Another war in Europe. A shrinking middle class. Stagnant wages. Inflation. A record heatwave. Recent years give us precious few reasons to be an optimist. Perhaps what we need is hope.
Christopher Lasch drew an important distinction between the two mindsets in his last major work The True and Only Heaven. Optimism, he argues, is the mindset of endless improvement. It implies a reading of history as the cumulative progress of society and humanity. He traces its development back to the emergence of political economy in the 18th century:
For eighteenth-century moralists like Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, and Adam Smith, it was the self-generating character of rising expectations, newly acquired needs and tastes, new standards of personal comfort…. that broke the old cycle of social growth and decay and gave rise to a form of society capable of indefinite expansion… (52)
Adam Smith believed that if we were to cultivate the “genial values” of brotherhood and cooperation, then instead of fighting to take things away from each other, we would all cooperate for mutual benefit. Everyone’s living standards would rise. There would be no more violent, existential conflict. The world would, over time, become an objectively better place for everyone.
These same thinkers also warned about the “democratisation of luxury”. They saw its moral hazards clearly, how it would weaken the resolve necessary for someone to press on through difficult times. Hume warned that a “philosophy of plenty” would weaken the powers of self-denial and amplify the pursuit of “feverish, empty amusements,” while Smith regretted how security and comfort would afford us little reason for “the contempt of danger, to patience in enduring labor, hunger, and pain.” (56)
The promise of a political economy that would grow indefinitely to meet our expanding tastes was a bittersweet one. It betokened a society much like that described by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History:
The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.
Optimism only ever made sense in this kind of age of affluence, on the back of monotonically increasing living standards. But despite the best attempts of economists and technocrats to re-program the doomsday machine, we are beginning to realise that our world might just as easily slip back into darkness. Lasch puts it simply: the expansion of the productive capacities necessary to supply us with ever increasing standards of comfort, has also led us to the brink of environmental collapse.
The planet’s finitude has never been more preciously apparent. The idea that we might go on living forever in the End of History is now ravaged by its equally naïve opposite: that the earth is done for and we and can’t do anything about it. Such “Doomerism” is little more than lost optimism. Lasch already anticipates it in his analysis of progress. Though the west abandoned utopian politics after the world wars, it retained a belief in progress as an “antidote to despair”. Historian Christopher Dawson described progress as “the working faith of our civilisation.” If that faith were ever to be threatened—if progress really was at a dead end—then our day of judgement had come, and despair would be the logical response.
Optimism is for cowards. It has left us ill-prepared to handle life’s travails. Promised of a bright future, formerly certain of our present superiority, we never had any need to intelligently reflect on how we got here. And now, perhaps, we have lost that capacity.
In place of optimism, Lasch posits hope. Hope consoles us, but we do not expect anything from it. And it suggests a way forward without ever denying life’s tragic character: its heartbreaks, rivalries, fights, and setbacks:
Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it. It rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the past. It derives from early memories—no doubt distorted, overlaid with later memories, past events—in which the experience of order and contentment was so intense that subsequent disillusionments cannot dislodge it. Such experience leaves as its residue the unshakable conviction, not that the past was better than the present, but that trust is never completely misplaced, even though it is never completely justified either and therefore destined inevitably to disappointment. (81)
A culture which trusts the future over life does not have the ability to see through the inevitable disappointments of both. Its solution is not a culture of pessimism, but a re-enchantment of the world, a rediscovery of its inherent awe. This way of looking at things reveals that the universe has not been designed for our comfort or ease, that it resists and often hurts us, and that we can never avoid this. It prepares us to discover our place in the face of adversity.
One way to read Lasch is as an attempt to reconcile the “soft, gentle, the amiable virtues” with “patience in enduring labor, hunger, and pain.” His sketch of a new socio-political culture begins with a reckoning of our limits—moral and ecological—so we might rediscover the courage to press on during difficult periods, for our time here is brief, and not everything will fall to our favour.