The best article I read last weekend was a Latimes op-ed on pessimism written by Joshua Dienstag, which is a rebuttal to Adam Cohen’s strong assertion in the New York Times that the legacy of the Bush Administration was that he robbed America of its optimism. Dienstag’s argument is that pessimism keeps us focus on what matters instead of giving us high hopes that will turn our attention away from reality. He writes:
Pessimism is more than a bad mood or the result of an unhappy childhood. In fact, pessimism has a long and distinguished philosophical heritage, one which we would do well to take more seriously as our grand plans to remake the world come a cropper. […] Though the Bush administration may be the latest and most extreme version of the compulsory optimism of American politics, matters will not improve if we simply replace it with an equally optimistic administration from the other party. The problem is that the vocabulary of optimism itself distorts our understanding of the world and leaves us lost in illusions. We don't need politicians to raise our hopes; we need them to build stronger levees, and not just in New Orleans.
Dienstag is really against is a way to do politics that consists in avoiding the truth and in infantilizing the electorate by telling them that there are no problems or they don’t have to make any sacrifices to stop the Titanic from sinking. I think that optimism is essential in politics and productive especially when it goes together with a worldview, which entices the electorate to know more and do more instead of fooling them into thinking that elections can solve problems of governance. I think that Adam Cohen was right when he wrote:
Pessimism, however, is the most un-American of philosophies. This nation was built on the values of reason and progress, not to mention the ''pursuit of happiness.'' Pessimism as philosophy is skeptical of the idea of progress. Pursuing happiness is a fool's errand. Pessimism is not, as is commonly thought, about being depressed or misanthropic, and it does not hold that humanity is headed for disaster. It simply doubts the most basic liberal principle: that applying human reasoning to the world's problems will have a positive effect.
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