XXXIIOPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM
I am often called an optimist, and so I am; but perhaps not in the popular meaning of the word. When a worldly wise man calls a person an optimist, he usually regards him with intellectual contempt, just as the elaborate courtesy toward women in the age of chivalry thinly disguised a cynically sensual attitude. Optimism is associated in many minds either with ignorance of life or mental inferiority; and when certain persons call others optimists, look out for them!
Thus recent definitions of the optimist illustrate the superior attitude of the pessimist: “An optimist is a fool unfamiliar with the facts.” “An optimist is one who falls out of a fourth-story window, and as he goes by the third story, he says, ‘So far, so good.’” “An optimist is one who at night makes lemonade out of the lemons that have been handed to him all day.” “A pessimist is one who lives with an optimist.”
Now the familiarly unpleasant back-slappingcheerio person, with a genius for the inopportune, is not necessarily an optimist. He is a nuisance. He was well known and dreaded like a pestilence among the ancient Jews. See the Book of Proverbs, 27:14, “He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him,” and 25:29, “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather and as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.”
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A man who attempts to console another by making light of his troubles or by pretending that things are otherwise than what they obviously are will not get very far. One might as well pretend in January that it is June. You cannot get rid of obstacles by ignoring them any more than you can solve problems by forgetting them. Nor can you console sufferers by reminding them of the woes of others or by inopportunely emphasising other things.
If a man slips on an orange peel that some moron has left on the pavement and breaks his leg, you will not help him by saying, “Yesterday a man fell here and broke hisneck.” If a manifold father loses one of his sons by a motor accident, you can’t help him by saying, “Cheer up! You’ve got three sons left.”
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” These terrible words were spoken not by a peevish invalid or by a bankrupt, but by the Light of the World. He always and everywhere recognised the forces of evil and never pretended that life was all sunshine. Religion does not pretend that everything is easy and comfortable, for religion is not meant to fill our minds with illusions but rather with fortitude. Our Lord came into the world to show us how to bear the burden of life cheerfully and bravely; life is not easy, but His yoke is.
A true optimist is one who recognises the sorrows, worries, drawbacks, misfortunes of life, its injustice and inequalities. But while seeing these things, the optimist believes that no matter how strong error may be, truth in the long run will triumph, even though it may not be our truth.
The optimist believes that in the long run virtue has superior staying power as compared with vice; that goodness will eventually defeat evil; that life means something; that character counts; that men and women are of more consequence than sparrows; in short, that this is God’s world and that the moral law is as unshakable as the law of gravitation.
What, then, is a pessimist? A pessimist isone who believes that the evolutionary process is the tragedy of the universe or, as Mark Twain put it, that life is the worst practical joke ever played on man by destiny. That from one primordial cell should have developed all complex forms of life through the vegetable kingdom, through the lower forms of animal existence up to man, is generally regarded as an advance. The true pessimist regards it as an irremediable disaster, as the worst of all possible mistakes. According to him, it would have been better had the evolutionary march stopped with the lower forms of animal life and never reached self-consciousness.
The fish, for example, is better off than men and women. The fish functions perfectly. He does exactly what he was meant to do, he has not the torture of self-conscious thought, no fear of death, and dies at the appointed time. But man has thoughts and dreams and longings that seem to belong to eternal life and eternal development, whereas in reality he dies like the fish; only with all his dreams and longings unsatisfied and with the constant fear and horror of annihilation in a universe where, no matter how sublime or far-reaching his thoughts, he is, in reality, of no more importance than a fish and must in the end share the same fate.
Taking this stiff definition, are there then any genuine pessimists? Certainly there are. Thomas Hardy was exactly such a pessimist. He affirmed in his last volume of poems that man would have been happier if he could have remained at the stage of lower animal development, with no power of thought. Alfred Housman, the great lyrical poet, says we could all be happy, if only we did not think. It is when we think that we are overwhelmed with gloom.
The custom of congratulating others on their birthdays is really an acquiescence in optimism. We instinctively (and I believe rightly) regard life as an asset. But Swift believed that the worst thing that had ever happened to him was being born. He therefore, like the honest man he was, kept his birthdays as days of fasting and mourning. He wore black and refused to eat.
For my part I find daily life not always joyous, but always interesting. I have some sad days and nights, but none that are dull. As I advance deeper into the vale of years, I live with constantly increasing gusto and excitement. I am sure it all means something; in the last analysis, I am an optimist because I believe in God. Those who have no faith are quite naturally pessimists and I do not blame them.