the dangers ahead and reminds us of Burke’s words, ‘all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’.
There is nothing quite so wearing and so destructive of action as the optimists’ clichés, ‘always look on the bright side’ and ‘things are not as bad as they seem’, or simply, ‘don’t listen to him, he’s a pessimist.’ Surely a pessimist would have been useful on the bridge of the Titanic on the night of 14 April 1912? But, like Cassandra, he most likely would not have been listened to.
The Greeks knew so well how human nature works, how we cannot bear the truth if it is unpleasant and how we must kill the messenger, if not by one means then another will do as well.
The difference between an optimist and a pessimist, according to one amusing definition, is that an optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears that this may well be true. The Oxford Dictionary limits its definition of a pessimist to one who takes the worst view of a situation, leaving open the question of whether the worst view is the accurate one or not.
There are many instances in history of optimists who have frustrated or denied action to avert disaster, believing that their opponents were merely pessimistic – the appeasement faction in the British Parliament opposing Churchill in 1938-9 is a famous example, as was the rhapsodic approval shown by many intellectuals of conditions in Stalin’s Russia during the Cold War. Pessimists – those with a contrary message – were ridiculed and not generally believed. The truth was too unpleasant. The great novelist, Thomas Hardy, known widely for his rather gloomy view of the human condition, argued that ‘Pessimism is really only a reasoned view deduced from facts unflinchingly observed’.
He said he was always sceptical of professional optimists: ‘they wear too much the strained look of the smile on a skull.’
He admitted that he often got depressed at the sight of so much pain in the world – constant pain.
In temperament and character, Hardy was the opposite of Chesterton but it is seldom acknowledged by Chesterton’s admirers – those who see him merely as a jolly, laughing, beer-drinking joker – that towards the end of his life he admitted (like Hardy) to feelings of depression.
Who can listen to recordings of Chesterton’s last broadcasts without recognising the great sadness in his voice and his fears for the future? When discussing optimism and pessimism, he wrote of the ‘cheap cheerfulness’ of the optimist and how we must judge any case of alleged degeneracy on its own merits.
“We are not judging them [the pessimists] but the situation they judge, or misjudge.” In other words, listen to the argument put forward by the pessimist and judge it, rather than dismiss it because it is not a pleasantly optimistic view.
We do not need to rely solely on writers of the past to see how dangerous it is to ignore the pessimists.
The contemporary French economist and presidential advisor, Jacques Attali, in his blog L’Express, condemns the widespread tendency to think well of optimism. He writes that it would be dangerous to discredit pessimism and then goes on to argue that in the blackest periods of our history the pessimists have always been right.
In every age, and particularly so in ours, there are voices raised which warn of disasters ahead, wrongful policies, or unpleasant consequences of popular human actions and decisions. They are the pessimists, the Cassandras and the Laocoons of today, whose opinions are minority ones, not generally found on the front pages of newspapers or on television.
We have to seek them out, be alert to the publications where their views can be found. If we take Chesterton’s advice, we should judge what they have to say, weigh the evidence, and not ridicule them or dismiss them merely because they take an unduly pessimistic view of the world and religious affairs.
Defend the pessimists of the world. They too have their role to play, and who knows, if listened to, and their arguments fairly judged, they may yet save our ship of state – indeed our civilisation – from the hazards so plainly in view ahead of us.