David Bouchier Essay: Great Expectations

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America more or less invented optimism. It was the inevitable result of creating a new nation out of millions of immigrants, all of whom were by definition optimists. The hope of better things brought them here. Optimism created a culture in which it was almost unpatriotic to be a pessimist or a cynic. The old Broadway musicals said it all: “The sun’ll come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun…” Bur now your bottom dollar has disappeared into some phony hedge fund, and sunshine has proved to be deadlier than nerve gas. Things have changed, and optimism no longer seems appropriate.

It is very much easier to be a pessimist than an optimist. An optimist must fight every minute of the day against the tide of negative events, and predictions of worse to come. A pessimist can just go with the flow. A pessimist is almost never proved wrong, while an optimist is confounded at every turn. I learned this at a young age, when I set my sights on opening a zoo in our back yard. My faith in this project was absolute, my plans were detailed, and I never for a moment doubted that I would fulfill my dream. I could almost smell the rank odors of the wild animals in their cages. After a mighty struggle with my parents I was allowed to keep half a dozen white mice in the shed. The cat ate them. That was the end of optimism for me.

So it is a tribute to something, or someone, or maybe just to the resilient human spirit, that optimism is creeping back, and not just in America. Here in cynical France, and even in Britain, where optimism has been unfashionable ever since the Great Plague of 1665, there is a positive feeling about the future. A lot of hopes are riding on what happens after Inauguration Day tomorrow.

Some of those hopes are unrealistic. A headline in a French newspaper read: “Obama Must Save Africa.” Oh yes, and what must he do for an encore? That’s the trouble with optimism: it’s such a rare and pleasant feeling that it tends to run out of control. So this may be a good moment to recall the difference between passive and active optimism - being saved versus saving ourselves. There’s no salvation by faith in the real world of politics and economics. It’s one of those inconvenient truths that we all have to get involved in making the changes we hope for, or they won’t happen. This message is no more popular than it was when President Kennedy delivered it during his inaugural address in 1961.

It feels right to be in Paris on the eve of this important event. Paris was the heart of the 18^th century movement called The Enlightenment, when philosophers for the first time sketched out the optimistic theory of progress, the novel idea that that we are in control of our own destinies, that became a reality in the American Revolution. As the philosophes saw it the future is not somehow “out there” like fate, waiting to happen. We make it happen by applying reason and intelligence to the wreckage of the past. The result depends on how well or badly we have learned from experience.

Tomorrow is the future, Day One. I would say: good luck to all recovering pessimists everywhere. But luck will have nothing to do with it.

In Paris, This is David Bouchier