Sophie Guiot

Can your critical optimism be an antidote for the widespread cultural pessimism of today?

Pessimism is all around us. It is anchored in nostalgia and has an apocalyptic dread of the future. -- "everything used to be better in the past...." "things are getting worse..." "what's the world coming to?"--

These viewpoints have everything to do with anxiety and stasis.

Pessimistic views are often expressed in a sloganesque way, emptily repeated like a mantra, in order not to feel the pain of living in a changing world. They are a way of not dealing with reality. They express thoughts replacing action.

A better approach is to be critically optimistic, meaning that you embrace the here and now; the reality of the world we live in. This can only be achieved by mourning for what has been lost, suffering that pain in order to get on. In other words, you must deal with a disappearing past, or even an idealised future, so that it does not become an imaginary dwelling. This approach can lead to growth, both at the level of the individual and of society.

If critical optimism (as opposed to naive optimism, with utopia at its heart) can be considered in this way, it can be a mental activity, producing thoughts that lead into action rather than replacing action.