Archive for the ‘optimism’ tag
John Steinbeck #
I was rather taken by Robert Gottlieb’s critique of John Steinbeck’s oeuvre. Though he’s been largely discarded by literary types, he’s probably the twentieth-century author who I’ve read most. (Though that more a sign of how little reading I’ve done than of how much Steinbeck I’ve read.)
Steinbeck’s final work years were spent on journalism, and his subject was almost inevitably America. A collection of think pieces and nostalgia called America and Americans (1966) reveals him at his most characteristic. He’s moralizing, he’s didactic, he’s searching for big answers to big questions. He’s generous and vulnerable and touchy. And he’s more and more dismayed by what he sees around him: “I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security—out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism.” You could say that by the end he had evolved into a kind of minor and irrelevant prophet, both disillusioned and irredeemably optimistic.
It’s not so bad. Really. #
Making a case similar to Mr. Brilliant’s, The Economist argues that the situation in the world’s better than most think, and still improving.
Indeed, for a great many people the way things are is pretty rotten: Burmese monks, for instance, or the Luo in Kenya. Life is not too bright for investors at the moment, either. But is the broader proposition true? Is the world really becoming worse for the majority of mankind? We argue that it is not.
To some extent, our qualified optimism is borne out by impartial data. In this article we look at three pieces of evidence: the underlying social conditions in poor countries; poverty alleviation over the past decade; and the incidence of wars and political violence. By those measures the world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realise.
The Case for Informed Optimism #
Larry Brilliant, the director of Google.org, makes an interesting case for informed optimism. Rather than arguing that optimism comes straight from ignorance — a silly but too common notion — he argues that looking at all that we’ve done gives a good guide to all that we’ll eventually do.