Thoughts about Optimism

I’ve been reading R-A Gauthier’s book Magnanimité. It’s incredibly wide-ranging, but one interesting passage contrasts the serenity and the anguish of the Greek with the serenity and anguish of the Christian. The anguish of the Christian is the anguish of sin; the Christian is a pessimist when he looks inward. Insofar as he knows himself, he realizes that he does not do what he wants to do; that with his own resources he is incapable of avoiding the evil he hates.

The Christian finds peace outside of himself, when he considers God, or the world which God has created. Serenity comes with knowing that God always works for the good of those who love him (Rom. 8:28). And recognizing with St. Augustine that everything that exists, because it is God’s creation, is good, the Christian is able to affirm his own goodness.

The Greek, on the other hand, is optimistic when he considers himself. The Aristotelian ideal of the magnanimous man, or the Epicurean ideal of autarkeia (self-sufficiency, independence), assume that man on his own can attain to virtue and happiness. It is only when looking outside of himself - to the gods, the world, fate – that his optimism is tempered. Gauthier quotes Sophocles:

Terrible deaths, innumerable sufferings;

Each of them the work of Zeus.

Thus the Stoics advocate a complete resignation to the world, with the cultivation of an attitude of supreme indifference toward suffering.

All this got me thinking about the optimism of the modern period. If the optimism of the Ancients reached its limit when confronted with the caprice of chance, modern Baconian and Cartesian optimism lies precisely in its mastery over nature. We can dominate it, and use it for our own benefit. This anthropocentric self-confidence ought to be supreme.

And yet our confidence is remarkably fragile. It is often remarked that the two world wars of the twentieth century served to negate the naïve Victorian optimism of the nineteenth. Only then did we fully realize the amoral nature of technology, and the intractability of human nature.

On a deeper level, I would suggest that our optimism about man suffers because we are unable to provide an account of our own goodness. There is no longer anything divine in us. Here the self-esteem movement has proved indispensable by providing therapeutic compensation. Children learn from a young age how special they are. If the child does something well, praise him; if he does something poorly, praise him. Never interfere with the supreme right of the individual to feel good about himself.

Still, there have to be some limits to the capacity of this sort of thing to provide for our needs. At least the more perceptive young people realize that the self-esteem movement is based on a lie. Where then do we turn to fuel our optimism? To Obama-inspired appeals to hope? (Someone should really write a book and call it The Opacity of Hope). To exotic spiritualities? Our culture is conflicted: it combines strong self-affirmation with deep insecurity about our own worth.

Forgetting Virtue

There has been a lot of talk surrounding the release of the latest Judd Apatow film, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Apatow’s characters are lovable for their clueless but well-intentioned attitude toward life. Even in their obsessions with sexual fulfillment, they are still somewhat childlike. In this, however, they are worlds away from the movie-goers who revel in them. They retain an innocence and an ignorance to which we cannot aspire. We know too much. The Apatow hero ends up being merely charming.

On the other hand, the makers of the raunchy Harold and Kumar movies seem to have captured a much more recognizable character-type. The brainy stoner, the overachieving slacker, is now quite familiar on college campuses. This image of the intelligent math geek or arts major massively overindulging in the pleasures of the senses calls to mind Walker Percy’s critique of the Cartesian mind-body split which he found so prevalent in modern man. In Love in the Ruins, Percy presents deliciously ironic characters whose abstract intellectualism, divorced from their present bodily situation, eventually gives way to a complete loss of restraint of their sexual desires.

Desires, left unregulated, eventually compel the mind to follow them. Today, the justification given by our sexual hedonists for avoiding deviant sexuality (orgies, even bestiality) is mainly aesthetic. Tastes are subject to change, however, and in our increasingly remissive culture (to use Philip Rieff’s term), it is certainly conceivable that these deviancies will eventually undergo widespread legitimation. In the shorter term, however, one wonders: to what extent can young people, having finished with their extended college revelry, settle down and adapt to a relatively normal life?