‘The Uses of Pessimism’ Rails Against the Blind Optimism of Modernity
A review of ‘The Uses of Pessimism’, by Roger Scruton (Atlantic Books, 2010).
I suppose that Roger Scruton was writing his book at a time when people were more cheerful, since the blind optimism against which he rails hardly seems commonplace today. I even wrote something about pessimism for the Independent at one point, though I can’t say I stand by much of it. In any case, Roger thinks we all ought to cultivate a bit more pessimism, since optimistic thinking, at least at the level of society, causes a problem or two.
But let me be more specific. For Roger, unchecked optimism leads to bad decisions, unrealistic expectations and – most grave of all – failing to plan for the worst. This is in part why the financial crash took place, why the natural world is in such a bad way, and why governments spend more money than they have. These, Roger says, are the products of evolution. For most of our history, life was rather precarious and emergency solutions were called for. But this tendency is poorly suited for modernity.
For Roger, unchecked optimism leads to bad decisions, unrealistic expectations and – most grave of all – failing to plan for the worst.
He singles out specific ‘fallacies of optimism,’ such as the ‘best-case fallacy’, which is the habit of assuming the best will happen without preparing for the worse. He blames the ‘born-free fallacy’ – the belief that the state of nature is a lovely, uncorrupted place – for failures in the British education system and some of the more curious declarations of Laing and Foucault. The ‘zero-sum fallacy’ describes black-and-white thinking, such as that American imperialism is exclusively to blame for poverty in countries like Zimbabwe, despite the corruption of Mugabe.
All this is very small-c conservative of him, since conservatism emerged in response to Enlightenment-age classical liberalism, which was relentlessly optimistic in its presentation of what humans could achieve through reason, science and free enterprise. In fact in Eamonn Butler’s primer to classical liberalism, published by the free-market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, the author explicitly describes classical liberalism as an ‘optimistic’ political philosophy.
For Roger, it is better to muddle through, accepting compromise and half-measures, mindful that no ultimate solutions, such as those offered by radicals and utopians, are available. He champions ‘a community without convictions’, marked by a spirit of irony and forgiveness, which sounds at once both quite nice and incredibly vague.
For Roger, it is better to muddle through, accepting compromise and half-measures.
Roger’s problem, as always if you read his stuff, is stopping his little spasms of bitterness from creeping into his writing. By all accounts (from those, at any rate, that do not have a political bone to pick with Roger Scruton, of which there are many) he was a decent human being, even if he was into fox hunting, which I cannot abide. But he does have a habit of railing almost apropros of nothing against various products of modernity, from pop music to women’s studies. And whatever you think of pop music and women’s studies, resentment doesn’t make for great writing, Gore Vidal’s work being the only possible exception.
I still like The Uses of Pessimism, though. Roger writes very elegant prose, and he is a genuinely democratic sort of writer: always trying, like Orwell, to make himself clear and easily understood by all. Of course, blind optimism is silly (and, according to Iain McGilchrist, a feature of left-hemisphere thinking) and a bit of scepticism is healthy. But people on the right wing are just as prone to optimism as people on the left (Boris, Matt Hancock) which is not something Roger Scruton wants to talk about much in this book.