A Plague of Optimists

The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope, by Roger Scruton; Atlantic Books, 2010, 232 pages, £15.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

—Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

Roger Scruton’s optimists and pessimists are not what one might expect. He is not talking about the optimist who looks at a problem and says, “We can fix this!” or the pessimist who moans and gives up. He is talking about false hope, “detached from faith and untempered by the evidence of history”, hope that is “a dangerous asset, and one that threatens not only those who embrace it, but all those within range of their illusions”.

He is mainly concerned with ideology and its effects on society. His targets, the “unscrupulous optimists”, mostly come from the Left. The optimists demonstrate the “I” way of thinking, in which intellect, unanimity and will are paramount and perfection is the ultimate goal. The pessimist approach, in contrast, emphasises the “we” of compromise, and is based on the impossibility of achieving perfection in any human endeavour.

In the first two-thirds of the book, Scruton allocates a chapter to each of seven fallacies of the optimists, in order to show:

the abundant intellectual resources upon which people may draw, in rearranging reality to fit the shape of their hopes, and avoiding the difficult task to which reason calls them, which is to rearrange their hopes to fit the shape of reality.

Those motivated by the Best Case Fallacy are the gamblers, who envisage only success. Scruton uses as an example the sub-prime loans that US banks were obliged to make to people they would normally consider to be bad risks. How wonderful if millions of poor people could pay for and own their own homes! But there was a reason why the banks considered them bad risks. Blinded by the hope of a bright future for the poor, politicians loved the scheme, ignored the critics, whom it was easy to label as “doomsayers” or “prejudiced against the poor” or “racist”, and so laid the unstable foundation that would inevitably crumble.

The Born Free Fallacy (after Rousseau’s “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains”) assumes that if any obstacle to our immediate happiness is removed, we will tend to approach the perfection that is innate in all of us. Society is to blame! If it feels good, do it! It is the cry of the adolescent who has yet to grasp or accept that his happiness depends on his making the considerable effort to adjust to the world around him, not on changing the world so that he never has to grow up. The damage done by this fallacy in the West over the last fifty years, especially in education (see Judy Stove’s article “Self-Control, the Neglected Key to Learning” in the October 2010 Quadrant) is incalculable.

The Utopian Fallacy inspired the manic rise of communism and Nazism but also numerous other “isms”, many of them still with us and many no doubt still to come. Like the other fallacies it can give its believers a feeling of unimpeachable virtue, but in this case that feeling of virtue can survive no matter how unutterably vile the deeds are that the believer perpetrates for the cause. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the utopia, or worse, obstructs its advent, must be evil—How can any but evil people oppose perfection?—and may therefore be disposed of. In the mind of the utopian, Scruton notes, “The millions of dead or enslaved do not refute utopia, but merely give proof of the evil machinations that have stood in its way”:

The ideal remains forever on the horizon of our experience, unsullied and untried, casting judgement on all that is actual, like a sun that cannot be looked at but which creates a dark side to everything on which it shines.

The Zero Sum Fallacy decrees that one person’s gain necessitates another’s loss. It is common in the thinking of those who discuss poverty, either individual or collective. In the ubiquitous case of Africa it takes the form of “the doctrine that the people of Africa need not laws, institutions and education—as the colonial regimes had (in whatever rough and ready form) provided—but simply money”. Scruton has some wise things to say here about anti-Americanism, which is partly due to America’s “success in so many spheres [which] attracts to it every kind of hostility from those who have failed in spheres of their own”.

The Planning Fallacy appeals especially to the university-educated. It assumes that all social problems can be solved by government; indeed, that most are caused by the lack of appropriate government intervention. Scruton uses the case of the ever-thickening fog of EU regulation that is stifling Europe. Here he allows himself a little hope: he believes the EU is becoming so remote from the people and so obviously contemptible that eventually “the people of Europe will consider themselves as little bound to obey the European Commission as the Commission feels bound to account to the people”. The Planning Fallacy was a driving force in the Whitlam government, and is perhaps the fallacy that gives the shiniest glint of all to the eyes of the Greens.

To those inspired by the Moving Spirit Fallacy the spirit of the times, even when it is no more than the thought of the herd, is correct and any opposition is “yesterday” and “out of touch” or, worse, is a throwback to the discredited past and is therefore wicked. In all fields of human endeavour, the common desire to be better than one’s predecessors, combined with the unspoken fear that one is not, makes this one of the most prevalent and potentially vicious of the fallacies.

The Aggregation Fallacy assumes that we can have all good things at once—such as liberty and equality. Multiculturalism is another powerful example. We are constantly told that the greater cultural diversity a society has, the better. Objections to any part of the multicultural project are denounced and in many cases can now be punished by law.

Society is endangered by these fallacies, these “ways of thinking that are clearly both irrational and compulsive”. How have they gained and exerted such power? Scruton’s next chapter, “Defences against the Truth”, examines some of the ways by which truth and its defenders are kept at bay.

One method is onus-shifting. Proponents of change insist that conservatives must prove that the change will be harmful (which is very difficult to do), when the responsibility should be on them to prove that it will be beneficial. Other methods include the use of false expertise (as if certified educationists and social workers, for example, must know better than teachers and parents), blame-shifting (where the real, difficult problem is ignored, and the focus is instead on some easy target; for example, after the 9/11 attacks many on the Left blamed America rather than al Qaeda), hermeticism (which involves “not defending one’s position, but concealing it within a fortified citadel of nonsense, of a kind designed to accuse the critic of ignorance or lack of logical skill”) and scapegoating.

Scruton’s brief analysis of scapegoating, focusing on the case of Enoch Powell, is brilliant and disturbing. The process of scapegoating and the part it plays in society are little understood, possibly because the term is so widely abused, especially by unionists and politicians trying to defend the indefensible. Scruton reminds us of what scapegoating means:

The hounding of Enoch Powell … took on a righteous character that enabled him to be silenced with an easy conscience, and without addressing the concerns to which he had given voice. Those in the vanguard of the witch-hunt were comfortable voices of the liberal establishment, people who had felt the hurt of Powell’s remarks in the visceral centre of their being. They had to make a sacrificial victim of Powell, not because he threatened their material interests but because he threatened something far more important—their illusions.

Change “Powell” to “Blainey” for a local example.

What is the source of all this fallacious thinking—as often as not among sane and well-meaning people—and the hateful panic that any challenge to it arouses? Why do so many people “prefer inspiring fantasies to sobering facts”? In Chapter 10, Scruton offers his hypothesis. It is, he says, a throwback to our tribal origins. In the tribe, the chieftain’s word is final, and the tribe lives or dies by it. The “worst case” is the tribe’s extinction, so there is no point in planning for failure. “Those who ask awkward questions are of no use to such a community, which is engaged in a life-or-death struggle that depends on certainty if it is to be won. The thinking of the chieftain is the thinking of the tribe.” Scruton shows clearly how each of the fallacies he has described, as well as the methods used for reinforcing them, benefit tribal society.

So no matter how modern the optimists think they are, in fact they are clinging to the Pleistocene, unwilling to come to grips with civilisation. Scruton aims to show that the world is “a better place than the optimists allow”:

The opening of the community to doubt and hesitation, the granting of voice to the prophet—this is the beginning of wisdom. And from this there emerges a new kind of order, in which discovered law replaces revealed commands, negotiation replaces domination, and free exchange replaces centralized distribution according to the ruling plan.

Scruton here opposes Western civilisation and Islam:

our current confrontation with the Islamists ought to have awoken us to the fact that there is something precious at stake, and that this precious thing is precisely what has enabled us to live as a free community of strangers, without submitting to tribal intimacies and top-down commands.

The law of Western civilisation, unlike that of Muslim and other tribal societies, “exists in order to resolve conflicts among free beings, not in order to lead them to salvation”. And the Western Left has been generally uncritical of the Islamists because the two groups’ respective visions of perfection lead them to despise the innate imperfection of Western civilisation. The West is threatened by a utopian pincer movement.

For Scruton, the two habits that underpin Western civilisation are forgiveness and irony. Simplifying this part of Scruton’s argument (which includes in this chapter some piercing observations on the mind of the terrorist), essentially I think they are two sides of the one coin: the acknowledgment of our inevitable human frailty. Forgiveness and irony enable us to retain others in our community when we think they are mistaken, because they enable us to see ourselves from outside and observe our own vulnerability to error. Forgiveness and irony also enable us “to look with … detachment on our actual condition, and to study how to live at peace with what we find”. Utopians, therefore, unlike Scruton’s pessimists, can never be truly happy, because they can never come to terms with the world as it is. There is great happiness in the simple recognition that things could easily be so much worse.

Much more could be said on the dangers and prevalence of false hope. Sticking mostly to the political and ideological aspects of society, Scruton touches on architecture (the brutal optimism of Le Corbusier and his cohort) but hardly at all on the arts, where all the great practitioners are pessimists because they treat humans in all their messy wholeness; theatre companies accustomed to producing agitprop continually try to distort the supremely pessimistic (in Scruton’s sense) plays of Shakespeare to fit their own narrow view, with grotesque results. Scruton doesn’t mention the vacuous popular optimism that gradually took over as the collective memory of the Depression and wartime faded and the instant cheeriness of television began to set the social tone, giving us the “live your dream” attitude that leads parents to encourage their teenage children to circumnavigate the world alone, and people to build their homes surrounded by eucalypt forest. We live in an age in which it is widely considered to be an anti-social act to say No. Nor does Scruton mention the decline of the Western Christian churches from the seriousness exemplified by “Abide with Me”, in its day one of the best-known hymns of all—

Abide with me: fast falls the eventide;

The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide …

Change and decay in all around I see;

O Thou who changest not, abide with me …

—to the banal optimism of the bumper-sticker “Honk if you dig Jesus”.

Scruton is writing as prolifically as ever, and will no doubt have more to say on the subject in his elegant prose. In recent years he has published two fine memoirs, Gentle Regrets and News from Somewhere. The defining moment of his life occurred when as a student he happened to be visiting Paris in 1968 at the time of the riots. He had not been political till then, but he says that when he saw the clash between the rioting university students and the police who were trying to maintain law and order in their beloved city, he knew at once which side he was on. He has remained staunchly on that side ever since, though it must have seemed at times that everybody around him was infected with the vicious, self-righteous optimism of the students.

George Thomas is deputy editor of Quadrant.