PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM: TWO WAYS TO
SEE THE WORLD TODAY
PESSIMISM
In the last few blog posts, I reflected on the idea of
DYING. As we all know, there are many “little deaths” throughout our lives and
we react to them according to our character or beliefs.
Dr. Irvin Yalom, in his book “selections from the Yalom
reader” (Basic Books, 1998), devotes a whole chapter to the notion of Death, Anxiety
and Psychotherapy. When we explore death, he states, we encounter four basic
postulates:
- The fear of death plays a major role in our internal experience; it haunts us as does nothing else; it rumbles continuously under the surface; it is a ‘dark ’unsettling presence at the rim of consciousness
- The child, at an early age, is pervasively preoccupied with death, and his or her major developmental task is to deal with terrifying fears of obliteration.
- To cope with these fears, we erect defences against death awareness, defences that are based on denial (as learned from parents) and that shape our character structure and that, if maladaptive, result in clinical syndromes. In other words, psychopathology is the result of ineffective modes of death transcendence.
- Lastly, a robust and effective approach to psychopathology may be constructed on death awareness.
My own reflections on
death awareness was noted in the past blog post describing how different
cultures understand and teach death awareness. Here the conclusion emerged is that
most, if not all, cultures explain that: a) Life and death are interdependent;
they exist simultaneously, not consecutively; death whirls continuously beneath
the life’s consciousness and exerts a vast influence upon our experience and a
constant as we go on living. b) Death is a primordial source of anxiety and as
such, is the primary cause of psychopathology.
My own personal reflections on the reality of death is that we all may
choose to practice Death Awareness from a positive or optimistic perspective or
from a negative or pessimistic one. Like Dr. Yalom stated: Most people live
with anxiety regarding death. To move from the anxiety (pessimistic notion) we
need to develop exercises that will give us support with the positive or
optimistic death awareness.
For example: The Sufi have a concept of ADAB. It refers to
the idea of a “good and positive” attitude to life. The importance to acting beautifully.
It is developing an inner sense of genuine respect and service to all. This
must be in place in order to reflect our inner beauty that is based on LOVE.
Another
example, from the Buddhist tradition is the compassionate contact with the process
of dying. Paul Lansburg states that: “We have constituted an “us” with the
dying person. And it is “us”; it is through this specific power of this new and
utterly personal contact that we are led toward the living awareness of our own
having to die”.
Another way to work at death awareness is to examine the daily
news media. How the media describes the “death: of a culture” (by wars); the
slow death of a nation-state (you name one); the fall of a leader 'on his own sword' and so on. We
need to pay attention to optimistic writers and news reporters and seek them out,
so we can develop a balance between the optimistic view and the pessimistic one.
“Pessimism can be a
self-fulfilling prophecy. By believing that the world is getting worse,
Pessimism may even answer to our spiritual needs”.
“Enlightenment Now: The Case for
Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress", by Steven Pinker
OPTIMISM
In the book “Enlightenment Now,” Pinker hopes to return us
to reality. During five hundred pages, he presents statistics and charts
showing that, despite our dark imaginings, life has been getting better in
pretty much every way. Around the globe, improved health care has dramatically
reduced infant and maternal mortality, and children are now better fed, better
educated, and less abused. Workers make more money, are injured less
frequently, and retire earlier. In the United States, fewer people are poor,
while elsewhere in the world, and especially in Asia, billions fewer live in
extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than a dollar and ninety cents
per day. Statistics show that the world is growing less polluted and has more
parks and protected wilderness. “Carbon intensity”- the amount of carbon
released per dollar of G.D.P.- has also been falling almost everywhere, a sign
that we may be capable of addressing our two biggest challenges, poverty and
climate change, simultaneously.
Pinker’s message is simple: progress is real, meaningful,
and widespread. The mystery is why we have so much trouble acknowledging it.
Pinker mentions various sources of pessimism - the “progress phobia” of
liberal-arts professors, for instance - but directs most of his opprobrium toward
the news media, which focus almost
entirely on of-the-moment crises and systematically underreport positive,
long-term trends. (Citing the German economist Max Roser, Pinker argues that a
truly even-handed newspaper “could have run the headline number of
people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000 since yesterday every day
for the last twenty-five years.”) He consults the work of Kalev Leetaru, a data
scientist who uses “sentiment mining,” a word-analysis technique, to track the
mood of the news; Leetaru finds that, globally, journalism has grown
substantially more negative.
The power of bad news is magnified, Pinker writes, by a
mental habit that psychologists call the “availability heuristic”: because
people tend to estimate the probability of an event by means of “the ease with
which instances come to mind,” they get the impression that mass shootings are
more common than medical breakthroughs. We’re also guilty of “the sin of
ingratitude.” We like to complain, and we don’t know much about the heroic
problem-solvers of the past. “How much thought have you given lately to Karl
Landsteiner?” Pinker asks. “Karl who? He only saved a billion lives by his
discovery of blood groups.” This is also written in Yalom’s Death Anxiety article
as stated early.
SUMMARY
The set - point theory of happiness:
Many psychologists now subscribe to the “set point” theory
of happiness, according to which mood is, to some extent, homeostatic: at
first, our new cars, houses, or jobs make us happy, but eventually we adapt to
them, returning to our “set points” and ending up roughly as happy or unhappy
as we were before. Researchers say that we run on “hedonic treadmills”- we chase
new sources of happiness as the old ones expire - and that our set points are
largely immovable and determined by disposition. Some fundamental changes can
affect our happiness in a lasting way - getting married, immigrating to a wealthy
country, developing a drug addiction - but many life improvements are impermanent
in character. Although food quality may have been worse in 1967, the pleasure
of today’s better meals is intrinsically fleeting. More people survive heart
attacks than in the past, but the relief of surviving wears off as one returns
to the daily grind.
Anxiety story:
“A Bedouin was
travelling through the desert, carrying a filled skin of water over his
shoulder and weeping bitterly. When another traveller asked him why he was
crying, the man replied that his dog was suffering terribly from thirst. The
traveller asked why he didn’t give the dog a drink from his water skin, and the
Bedouin said: “I couldn’t do that. I might need this water for myself”.
A Sufi story
