Sherry Chandler

As a follow-up to my own defense of pessimism, I would draw your attention to this L.A. Times op-ed, Oh, to Be a Country of Pessimists Again, by Joshua Foa Dienstag that I found by way of Globalclashes. Dienstag, you may recall, has a new book out called Pessimism that was the subject of a NYTimes op-ed last week. In the L.A. Times piece, Dienstag says in part:

Republicans hardly have a monopoly on the tendency toward optimism. Americans of all stripes tend to treat pessimism as if it were a psychological impairment or rare tropical illness that inexplicably befalls others. …But Bush’s verbal fumbling on a question about the Iraq war indicates that there are some situations — unfortunately, very common ones — for which the language of optimism is not helpful.

…It is sometimes claimed that pessimism retards political action, that one must somehow be an optimist in order to get out of bed in the morning. This is not only silly but dangerous. If one looks at the writings of, say, Albert Camus or Vaclav Havel, both philosophers who also were active in resistance against tyranny, it’s easy to see that they had no expectations their actions would defeat what seemed like an overwhelming foe. They were as surprised as anyone when the regimes they opposed collapsed. They acted not out of optimism but out of a sense that opposing dictatorship was the only decent thing to do, the only way to live with dignity in dark times.

Much has been made, one way and another, of the fact that George W. Bush claims to have been reading Camus this summer. Does this, along with his fumbled statement that “these are not joyful times,” indicate that he may in fact be seeking a way to do the decent thing, to live with dignity?

I doubt it. I think he’s just trying to look smart. And possibly associate himself with the Algerian resistance. But Bush’s instincts are those of the tyrant. He strikes me as more like the characters in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We — able to read “three Shakespeares” without being in any way changed by them.

I will give Dienstag the last word:

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.