Pessimism

A pessimist is a person who sees the worst aspect of things or believes that the worst will happen.  A pessimist has no hope or confidence in the present or in the future.  I’m trying my damnedest not to be one!

History helps a little bit.  It was only 80 years or so ago that Hitler was at the top of the world, or thought he was.  “Children in German schools,” wrote Harry Emerson Fosdick, “were using textbooks with statements in them like this:  ‘The teaching of mercy and love of one’s neighbor is foreign to the German race, and the Sermon on the Mount is, according to Nordic sentiment, an ethic for cowards and idiots.”  Hitler didn’t last.  When I read history, Victor Hugo’s remark echoes through it.  Hugo wrote that Napoleon fell and ended up on St. Helena because he “bothered God.”  I feel deep in my bones that what we are experiencing now in our America is not the last word.  I think what is happening now “bothers God.” The Hitlers and Napoleons  and their ilk—even the Coronavirus--are not history’s final word.

“I dare you,” wrote Fosdick, to be a pessimist.  You are troubled by discouragement.  I dare you to stop playing around the fringes of it and to plunge deep into it.  Stop trying to be hopeful.  Accept pessimism, lock, stock, and barrel, and make a creed of it.  Believe that all ideals are delusions, all hopes mirages, that any progress in the past was only accidental….Agree that we have reached dead-end…that dictatorships have the democracies of the world on the run because democracy is essentially unworkable, that goodwill is all fantasy…If you are going to be a pessimist, try being a real one; make disenchantment your final word and futility your creed.  You can’t do it.  At once arguments on the other side begin shouting, and will not be silenced.” We are living in a tough time, but hope abides because hope has carried us through other times.  Deep in us all is the faith that this hope will make things better.

“Easygoing optimism,” said Fosdick, “is silly; thoroughgoing pessimism is fatal; what we need is intelligence, faith, goodwill, courage.”  God is bothered by what is happening just as we are bothered by it.  The present situation (as bad as it is and getting worse day by day) is not the end of the story.  The present situation should not weaken  or rob us of our intelligence, our faith, our goodwill and courage.  It should, rather, call it forth.  To lose that intelligence, that faith, that hope, and not be “bothered” by what is going on is fatal.  Keep the faith.  This moment is not history’s final word.    

What do you see?