Why I'm an Optimist

Is the glass half-full or half-empty? We’ve all heard that it depends on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

But what if the glass is filled just short or just above the half-way mark? In a series of water glass tests, it was found that optimists more frequently over-estimate than pessimists under-estimate the contents. Published research shows that pessimists are more frequently right; they are in better contact with reality.

What is true of perceptions may also be true of predictions. In the short term, at least, pessimists probably make the better judges of what will happen. They seem to make allowances for the unforeseen and unintended consequences of even the best-laid plans.

The twentieth century offers several examples of technological advances that turned out to be too good to be true. Think only of leaded gas and DDT, and the image of the ever-optimistic Charlie Brown running toward the football held by Lucy comes to mind. The ball is pulled away and Charlie is left sprawling on the ground, just as we are left picking up the pieces of promise after promise.

Can you blame pessimists for being cautious about the “blessings” of plastic water bottles or cell phones or biofuels?

Family and friends number me among the pessimists. I’m not offended, and I won’t argue with how they size me up. There is a blind spot in every eye, and we are condemned to act and learn only later the effects of what we have done.

That blind spot, or scotoma, is sometimes self-inflicted in our selfishness. Nothing is more immediate or short term than my own interest.

Sometimes the scotoma is congenital: We are thrown into life and faced with decisions before we understand more than just a tiny bit of who we are and what we should do.

Always the blindness is fed by the sad fact that each of us lives such a short life. Passing on to others what we have learned from our experience is a precarious business. Helpful lessons about the danger of unbridled financial speculation or the horrors of war are forgotten, not by us as we die but by the community we leave behind.

In the short term, then, I have to be a pessimist. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that St. Thomas Aquinas was asked if he was an optimist. He replied that he was, but only in the long run. Remember, as John Maynard Keynes famously said, that in the long term we are all dead. That’s what St. Thomas meant. Or, as Franz Kafka put it: there is hope, but not for us.

Such long-term optimism is not a leap of faith, as if God will save us from our folly. Nor is it a blind bet that someday what we can’t see about the future will somehow turn out well.

No, it is based on something even more demanding than our selfish desires and more insistent than our mistakes. That something is the Eros of the human spirit that is always questioning, always marshalling evidence, always re-evaluating what is important.. Bernard Lonergan put it this way: “As man cannot divest himself of his animality, so he cannot put off the Eros of his mind. To inquire and understand, to reflect and judge, to deliberate and choose, are as much an exigence of human nature as waking and sleeping, eating and drinking, talking and loving.” There is no way to kill the human spirit, no prison that it doesn’t escape.

In the short term, this spirit guarantees that every judgment about what is the case or what should be done will be corrected. In the long term it will still be busy at work. It is as human and as enduring as the scotoma that afflicts our race. It is the reason that H.G. Wells commented that every time he saw an adult on a bicycle, he no longer despaired for the human race.

The ultimate reason for being an optimist is metaphysical. Evil is revealed as evil only against the foil of the good. We are attracted to bad news because our spontaneous expectation is that the world will reflect our own garden of orderly and happy events. Infirmity and death are frightening because they assault our sense of well-being. They require an act of faith in our fundamental hope, breathed into us by parents who cooed to us that everything will be ok, that in the end all will be well.