“Easy hope is itself a temptation, a false meliorism that clouds our ability to take stock of what is wholesale happening. Hope that offers us five easy steps is nothing but wish-fulfillment: hope meager and for sale.”—Anton Barba-Kay
Pessimism gets a bad rap, especially in this country. A favorite pastime of American pseudo-intellectuals is to hold up prophets of decline to mockery, laughing at predictions of doom that never came true. Frequently enough, this involves caricaturing the predictions so that they can be safely ignored—so that if they ever do come true, no one will ever have to admit that the prophets were right. But often enough, critics do not even feel the need to point to particular debunked predictions: the mere fact that someone has dared to be an Eeyore is enough to discredit them in a can-do culture.
Even as the heady optimism of the 1990s gave way to a glummer mood in the aftermath of the Great Recession, there seemed to be an unspoken rule that any cultural critic must end his diatribe on an upbeat note: “But we can solve this, guys! All we need to do is…” Indeed, I myself felt compelled to frame my recent bleak diagnosis of digital culture as a golden policy opportunity. The two most compelling books I’ve read this summer, however, both refuse to play that game. In Democracy and Solidarity, James Davison Hunter surveys various diagnoses of American civic ills and summarizes,
“What they tend to share in common is the belief that any remedy comes down to a matter of political will and smart public policy. The general sense is that if we are just a little more clever or try just a bit harder by mobilizing our individual and collective political resolve, we can rebuild the social fabric that gives life to democracy….Not to hope and not to think creatively and practically for solutions to the range of troubles facing us seems nothing less than a blasphemy. Yet it is important to remember that while institutions, even as they evolve, tend to be stable and enduring, no human institution is permanent. No institution is infinitely fixable. Under the circumstances, it is worth considering whether contemporary American democracy can be fixed.”
Depressing, but he has a point. History holds no guarantee that any civilization will keep on enduring and flourishing; in fact, it tends to tell us that all are fated to endure periods of profound and sometimes irreversible decline.
Anton Barba-Kay evinces a similar frustration with the mandatory optimism of techno-criticism in A Web of Our Own Making:
“I have been surprised again and again at how, after a few hundred pages of incisive criticism, such authors feel compelled to conclude on a note of contrived and desperate positivity. They offer what cannot but be (in light of the magnitude of the problems they themselves have outlined) anemic and self-helpful advice about how to civilize the internet’s world-rending id. As if one could tame the whirlwind by politely requesting that it shift its trajectory a little to the left…. Policy issues like those I’ve named are the merest symptoms of an absolute and comprehensive social harrowing; we should take better care not to be betrayed by our own desires for reassurance. Easy hope is itself a temptation, a false meliorism that clouds our ability to take stock of what is wholesale happening. Hope that offers us five easy steps is nothing but wish-fulfillment: hope meager and for sale.”
There is, of course, a cheap form of pessimism, the “black pill” that so often accompanies “red pill” dissidence: an almost gleeful denunciation of how bad things are, so as to open up space for a revolutionary project. This is unconvincing because it still operates at the level of fantasy, imagining utopian transformations that will emerge on the other side if only we can get gritty enough. Say what you will about Hunter and Barba-Kay (and I am not sure what to say), it’s clear that their pessimism is not cheap, the prelude to some utopian flight.
Still, many will worry that such pessimism is thoroughly unpractical—that it saps courage and paralyzes action, destroying any chances we might have of achieving a happier outcome. But I don’t think so.
For one thing, we must reject the pragmatic premise that self-deceit is better than honesty if it produces better immediate results. There comes a point in every life when a man must have the clear-eyed courage to look the end of all his strivings squarely in the face, rather than listening to doctors who promise him he’ll be back on his feet in no time. For the Christian, death is not the end, either for an individual or for a civilization. We can face our cultural decline with the world-renewing vision of a Benedict or a Boethius only if we are willing to look beyond the possible death of our own social world toward the new ones the Lord may have in store.
Which is to say that if it is truthful, pessimism is practical. This is indeed the basic structure of our Christian confession. I have recently been working through the Heidelberg Catechism with my children. Although it begins with a beautiful reminder of our “only comfort in life and in death,” it immediately reminds us that we can come to this comfort only through the most radical pessimism:
“Q. What must you know to live and die in the joy of this comfort?
A. Three things: first, how great my sin and misery are; second, how I am set free from all my sins and misery; third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.”
It goes on to spell out this “sin and misery” in thoroughly uncompromising Augustinian terms. Only by looking the reality of our situation squarely in the face through the mirror of the Law can we be prepared to escape it through the Gospel.
The spiritual case is somewhat unique, in that (at least from a Protestant standpoint) no effort of ours can get us out of this fix, whereas the crises induced by technological deformation or political polarization are ones that we must take action against. But there is little chance that we will take the appropriate actions unless we have first truly grappled with the realities of our situation. The entire story of The Lord of the Rings is one great meditation on this theme: that in a time of increasing darkness, sometimes the only path of hope is one that looks almost indistinguishable from despair, and the only way to find that path is to first shed our comforting illusions.
In listening to The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark’s masterpiece about the outbreak of World War I, I have been struck by the poignance that a little more pessimism might have prevented this great catastrophe of the modern age. While everyone talked of the possibility of war, no one really seemed to believe it could happen; and even those who claimed to wish for war closed their eyes to what it would actually entail. Because of this, statesmen and ambassadors in every capital of Europe played with matches and dynamite, imagining up until the final fateful moment that they were just engaged in old-fashioned diplomatic sparring.
Cultural peer pressure often places a taboo on giving voice to our deepest fears about the threats that face us. But that which remains unspoken can never be challenged and never be changed. Barba-Kay writes,
“The best way I know to keep faith with the time is still to insist on noticing just what is taking place….My aim here is thus not simply to think and speak, but to call things by their name in order to give voice to them. Because what is not claimed by open clarity is what dominates us. What is unthought and unsaid is what is all powerful. Such is the debt that the truth constantly exacts from our loyalty.”
To be sure, doomerism is a vice, a lazy and self-indulgent one. If faith is the highest virtue, so Kierkegaard argued, despair is the greatest sin. But pessimism is not the same as despair—or need not be. A willingness to call things by their proper names and face up to the reality of just how dangerous and damaging certain trends are in the past and in the present does not entail a surrender to their inevitability in the future. On the contrary, it is precisely the bland reassurances of the techno-optimist or the “well let’s not overreact” crowd that ensures that the worst trends of the present will continue to gain force into the future.
Again, Barba-Kay:
“At any rate, have the courage neither to talk yourself out of the problems nor to simplify them through hope for easy solutions, ‘for hope would be hope for the wrong thing,’ and the only way to answer to such problems is to first make them more complicated. This is admittedly an impractical, if not a practically absurd, position. But at a moment where words are not working as they should, it is the fate of criticism to become less encouraging the more accurate it is.”
Note: There will be only one Substack next week, on Wednesday or Thursday, as I’ll be busy teaching at the Lilly-funded Congregational Life in a Digital Age program at Davenant House.