The Uses of Pessimism

Roger Scruton

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781848878815
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Scruton argues that the tragedies and disasters of the history of the European continent have been the consequences of a false optimism and the fallacies that derive from it. In place of these fallacies, Scruton mounts a passionate defence of both civil society and freedom. He shows that the true legacy of European civilisation is not the false idealisms that have almost destroyed it - in the shapes of Nazism, fascism and communism - but the culture of forgiveness and irony which we must now protect from those whom it offends. The Uses of Pessimism is a passionate plea for reason and responsibility, written at a time of profound change.

Contents

	Preface
ONE	The First-Person Future
TWO	The Best Case Fallacy
THREE	The Born Free Fallacy
FOUR	The Utopian Fallacy
FIVE	The Zero Sum Fallacy
SIX	The Planning Fallacy
SEVEN	The Moving Spirit Fallacy
EIGHT	The Aggregation Fallacy
NINE	Defences against the Truth
TEN	Our Tribal Past
ELEVEN	Our Civil Present
TWELVE	Our Human Future

Preface

In this book I examine optimism in what Schopenhauer called its ‘wicked’ or ‘unscrupulous’ (bedenkenlos) form, and show the place of pessimism in restoring balance and wisdom to the conduct of human affairs. I don’t go along with Schopenhauer’s comprehensive gloom, or with the philosophy of renunciation that he derived from it. I have no doubt that St Paul was right to recommend faith, hope and love (agape) as the virtues that order life to the greater good. But I have no doubt too that hope, detached from faith and untempered by the evidence of history, is a dangerous asset, and one that threatens not only those who embrace it, but all those within range of their illusions.

At first, the old myth tells us, the only mortals on earth were men, to whom Prometheus brought fire in defiance of Zeus. In revenge Zeus ordered the creation of the first woman, who was given in marriage to Prometheus’s brother. Her name was Pandora – the all-giving one. And as a wedding gift Zeus gave her a box, instructing her never to open it. Giving way to her curiosity at last, she opened the box, releasing into the world death, disease, despair, malice, old age, hatred, violence, war and all the other evils that we know. Pandora closed the box at once, and one gift remained inside – the gift of hope: the only remedy, but also the final scourge.

My concern, in the first instance, is with certain fallacies that seem to justify hope, or at least to make disappointment bearable. My examples come from many areas, but they share a common characteristic, which is that they show, at the heart of the unscrupulous optimist’s vision, a mistake that is so blindingly obvious that only someone in the grip of self-deception could have overlooked it. It is against this self-deception that pessimism is directed. A study of the uses of pessimism will reveal a most interesting feature of human nature, which is that obvious errors are the hardest to rectify. They may involve mistakes of reasoning; but their cause lies deeper than reason, in emotional needs that will defend themselves with every weapon to hand rather than relinquish the comfort of their easily won illusions. One of my purposes is to trace these emotional needs to their prehistoric source, and to show that civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our species, but that are useful no longer.

The belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an attentive reading of the Iliad, still less of the Old Testament. The fact that it did so is a sober reminder that the argument of this book is entirely futile. You may enjoy it and agree with it, but it will have no influence whatsoever on those whom it calls to account. The irrationalities that I explore are, as the neuronerds put it, ‘hard-wired’ in the human cortex, and not to be countered by anything so gentle as an argument.

The theme of the collective unreason of mankind is not new, and you might wonder whether there is anything to be added to the great survey that the Scottish poet Charles Mackay published in 1852, entitled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Mackay’s study of prophecies, superstitions, witchhunts and crusades is a grim reminder that all the things that he sardonically describes have continued in the same frequency and to worse effect since his book was published. Mackay felt that mankind had at last entered a period of scientific knowledge, in which crowds would allow themselves to be corrected by the experts whom previously they had preferred to burn at the stake. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The great crowd movements of communism, Nazism and fascism, in which false hopes were to transform themselves into marching armies, had yet to appear over the horizon. And the rise of the scientific expert did little more than rebrand the witch-hunts and genocides of the twentieth century as rational decisions, for which science had shown the need. The ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ was justified by ‘Marxist science’, the racist doctrines of the Nazis were proposed as scientific eugenics, the ‘Great Leap Forward’ of Mao Zedong was held to be no more than an application of the proven laws of history. Of course the science was phony; but that merely shows that, when unreason triumphs, it does so in the name of reason.

In a more recent study, Scared to Death, Christopher Booker and Richard North have examined the panics that have swept across the civilized world in the last two decades. These panics show the other side of unscrupulous optimism: the equally unscrupulous pessimism that comes when false hope is deflated. All of them – from the hysterical belief that two million British people were about to die from the human variant of mad cow disease, to the apocalyptic vision of global warming, from the fear that all the world’s computers would shut down at the millennium, to the campaigns against lead in petrol and passive smoking – have been presented as ‘science’. And all of them have ignored evidence and argument in favour of a preordained conclusion, accepted because it gives direction and force to a mass movement of the righteous, assembled to cast out the devil from our midst. Those who question or resist are singled out as scapegoats; witchhunts of the sceptics go hand in hand with adoration of the heroes such as Al Gore who are pointing the way to salvation. And when the panic is over the crowd disperses, having achieved neither relief nor self-knowledge, but merely the readiness for another scare.

In two other recent studies – How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen, and Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont – indignant intellectuals have pointed to the ways in which nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of the optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.

Some of my observations are indeed anticipated by those estimable authors. But my purpose differs from theirs. My theme is less the ‘madding crowd’ than the scheming individual: the one who, troubled by the imperfect prescriptions contained in custom, common sense and law, looks to another kind of future, in which those old ways of compromise are no longer required. Unscrupulous optimists believe that the difficulties and disorders of humankind can be overcome by some large-scale adjustment: it suffices to devise a new arrangement, a new system, and people will be released from their temporary prison into a realm of success. When it comes to helping others, therefore, all their efforts are put into the abstract scheme for human improvement, and none whatsoever into the personal virtue that might enable them to play the small part that it is given to humans to play in bettering the lot of their fellows. Hope, in their frame of mind, ceases to be a personal virtue, tempering griefs and troubles, teaching patience and sacrifice, and preparing the soul for agape. Instead it becomes a mechanism for turning problems into solutions and grief into exultation, without pausing to study the accumulated evidence of human nature, which tells us that the only improvement that lies within our control is the improvement of ourselves.

I have benefited greatly over the years from discussions with Bob Grant, who read an early draft of this book and made many useful criticisms and suggestions. My thanks go also to those who have set an example, by following the rule of agape, striving to love people as human beings without hoping that they will turn into something else. I single out Gladys Sweeney and her students at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, Ian Christie, Jonathan Ruffer, Helena Pechoučková, my sister Elizabeth, and above all my wife Sophie, who has had a particularly hard case to deal with, and yet who still manages to smile.

Sperryville, Virginia, May 2009.

ONE

The First-Person Future

Every scientific advance is welcomed by those who see a use for it, and usually deplored by those who don’t. History does not record the protests that surrounded the invention of the wheel. But it certainly records the protests that surrounded the invention of the railways. For the great critic and social philosopher John Ruskin the railways were a ruthless assault on rural tranquillity; they destroyed the sense of place, they uprooted settled communities, they overran the countryside with steel-clad ugliness and urban sprawl. They set us all in motion, when the true point of human life is to stay quietly where we are. They were, in short, the end of civilization as Ruskin knew it.¹

Yet how quaint does Ruskin’s cry of heartfelt protest now seem. Oddly enough, the railways of England were built according to designs influenced through and through by his writings, and in particular by Stones of Venice; they are looked back on now with intense nostalgia, as symbols of peace, place and distance. One of the most famous invocations of rural settlement in English – ‘Adlestrop’ by the poet Edward Thomas – describes a tranquil country railway station viewed from a train. And campaigners against automobiles propose the railways as their ideal of a safe, environmentally friendly and aesthetically pleasing link from place to place across a continent.

Ruskin’s protest against the railways has lost its persuasive force. But it illustrates an important and recurring theme in the annals of human progress. For Ruskin, the railways threatened one of the fixed points in our moral universe, which is the earth itself – earth that provides the food we eat, the water we drink and the stones with which we build; earth that creates the distances between us, and also the comfort of settling side by side. When we build we must treat the land as a place of settlement, into which our lives are harmlessly slotted like those of fish in the sea. In a similar vein contemporary environmentalists complain that, by exploiting the earth for our ephemeral purposes, we treat as a mere means what should be respected as an end: we meddle with something that should be a fixed point for us, the place at which our self-centred experiments stop. Like Ruskin, the modern pessimist is urging us to consider what happens to us when old constraints are removed, old limitations abolished, and an old way of confronting the world replaced by an illusion of mastery.

In his novel Erewhon, published in 1872, Samuel Butler describes an imaginary country in which all machines are forbidden. The inhabitants had once availed themselves of watches, steam engines, mechanical pumps and hoists, and all the other devices that could be admired in the great Exhibitions of Victorian England. But, unlike Butler’s Victorian contemporaries, they had perceived the terrible danger that these things represent. Machines, they realized, were always improving. Never for one moment did they take a step backwards into imperfections that they had surpassed.² Always the next machine was better, more versatile and more adapted to its uses than the last. Inevitably, therefore, the process of improvement would continue, until machines had no need of humans at all – until they were able to produce and reproduce themselves. At that point, like all creatures obedient to the law of evolution, the machines would be locked in a life-and-death struggle with their competitors. And their only competitor would be man. Hence, foreseeing that the machines would otherwise destroy them, the inhabitants of Erewhon had destroyed the machines.

The fear of the Erewhonians was not absurd: it had been anticipated by the machine-smashing Luddites of early nineteenth-century England, and was to return with twentieth-century agrarians like Hugh Massingham, Gustave Thibon and Wendell Berry. But its premise was unconvincing – at least to Butler’s readers. The idea of a self-reproducing machine seemed, to most of them, a mere literary fantasy. Yet sixty years later Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, the portrait of another imaginary country, in which humans are produced as machines are produced, according to specifications laid down by official policy. Intelligence, interests, pleasures and pains are all controlled, either genetically or by subsequent conditioning, and all those aspects of the human psyche in which eccentricities, commitments, deep emotions and old-fashioned virtues might take root, are deliberately prevented from forming. And if humans can be produced as machines are produced, in factories controlled by humans, why cannot machines be produced as humans are now produced, by self-reproduction?

Huxley’s visionary future was a major advance on Butler’s, since it engaged with what was actually happening in the surrounding world. Since 1931, when the book was published, advances in genetics, robotics and computer science have brought us face to face with the possibility that human beings might escape the limitations by which their lives have hitherto been circumscribed. The ‘posthuman’ future promises enhanced bodily and mental powers, immunity to disease and decay, even the conquest of death. And many argue that we have no choice but to embrace this condition: it will happen anyway, if only because biological science and medical technology are both moving in that direction. Why not learn to control the future, lest it should end, as in Huxley’s dystopia, by controlling us? A new kind of optimist has therefore emerged, advocating a transformed human being who will emerge from the million years of man’s incompetence to stuff the disasters back in Pandora’s box.

In a celebrated play, The Makropulos Case, turned into an opera by Janáček, Karel Čapek explores the psyche of a woman who has inherited the elixir of eternal life and survived for 400 years, enjoying many times over the things at which human beings aim: pleasure, power, influence and love. And all these things have staled with repetition, her heart has hardened to every natural affection, and – being immortal – she looks on the frailty and need of her mortal lovers with an attitude of cold and cynical disgust. Her life is loveless, not because she cannot be offered love, but because she cannot receive it. All giving, all surrender, all sacrifice have vanished from her psyche, and only the empty lust for longevity remains. Suddenly realizing the depth of her unhappiness, she resolves to abandon the elixir and to let death have its prize. And in that moment she becomes human again, and lovable.

The moral made explicit in The Makropulos Case is implicit in art and literature down the centuries. Poetry, drama, portraiture and music show us that mortality is inextricably woven into the human scheme of things: that our virtues and our loves are the virtues and loves of dying creatures; that everything that leads us to cherish one another, to sacrifice ourselves, to make sublime and heroic gestures, is predicated on the assumption that we are vulnerable and transient, with only a fleeting claim on the things of this world. On such grounds Leon Kass, the American biologist and philosopher, has argued for what he calls the ‘blessings of finitude’ – for the intimate connection between the things that we value, and the fleetingness of life.³

All such reflections are dismissed by the advocates of the posthuman future. Ray Kurzweil, their most vocal spokesman, has predicted the emergence forty years hence of a ‘singularity’, a point at which technology will have advanced so far that human nature will be transcended.⁴ The resulting ‘transhuman’ species will be the product of its own decisions, enjoying powers that no mere human has ever known. Kurzweil himself is an example, ebulliently advancing towards his future enhancement as the Übermensch, his computer-generated avatars sweeping before him into the furthest reaches of cyber-space. In one of Kurzweil’s scenarios the world is saved from self-replicating nano-robots by a computer-screen avatar named Ramona. And Kurzweil registers neither alarm nor discontent at the thought of a world in which man’s future has been bequeathed in this way to his own fictional creations. In that happy time people will be indistinguishable from the information contained in their brains, which could be immortalized in some benign central computer, to be downloaded into whatever cyborg might give it another go.

Huxley’s anticipation of the effects of contraception and genetic engineering was amazingly prescient. But it did not prepare us for the transhumanists, for whom all the unsettling developments of recent technology are advances in s...