Cultures of Optimism

The Institutional Promotion of Hope

Oliver Bennett

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137484802
• eBook ISBN: 9781137484819
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What are the functions of optimism in modern societies? How is hope culturally transmitted? What values and attitudes does it reflect? This book explores how and why powerful institutions propagate 'cultures of optimism' in different domains, such as politics, work, the family, religion and psychotherapy.

1

The Optimism Imperative

Introduction

In a letter to the Swiss theologian, Elie Bertrand, in February 1756, the French writer and philosopher, Voltaire, described optimism as ‘a counsel of despair, a cruel philosophy with a consoling name’.¹ He was not using the term in the sense to which we are now accustomed, that is, to denote a psychological attitude, but in the sense of optimism as a philosophical position. This had been first expounded by the German philosopher, Gottfried Leibnitz, who had argued that we inhabited the best of all possible worlds because God, being all-powerful and all-knowing, was incapable of creating anything less.² This was the doctrine that Voltaire satirised in Candide, which he wrote two years after his letter to Bertrand, creating in Dr Pangloss a figure that would forever stand as a convenient referent for mindless optimism.³

An alternative idea of optimism emerged out of the Enlightenment, which, in contrast to the acquiescence in suffering implied by Leibnitz and parodied in Candide, denoted a vision of the future in which human beings actively created a better world.⁴ There was a heroic quality to this kind of optimism, with which Voltaire himself was associated and which, in the twentieth century, was popularised by the Italian political theorist, Antonio Gramsci, with his ‘optimism of the will’ that could persist in the face of ‘pessimism of the intellect’.⁵ Leibniz’s optimism, on the other hand, was a religiously-inspired optimism of faith, through which God’s will was seen to be benevolently working its way out in the world. This form of optimism can still be found in some contemporary Christian teaching⁶ and secularised traces of it can arguably also be seen in the expectation produced by optimistic dispositions that good things rather than bad will generally happen.

During much of the twentieth century, however, Enlightenment optimism, closely associated with the idea of indefinite human progress, was eclipsed by the pervasive ‘pessimism of the intellect’ displayed by so many leading writers, artists and intellectuals of the time. Such pessimism was not in itself new and, indeed, the optimism of the Enlightenment could arguably be seen to offer no more than a brief interlude within the predominantly pessimistic register of Western intellectual history.⁷ Even by the nineteenth century, this optimism had come under attack, with those such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche asserting that the forces of reason were no match for the destructive power of basic human desires. But it was during the twentieth century, described by the historian, Isaiah Berlin, as ‘the most terrible century in Western history’,⁸ that the optimism of the Enlightenment came to be most comprehensively dismantled.

Sociology played its part in this process, with Max Weber, and, later, the Frankfurt School, proving particularly influential in their accounts of the development of an ‘instrumental rationality’ that reduced human beings to depersonalised, administrative units. But sociology formed only one tributary of a much broader literature of pessimism that accumulated over the century. For example, a significant proportion of early- to mid-century artistic and literary modernism represented a view of history that could only be described as catastrophic. From the Berlin Dadaists to the Surrealists in Paris, from Eliot’s Wasteland to Kafka’s Trial, from the dystopias of Huxley and Orwell to the bleak landscapes of Samuel Beckett, writers and artists repeatedly denounced or despaired of the societies they inhabited. Their denunciations were delivered from radically differing positions and, politically, they could be seen to divide in extreme and polarised ways; but they shared a profound disillusion with the kind of world that philosophies of progress had bequeathed.

In the postmodern period, from the 1960s on, narratives of decline proliferated further, to the extent that they collectively represented a pessimism that could justifiably be described as ‘cultural’. Such narratives could be found – and this is by no means exhaustive – in fields that included ecology, human rights, military history, international relations, criminology, history of science, cultural criticism and political economy.⁹ In his magisterial account of counter-Enlightenment thinking, Enemies of Hope, Raymond Tallis charted in meticulous detail ‘the process by which contemporary humanity [was] talking itself into a terminal state of despair, self-disgust and impotence’.¹⁰

From time to time, this pessimism was explicitly challenged – amongst others, by the American historian, Francis Fukuyama,¹¹ by sporadic interventions from newspaper columnists¹² and, most comprehensively, by Raymond Tallis himself, as mentioned above. However, as Tallis caustically pointed out, pessimism had not only become deeply embedded in the practice of cultural criticism, but it had also to some extent become a mark of moral and intellectual seriousness.¹³ Cultural optimists, on the other hand, were often portrayed as shallow apologists for human suffering, ridiculed for their Pollyanna-ish naivety or condemned for their complicity.¹⁴

It is not the purpose of this book to evaluate the extent to which the claims of Enlightenment optimism may or may not be superior to those of counter-Enlightenment pessimism (or vice-versa). This debate has been well-rehearsed and, in any case, must always be as inconclusive as the future is uncertain. What the book does suggest, though, regardless of how endemic a pessimism of the intellect may have become, is that it co-exists with a kind of ‘optimism of everyday life’, which performs very significant functions for both the individual and the collective. Indeed, the functions that it performs seem so important that it is difficult to see how modern societies would be able to sustain themselves without it. But before getting on to this, it is necessary first of all to explore in further detail what might be said to constitute an ‘optimism of everyday life’, the extent to which it manifests itself in the human population and how it can be measured.

The optimism of everyday life

In modern usage, optimism denotes a tendency to hold positive expectations of the future. It can be seen as a stronger version of hope, with which it is often used interchangeably.¹⁵ The older idea of optimism, as a philosophical position, has now largely fallen out of use, although the two concepts are clearly not unrelated. However, in the discussion that follows, I shall largely be focusing on optimism in its modern sense, defined by the anthropologist, Lionel Tiger, as ‘a mood or attitude associated with an expectation about the social or material future’.¹⁶

This reference to mood usefully reminds us that optimism is not just a matter of ‘cold cognition’, to use Christopher Peterson’s phrase, but that it carries with it a strong emotional charge.¹⁷ In other words, the specific future imagined is not neutral but inextricably bound up with desirability, values and affect. Optimism also expresses probability – the belief that the anticipated future is more likely than not to materialise. Whilst such assessments of probability may perhaps involve ‘cold cognition’, even here, desirability can get mixed up with expectation, and expectations can end up reflecting as much what is desired as what is probable.

If optimism is an implicit expression of values and desires, it follows that it can have no single or absolute content, but will always be relative to the values and desires it expresses. Of course, there may be broad future scenarios, which most people would agree were desirable (for example, that planet Earth remained a hospitable environment for the human species), but desirable futures are as variable as values and will be constructed in different, and often conflicting, ways. One person’s optimism can be another’s pessimism.

The content of optimism can also be distinguished by its ambition or reach. Lionel Tiger offers a distinction between ‘big optimism’ and ‘little optimism’¹⁸ – the former expressing an attitude towards large matters, such as the condition of an economy or the outcome of a political struggle; the latter, an expression of more personal hopes, such as finding work or recovering from an illness. This might also be characterised as a distinction between an optimism looking outwards, to conditions in the external world, and an optimism looking inwards, to conditions in one’s own life. The two, of course, are not unrelated and, in some cultures, less unrelated than in others. Nevertheless, the respective scales of these optimisms are significantly different.

Given all these variables, it might be objected that an ‘optimism of everyday life’, as a general category, would denote so many incommensurate expectations of the future that its function could not be analysed with any degree of precision. However, if we draw a distinction between optimism as an attitude of mind, involving both cognition and affect, and the specific futures that are actually imagined, then it becomes possible to consider optimism as a particular mode of viewing the future, whose function can be considered separately from the variety of its expressions; in other words, a separation of form from content.

Take, for example, the ‘big’ neo-Enlightenment optimism that expresses an attitude towards progress and the general advancement of humanity, and contrast it to the countless ‘little’ optimisms that infuse most peoples’ lives. On the face of it, these might appear to have nothing in common – the former, an intellectual optimism, projected on to a large canvas; the latter, simply the expression of personal hopes and desires. Yet, what they share is an attitude towards an uncertain future, which can only be imagined; and how this future is imagined, whether on a large or small canvas, will at some level be inflected by a tendency – or disposition – towards optimism or pessimism.

Of course, it might be objected that, in the case of ‘big’ optimism, such inflections are neutralised by the cognitive rigours of intellectual or academic discipline; or, indeed, that it is not so much disposition that inflects cognition, but the other way round. These are important objections, which caution against too simplistic a model. Nevertheless, cognition, disposition and affect are intricately bound up with one another and, even if we allow that disposition can be moderated by cognition, the distinction between optimism as form and optimism as content can still be maintained.¹⁹

If the ‘form’ of optimism can be thus identified, the next task is to consider how its incidence might be established and the extent to which it can be found within the human population. Some preliminary conclusions on this can tentatively be drawn from studies in social psychology that have been conducted over the last thirty years or so and which have led to the foundation of the ‘positive psychology’ movement.²⁰ In brief, this movement arose in reaction to what its founders perceived as an almost exclusive preoccupation with psychological damage, which they believed had, at least until relatively recently, characterised the development of psychology, and clinical psychology in particular, since the 1950s. Two key figures in this movement, Martin Seligman and Mihali Csikszentmihalyi, observed that the science of psychology had largely concentrated on ‘repairing damage within a disease model of human functioning’.²¹

Yet, this focus was seen to be at odds with how most people around the world experienced their lives. Despite the evidence of a growing incidence of depression worldwide,²² studies had consistently shown that the majority of people in most places reported that they were satisfied with their lives, even under very challenging conditions.²³ This, of course, was not to condone such conditions – even less to avert attention from the manifest injustices in the world – but to note only the widespread capacity of human beings to experience satisfactory lives and subjective well-being under adverse circumstances. In their 2005 review of the positive psychology movement, Shelly Gable and Jonathan Haidt argued that ‘most people are doing well’ and that psychologists had tended ‘to overlook the greater part of human experience and the majority of people, families, groups, and institutions’.²⁴ Positive psychology therefore saw itself as attempting to correct this imbalance, by revisiting the ‘average person’ and investigating the mechanisms that enabled the majority of people to function as well as they did. Psychology might thus acquire a more balanced and textured understanding of human experience, which could also yield new clinical applications.

Studies in optimism have featured prominently in the development of this movement. For example, Martin Seligman shifted his attention to the function and promotion of optimism after years of studying the relationship between pessimism and depression. Seligman’s key discovery, which was consistently supported by subsequent research, was that an optimistic outlook played a crucial role in enabling people to sustain positive views of their life experiences and prospects across a broad range of contexts.²⁵ As another group of leading researchers in the field put it, optimists ‘are less distressed when times are tough, they cope in ways that foster better outcomes for themselves and are more positive in their responses to adversity’.²⁶ These findings all suggested that the widespread inci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Optimism Imperative
• 2 Optimistic Democracy: The Politics of Hope
• 3 Optimism at Work: Human Resource Management
• 4 Great Expectations: Parenting, Optimism and the Child
• 5 Models of Salvation: Religion, Eschatology and Hope
• 6 Optimism and the Self: From Mind-Cure to Psychotherapy
• 7 Culture(s) of Optimism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index