Optimism, our Achilles heel
Monday August 6, 2007
Categories: Culture
A reader writes: Good post on Ignatieff. The problem, though, is that optimism has become a sine qua non of a political career in the US today. For me, that has been the most instructive thing about the Democrats' You...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Totally agree on your reader's comment about optimism. This seems to be the true American faith of today -- the sense that ultimately, failure is impossible. It's bigger than just the immigration debate, too -- it goes to global warming, the economy, and Iraq.
On Iraq, the Prez keeps making a point of his optimism, as if somehow that makes success certain.
Isn't it the opposite? Does the lack of a tragic sense make failure all the more likely?
Sunday's Mass readings had a lot to say about luxury being more ruthless than war . . . or at least as pointless and capricious.
Meanwhile, on the optimism front . . . how about this one? Gen. Petraeus is The Man. He'll make an objective, intelligent and fair assessment on whether the "surge" is working.
Oh, really???
Funny what I read from the Washington Post just now . . . .
http://revolution-21.blogspot.com/2007/08/who-is-supplying-insurgents-with.html
OK . . . LET ME FIX THAT FIRST LINK:
Sunday's Mass readings had a lot to say about luxury being more ruthless than war . . . or at least as pointless and capricious.
Meanwhile, on the optimism front . . . how about this one? Gen. Petraeus is The Man. He'll make an objective, intelligent and fair assessment on whether the "surge" is working.
Oh, really???
Funny what I read from the Washington Post just now . . . .
http://revolution-21.blogspot.com/2007/08/who-is-supplying-insurgents-with.html
Truth is dead. I seem to be on an over-simplification kick lately, but those three words say it all for me.
No politician wants to be the first to be right about something bad. No politician wants an electorate focused on negative things taking place, especially when those things are bad right now. As a talking point, and assuredly as a weapon against a campaign opponents, negativity is "acceptable"... but it is taboo in a debate.
The vast majority of our fellow citizens bear full responsibility for letting this come to pass. They reward optimism and punish pessimism; they overlook the mistakes of optimists, and ignore when pessimists turn out to be right.
We are getting the leaders we are asking for.
"...conservative anger over immigration is never going to amount to much, because the conservative base, in the end, will not put up with the costs to the consumer economy that enacting their prescriptions on immigration would inflict."
Yuppies do like their cheap goods and services (who doesn't?). But one shouldn't, as libertarians often do, exaggerate the costs of a sane immigration policy. As you've pointed out labor is a small part of the cost of most agricultural products. Karl Rove believes that American conservatives will trade culture and sovereignty for cheaper lettuce and a five-grand savings on their swimming pool. Some will. But the costs of defacto open borders (crime, schools, healthcare) have been hidden to most for some time. That seems to be changing.
And we shouldn't see this exclusively in terms of economics. The Cold War had no economic upside for the average American. We accepted increased defense spending becaused we believed we were right and the fight was necessary. The militant marches on "Latino Solidarity Day" showed, via the web, an angry challenge to America ("This is not your country, gringo!"), complete with Mexican flags and threats to "out-breed the white man." This kind of thing makes an impact on Americans, as is shown by conservative's increasing dismay with Bush and co.
We no longer live in a country where the media can white-wash the open-borders movement by filming Latino children at demonstrations while ignoring the threats and intimidation from the movement's leaders.
Then again, perhaps I'm being too optimistic.
Politicians do feel they have to project optimism. Why is this? They do it to appeal to the undecided vote. The undecided are the people who decide most elections. They are the uninformed element of the electorate and vote with feelings about candidates rather a concise view of what they want of an elected official. The banal nature of campaigning tries to appeal to the optimism of the undecideds, and this element of politics is very cynical.
Bush does seem unusually optimistic, and his vision of free government spreading all over the world was extremely naive. One problem with this upcoming election is that we are not able to view the political scene optimistically. This is causing much confusion in the electoral process. We are seeing the candidates warts and all, and even the knuckleheads can see trouble coming in the future.
Boy, I wish FDR had been gloomier during the Great Depression. That would have helped. And with that Malaise speech (which actually had a lot of accurate substance that should have been articulated in a different way), well, bless his heart, Mr. Misery Index didn't suffer from excessive optimism. And Reagan: yep, he should have listened to the experts like Schlesinger who said the Soviet system was in pretty robust health and that those who predicted its collapse any time soon were engaged in wishful thinking.
I certainly agree that there are dangers present in excessive optimism. (The current administration has made some terrible decisions based on wishful thinking.) But don't underestimate the positive effects of politicians publicly expressing optimism. Perhaps the ideal is the politician who can be coldly realistic internally, and make decisions on that basis, while knowing when it will actually help the substance of things to project a particularly sunny public outlook.
James Poulos wonderfully criticizes the tendency to blame our current difficulties on optimism here. A must-read.
Scurvy, there's a difference between optimism and hope. Hope is the Christian virtue that embodies confidence that all things have meaning, and ultimately work to the good, even if we, in our limited circumstances, cannot know what that good is. Optimism, as Poulos points out in his great post, is an emotional condition that believes everything's going to turn out right because, as President Bush said while predicting ultimate victory in Iraq, "it has to."
I think it must be a real gift to be able to offer hope to people while being thoroughly realistic. Churchill had that gift when he told the British people that he had nothing to offer them but "blood, toil, tears and sweat." People could trust him, because they knew he wasn't b.s.'ing them. When leaders offer unwarranted optimism instead of hope, they inspire false idealism, and in turn cynicism.
Rod, I quite agree on the difference between optimism and hope, and I like the way Poulos describes hope.
I'm trying to make a narrow first point: a leader's convincing public expression of optimism can have nuts & bolts utility, because the way people feel affects how they behave. (We care enough about consumer confidence to have an index for it, for example.) Hoover said something pretty similar to "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." Few people remember exactly what it was he said, because he was, well, Herbert Hoover. FDR's upbeat manner changed the lay of the land materially.
And under the circumstances at that time, Reagan did well to say: "We're blessed with the opportunity to stand for something - for liberty and freedom and fairness - and these are things worth fighting for, worth devoting our lives to. And we have good reason to be hopeful and optimistic. We've made much progress already. So let us go forth with good cheer and stout hearts, happy warriors out to seize back a country and a world to freedom."
Now to my broader second point: I'll admit that even I cringe a bit in reading those lines right now. But if those stirring words appealed to you once -- and I believe they did -- I'm betting they will again. So my contrarian urging is that we be careful not to indulge too much in a doom and gloom fest as a result of current circumstances. I wonder sometimes if Larison has a fainting couch next to his computer. :)
"Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man . . . "
Luxury is more ruthless than war.
I just wanted to see that in bold. Amen, brother.
Politicians have no choice but to sound optimistic. It's the only way they can get pass the mute button.
Poor Jimmy Carter was the last president who had the luxury of being able to command a mass audience with an address, and as we all know he blew it. Ever since, there have more and more alternatives for the public and no one is trapped in front of a television with only three channels and all of them showing the same thing any more. Even if all the cable and satellite channels were to show the same political garbage at the same time, there is nothing to stop people from popping in a video or turning on the game console.
If you send a message to people that they do not want to hear, they can simply tune it out and there is no way around that.
The older I get, the more skeptical I am of any political or social program that attempts to "remake the world." I think we could do with a few more counterrevolutionaries, since it seems to me that terror inevitably follows all "revolutionary action."
Iraq would be a good example. I think one of the qualities of the Bush Administration that has made it so unpopular around the world is the Administration's arrogance in believing it could remake the Middle East, an arrogance that was not only presumptuous but also deeply naive. I'm not a pacifist, but I think we should be a lot more conservative and pessimistic when we consider intervening in the affairs of foreign nations.
It seems to me that the people seek for optimism in their leaders, who will tell them what they want to hear, because they do not want to bother with restraining or disciplining themselves for the sake of a greater good. Thus, politics becomes largely about protecting one's own private enjoyments, which is how both the left and the right understand freedom. Both now seek largely to protect the lack of restrictions they currently enjoy, rather than to gird themselves to address the daunting problems confronting not only our society but also the whole world. Our lack of restraint is provoking jihadists from one side and angering the global poor who must shoulder the burden of climate change on the other. It's interesting to think that after 9-11, we could have chosen to undertake severe austerity measures to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but the nation decided it was less burdensome and more cost effective to fight an unnecessary war in Iraq.
Peter Paik's comment is excellent. Thanks.
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