Three cheers for life and to hell with the pessimists
When I first came to London, half a century ago, the head of the journalistic profes sion was Arthur Christiansen. ‘Chris’ was much admired in the trade. I considered it a signal honour to have a drink with him in what his employer, Lord Beaverbrook, called ‘El Vino’s Public House’. Beaverbrook made him editor of the Daily Express, and over the quarter-century of his rule there he raised its circulation from 1,700,000 to well over four million. It was the finest popular newspaper in the world. One of Chris’s sayings was, ‘You may speak with the tongues of angels and write with the pen of Shakespeare but you cannot beat news in a newspaper.’ (How true; and how forgotten today.) Hoping to inspire one of these lapidary remarks, I asked him, ‘To what do you attribute your success, Sir?’ He replied, ‘Optimism.’ It was true. The Express of those days exuded good cheer and glamour. Beaverbrook said, ‘I want my newspaper to inspire a song in the heart.’ He continued, ‘We must print the bad news, but let us print the good news too — there is plenty of it if you look.’ Chris was always looking for things which would cheer up ‘The Man in the Back Streets of Derby’. It is true that this policy sometimes led to disaster. In 1938 he came up with the headline, ‘There Will Be No War — this year or the next.’ This was made fun of by Noël Coward when he scripted his wartime movie, In Which We Serve, to boost the career of his chum Lord Louis Mountbatten, and it provoked one of Beaverbrook’s most venomous vendettas against both. But as a rule the policy of optimism worked, and put on sales. It was an axiom of Chris’s that a lot of ordinary people could share in the high life of the rich and the famous thanks to the Express. His theory was, ‘Modern capitalism and new technology make it possible for millions to scramble on to the plateau hitherto exclusively occupied by the elite. So cheer up and go for it.’ That put the paper squarely on one side of the fundamental argument opened up in 1710 when Leibniz published his Théodicée. His primary object was to justify God’s apparent tolerance of evil but in doing so he propounded the doctrine of optimism: the world we lived in was the best of all possible worlds, and we must make the best of it and improve it rather than bemoan and reject it. He based his argument on the trilemma: if this world is not the best possible, God must either not have known how to make it better, or not have been able, or not have chosen to do so. The first contradicted his omniscience, the second his omnipotence, the third his benevolence. QED: be grateful. In due course Voltaire came along to refute this argument, prompted by the horrific Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed over 60,000 people. His writings, taking a pessimistic view of the existing order of the universe, tended to undermine respect for authority, confidence in the benevolence of the way things were arranged, and so prepared opinion for the French Revolution.
It may be argued that utopian revolutionaries are by nature hopeless optimists in that they believe a perfect society can be created by humankind. But to get to that point they must first demolish the existing order completely, and to do this they must persuade a sufficient number of people that things cannot be gradually improved. Their teaching, therefore, is essentially pessimistic. Marx, for instance, lived in a time when industrial capitalism was just emerging from its tragic-heroic period of suffering and accumulation, and when conditions in the factories were improving from year to year. His analysis denied this and demanded that things got worse, thus provoking the inevitable explosion, and to present it he deliberately twisted or faked the evidence. It says a lot for the inherent tendency of people to be pessimistic that this cooked doctrine survived, prospered, took over Russia, and then spread to one fifth of the Earth’s surface, causing untold deaths and human misery for over a century before collapsing. And even today it is still the official political religion of China.
It is part of the philosophy of the radical pessimists that human beings in the mass are too stupid to run their lives wisely, let alone build Utopia, and therefore must be governed by what Lenin called ‘the vanguard elite’, the rest being represented by an abstract concept, what Rousseau termed the General Will and Marx the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The idea that one-man-one-vote democracy can actually work is anathema to the pessimists. Most Western intellectuals positively hate average men and women — what Marx contemptuously dismissed as the lumpenproletariat — and believe they have no role in the process of government, except as theoretical concepts. Although they never say so openly, intellectuals dislike the entire democratic process because it assumes that people like manual labourers, shop-girls, bus-drivers and dustmen have just as much judgment and wisdom as themselves, and as much right to share the decision-taking.
These ingrained, pessimistic attitudes about humanity help to explain the violent antiAmericanism which is almost universal among intellectuals. For America was the first nation to be built upon the principles of optimism, and it remains by far the greatest and most articulate in believing the world can be made an even better place by hard work, common sense and sheer human ingenuity. Americans also believe that the political framework in which this gradual improvement takes place most effectively is democracy, which enables the largest possible number of people to participate in decisions at every level. This combination of optimism and democracy makes intellectuals grind their teeth in rage, and explains the violence and the irrationality of what they write. A man like George Bush, who honestly believes that it is America’s mission and duty to export democracy to the world, and that it can be done, given time, resources, patience and enthusiasm, is anathema to their deepest instincts.
That is the nonsense to which pessimism brings its adherents. And pessimism of the most unbending kind is the pervading sentiment of the media today. There must be many people like me who cannot turn on the television without dread, or open a newspaper without a feeling of gloom. Even if one can stomach the ubiquitous vulgarity which forms the depraved icing on the nauseous pill, the underlying gospel of despair is almost insupportable. It is not just that we are told all politicians are fools, rogues or both, businessmen crooks, sportsmen cheats and clergymen humbugs, that our police are dishonest, our soldiers torturers and the criminals are taking over, but the message also comes across that fanaticism and terrorism are getting the upper hand and that the Earth is being poisoned by industry, farming, science and technology. There is absolutely nothing in the world today from which we can take comfort.
No wonder press circulations and TV ratings are plunging! Pessimism is a killer, and people know it. The doctrine of old Arthur Christiansen is much closer to the truth of human nature. If I were running a newspaper or a television channel today, I would take every legitimate opportunity to strike an optimistic note. The world is an infinite mine of riches, crowded with clever people who can exploit it. The opportunities facing us are inexhaustible. Let us all give three cheers for life.
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