When Robinson Crusoe is coming to terms with being shipwrecked,
and swinging between the will to survive and the temptation to crumple
in despair, he decides to let reason be the judge. He made two lists of
the good/bad, encouraging/discouraging aspects of his situation – just
the facts as he sees them without trying to load them with emotion –
and came to the logical conclusion that he should be grateful to be alive,
was not in immediate danger and well supplied with all the provisions he
needed to sustain him until he was rescued.
Optimism is almost certainly good for your health, although it is
difficult to prove the link. It makes sense that a positive outlook has a
physical effect on your cells and boosts your immune system. If nothing
else, it motivates you to go out and get exercise or to eat well.
Optimism is good for the world too. You could say, we have no other
option. 'What right do we have to be so pessimistic, and blind, and not
moving, when people are dying on our watch?' asked the economist
Jeffrey Sachs in a Reith lecture: 'Cynicism is our worst enemy today. We
must build on our successes, not feed our doubts. If we believe that war
is inevitable we will end up at war. If we believe that extreme poverty
can't be solved we will end up letting millions and millions of people die.'
Optimism is the quality of the activist, the campaigner, the instigator
of co-operation or innovative solutions. As a disposition towards
co-operation, compromise, construction, changing an enemy through
force of argument rather than force of arms, it offers an alternative
to the politics of division, confrontation, complacency, exploitation and
short-termism.
The first step towards resolving any problem is believing that it can
be solved in a 'positive sum game' in which everyone involves wins. The
second is to expect to solve it and the third is to do something about it.
This requires that you motivate yourself to overcome any obstacles that
get in the way of a solution.
At the same time, it is important not to be tempted to delegate our
optimism to someone else or something else. To believe that we can
trust science to fix everything that troubles us – climate change, human
mortality and such – is to take a step away from taking responsibility for
our own thoughts and actions.
We must always bring ourselves back to the here and now and be
neither wildly fanciful nor depressingly doom-laden.
Optimists
cope better
with suffering
– they have an
innate will to
make the best
of the situation
and know that
despair serves
no useful
purpose. If you
have to live
with pain or
struggle with
depression,
optimism is
really your only
option.
A few years ago, the editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, pointed out
the difference between hope and its opposite: 'As Rabbi Zalman
Schacter-Shalomi once said, "There is more good than evil in the
world-but not by much." Unexpectedly "not much" is all that is needed
when you have the power of compound interest at work – which is what
culture is. The world needs to be only 1% (or even one-tenth of 1%)
better day in and day out to accumulate civilisation.'
This 'positive margin' is all we need to do great things in the world
on a personal or global level. We have good reason to hope or expect
that intelligence will win out over stupidity; empathy over selfishness;
and communal courage over ostrich mentality. Maybe not by much, but
enough. And that is all you need. O
ODYSSEY 37
•
DIGIMAG