Tag: optimism

Between Optimism and Hope There We Stand

There’s an opinion piece titled “The world is being driven to the brink by thugs and dictators, but there is a route to a brighter future” in today’s Guardian.

Simon Tisdall writes:

“The future lies not in the hands of political thugs and killers, of dictators and megalomaniacs, but in the hands of ordinary people everywhere. It depends on millions upon millions of individual daily acts of kindness, selflessness, faith and courage. So don’t lose heart. Keep your eyes open. Unblock your ears. And don’t look down!”

I like this viewpoint. Still, I’m put in mind of Terry Eagleton’s book “Hope Without Optimism” for several reasons. Eagleton argues that optimism is a temperament. Hope is essentially an act of will and imagination. As Eagleton puts it: “To believe that a situation will turn out well because you are an optimist is as irrational as believing that all will be well because you are an Albanian.” Hope is the other animal.  Eagleton again: “Utopia could only be achieved through an intense hopelessness.”

I suspect Simon Tisdall knows this viewpoint. We are now in intense hopelessness. It’s a lousy neighborhood. And Eagleton: “True hope is needed most when the situation is at its starkest.”

Individual acts of kindness do not necessarily spring from false optimism (though they can) but instead from the almost universal desire of human beings to help that man or woman with a broken leg. We have been healers for 15,000 years. That’s hope. Tisdall’s argument that power resides at the local level is not wrong.

Jerome Groopman writes (in his remarkable book “The Anatomy of Hope”) that hope is:  “the elevating feeling we experience when we see… a future that is amenable to reasonable pursuit” and I like that pursuit.  Groopman who is an oncologist understands that there’s a practicality to hope, hope which we must use with all our might. We must not pretend otherwise.

I was heartened to read Tisdall this morning for the worlds of social media are clogged with pessimism. I see poets attacking poets, disability rights activists clobbering other cripples, internecine spats everywhere. But we should be reminded that despair is a choice, one to which the old men wish you to succumb.

If I’m an occasional optimist this is because I understand the nuances both of temperament and intellect. It’s likely I’m an optimist by means of hardwiring. Hope is practical.

 

 

Optimism, Pangloss, Skateboard

Optimism. Such a hopeless word, outdated like macassar oil. Late capitalism and gangster nations (sometimes the same thing) push environmental disaster. Human rights are, as always, being quashed. This O word is the fluff of nostalgia. Here comes Pangloss on his skateboard. 

And yet I’ve declared my self a cautious optimist. What in the hell does it mean? And who am I to declare such a thing when the world is quite literally in flames? 

One thing I know for sure is that disability has a peculiar demand, perhaps not for everyone who identities this way, but the demand is there and it says get on with it. Get up. Put on your frigging shoes even when you can’t imagine leaving your house. I have whole days when I can’t think about leaving my house. Depression and weariness. You just know you’re going to have another unhappy day in Able-ville. By now I’ve written about this too many times to count. 

What I’m talking about it the hard choice to get up. The hard choice to picture something better. The refusal to give in. Its likely I feel like crap. But I’m going out into the  indifferent world. Bully for me, you say. I’m with you. Bully. But I don’t have the privilege to succumb to hopelessness. I just don’t. There’s just no way I can afford it. 

Pangloss. Skateboard. Candle in the wind. I’m putting my blind shoulder to the wheel. 

Maria Popova frames this as a balance rather than a blend: “critical thinking without hope is cynicism, while hope without critical thinking is naïveté.” The Marginalian  

There it is. 

Hope is Also the Plucked Chicken

Both Moliere and Shakespeare grew up watching morality plays, fables whose stock characters were invariably named God, Death, Everyman, Good-Deeds, Angel, Knowledge, Beauty, Discretion, and Strength. Because they lived during the first flowering of public literacy they understood the indispensable healthiness of word flipping. Talk about nature’s bounty! Words were no longer merely to be received and absorbed. Can you imagine the joy of a 17th century adolescent forced to watch Everyman or The Second Shepherd’s Play, as he substituted Satan, Life, Neighbor, Sin, Second Rate Demons, Ignorance, Ugliness, Gossip, and Basic Human Weakness for the stock characters of religious drama? Of course you can. Almost no one who’s lived through a high school production of The Man of La Mancha has not done this.

One can do this with lines of poetry. Hope may be the thing with feathers but its also nubby like a plucked chicken. I don’t know about you but this is a good game for me. Optimism doesn’t have to be perfect. It can be homely. There are many jokes about this. The classic goes like this:

Three guys are walking down the sidewalk when they spot something in their path. Bob crouches down for a closer look.

“Looks like shit,” he says.

His friend leans in and sniffs it.

“Yeah. Smells like shit too.”

The third guy isn’t convinced. He pokes it with a stick, then touches it.

“Feels like shit.”

Finally, just to be totally sure, one of them tastes it.

“Yep. Tastes like shit too. I think it must be shit.”

Bob nods. “Yeah. Good thing we didn’t step in it.”

A useful form of hope is encoded in this. Its a hard life. But look. We didn’t step on the turd. BTW I like to imagine Fred Astaire dancing on poop. Such things help me. Anyway the trouble for millions of us is that optimism has been taken over by the self help industry Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that the war between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands was like watching two bald men fighting over a comb. 

I like to think of the bald man who still buys a comb.