I’d written James Wolcott off already as silly – I mean what can you possibly say about someone who says things like “I will be as civil as I can be with a knife permanently wedged between my teeth“ and leaves you wondering exactly which pattern of Christofle butter knife it might be?
Wolcott says “that this whole business about pessimism versus optimism is, well, silly.” Which is, in fact, silly.
But I forget that as a journalist, he’s probably never been a leader. I have an acquaintance in Big Journalism in New York – her brother is a dear friend of mine, and my sons have been backpacking with her son.
I gather from their experience that the denizens of Gramercy Park don’t lead scout troops, they hire it out. Because had Mr. Wolcott led even a group of Brownies on a hike around Central Park, he’d realize the difference optimism and pessimism have on actually motivating people to get things done.
Here’s what I said once about optimism:
For someone who doesn’t go to church (except once in a while to hear my sweetie sing), I do seem to talk a lot about faith. I do because I believe that on a fundamental level, it is the intangible that really drives people; it is their faith in the future and each other that makes them willing to step up and shoulder burdens, take risks, accept loss, to move out of present comfort into pain in order to move to a future about which we can’t be certain.
…
…some of the critical things I’ve said about Bush; specifically that he hasn’t articulated or sold his plan. I think it is necessary that he do so, because ultimately this war will be won by the side with the stronger faith; we are matching our faith in our vision of the future against our opponents’.
Undue pessimism and unsupported optimism are, in fact the furthest thing from silly. They are dangerous and deadly serious. But as I said, you’d have to live somewhere except Manhattan to understand that.
*Perles is the Christofle pattern from my former wedding
I think that’s not only about motivating people.
A totalitarian regime is usually based in three pillars: fear, corruption and propaganda. In order to keep the totalitarism going it is necessary to frighten the population in some way, sometimes using and external enemy, real or not; and often by some kind of repression.
Optimism, as faith in a better future that must be built, opposes directly against that. It is easier to convince fearful people to adopt totalitarian measures.
Re your statement; ‘ultimately this war will be won by the side with the stronger faith; we are matching our faith in our vision of the future against our opponents.’ Wars on the battle field and any other struggle that can be described as a ‘war’ necessarily has an element of the insane. War is never rational. No one ever wins wars, everyone, including future generations unborn and all who participate, loose.
Ian, so nobody wins a war. I think winning the war against Hitler was a win for our side as against the conditions for millions of people had we just left him alone on that premise.
Ian, the folks in Carthage might take exception to your point, as might the black residents of the Southern states here in the U.S. I could go on…
A.L.
James Wolcott is optimistic about the “effect of hurricanes on humankind”:http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2004/09/an_ignoble_conf.php
A scientist who has spent some time studying the “effects of spite on the natural world”:http://www.short-ton-unit.co.uk/interesting/spite says:
This scientist has spent a lot of time studying parasites and bacterium. Not coincidentally, he seems to have a fairly in-depth understanding of Wolcott
Oh come now. Wolcott’s ode to hurricanes keeps being yanked out of context across the blogosphere.
I find it hard to work myself up into a dudgeon, whether high or low. It’s another version of “It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature!”
There’s also a funny self-mocking subtext of his and humanity’s tendency to — on one rather dreadfully perverse level — love drama. It’s clearly terrible, and we all really do hope and pray that the looming natural disaster will fizzle out somewhere in the Gulf. But why do people adore the Weather Channel when a storm of any kind is brewing? And let’s be honest, from a drama standpoint, it’s a bit anticlimactic if all those reporters huddled on the beach against the blinding rain turn out not to even need a slicker.
You may find his politics excreable. But can’t we find a way to laugh with him please, especially when he’s poking wicked fun at himself first and foremost.
BTW — To each his own. Since I profoundly disagree with A.L.’s take on Norman Podhoretz and WWIV, I found Wolcott’s gleaming knife screamingly funny, and again as self-mocking as anything. IMHO Roger Simon and Podhoretz both richly deserved it. It sent me into a flight of fancy of my own, which I’m sure A.L. would have found in the poorest of taste. OTOH, though I normally despise both the pun and the punster, I must confess Perles before swine made me LOL.
Actually, Nady, I don’t think it was.
My old host for Armed Liberal (http://www.armedliberal.com) is flaky today, but go over sometime and search for “What Bad Philosophy Looks Like”; a post I did on people who found transcendent meaning in the 9/11 disaster, as it “broke the banality” of their daily lives.
I’ll place Wolcott’s take on disasters firmly inthe same line of thought. He’s bored, sated with life, and here’s something to give him some twinge of feeling again. Sadly, thousands have to die for that to happen…but a small price to pay, neh?
A.L.
Oh – I’m trying to avoid WW IV; my break with Podhoretz (and Charles Johnson and Roger Simon) on policy that we’re not there – yet, and so we have a chance to shape events to avoid it.
In my mind that will require a deft mixture of hard and soft power. I actually think we’re doing OK on the hard power while agreeing that we have a long way to go in effectively using the soft.
A.L.
One thing that took me a long time to realize was that whatever you focus on will expand. If you focus on the negative, you will invite more negativity into your life. The same is true if you focus on the positive, you will attract positivity in your life.
Ronald Reagan is the best example of this that I can think of. He was the ultimate optimist and his positive outlook for America trancended to most of America at a time when we needed it most.
The same can be applied to the current state of the Democratic Party. Their pessimistic view of America trancends into groups like MoveOn.org and until this changes, the Democratic Party will keep losing elections because they themselves invite the negativity into their party.
SBD
Ronald Reagan is a good example:
At a time when people were frighten with the possibility of a nuclear war, he attacked psychologically the root of that fear with the SDI program. The aim of the SDI (Star Wars) was not military (as some say remembering the money invested and the lack of results), but mainly psychological, not only in the communist but also in the free world. He forgot about geopolitics and foreign affair advisors and keep pushing that psychowar against the communists. A genius.
Actually, RR’s genuis was flipping the optimism/pessimism on BOTH sides with this move.
Part of the big deal with SDI was the computer angle. The Soviets didn’t have anything even remotely resembling the USA’s computing chops, and saw that gap widening big time. Despite their advanced beam weapon research at Sary-Shagan and ABM radar installation platform near Moscow, they realized that an SDI race would be a computer war for proper command, control and targeting. Many of their electronics were still using vacuum tubes, while the USA was way into the transistor revolution (smaller, cheaper, way more computing power, improving fast, more vulnerable to EMP on the down side).
Throw in the fact that SDI might work, and so neutralize their 20-year build up of ballistic missile superiority since 1962, and they were seriously wigged out.
To compete in the computing field and play this game, the Soviets would have to give many youngsters computers to play with. Even assuming they could solve their need to steal the technology (which they did, sometimes as in complete working fabricators) and solve their chip fabrication quality problems, they had a bigger problem. Sowing lots of computers around would feed Samizdat (forbidden political literature) the biggest steroids boost you can imagine. How could their political system survive that?
You can see why their pessimism, never far from the surface among Russians anyway, ran so deep.
Unless… unless THEY MODIFIED THE SYSTEM ITSELF to make criticism more “normal,” thus heading off the political corrosiveness of more widespread computers.
Result: “Glasnost”.
Result: Loss of ideological will among the Communist Party mafia (which is all it was by then) to kill in order to retain power. Also loss of control over the transformations in the slave states of the Eastern Bloc. Like Spock in the infamous “evil Federation,” trying to be gentler brought the whole repressive edifice down.
It’s fair to argue that communism was brought down by Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II… and Steve Jobs. A solid argument could be made for SDI as the final straw that forced the USSR’s hand, and led to an ultimately fatal set of political changes.
Oh yeah, pessimism can kill, all right. (For excessive optimism, search on “Alcibiades syndrome” from classical Greece.)
A nice corrective to western egocentrism, but it’s really not _all_ about the Iraqis. The Sudanese have suffered as much or more, but no one, enlightened or otherwise, is sending in troops to kill the fascists and enable democracy’s march in Sudan.
Obviously, some nations matter more to us than others. Korea matters more than Timor. Iraq matters more than Somalia. As noble as your sentiments are, realpolitik still matters. As do idealism and democracy promotion. The challenge is to get the balance right, at the right time, in the right places.
The timing will vary– Wolfowitz was right to wait until 1986 to urge Reagan and Shultz to drop Marcos and embrace People Power in the Philippines, for ex.– but one thing should be obvious: the theater that matters most to us this decade and the next and the one after will be the *East Asian* one. Japan is more important to us than France; India’s more important than Germany.
One of the more annoying aspects of the anti-Bush brigade is the obsession with Europe. The axis of history no longer passes through Berlin; it now runs from Washington to Tokyo, Beijing and Delhi. Let’s hope that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice continue to shift this nation’s orientation westward. (Ho.)