Optimism Is Only A Feeling

Daniel Larison's infamous disdain for optimists and upbeats has spread to Rod Dreher, and apparently at least a few of Dreher's readers. This line in comments jumped out:

This seems to be the true American faith of today -- the sense that ultimately, failure is impossible.

I've blogged many, many times about how the language of 'giving a sense of' and 'sending a message' makes sensations and emotions more important than the acts and realities that cause them, and how alienating this actually is to our emotional psychologies themselves. It reinforces a permanent remove from your own actions, putting you into an essentially ironic relationship with your own life and self.

But 'the sense that ultimately, failure is impossible' is precisely worded. Optimism is not, despite what people might tell you, the conviction that failure is impossible. Optimism is not by any stretch the Christian virtue of hope, for example, which is more than a 'sense,' even when faith is battered and weak; more than a 'sense' because it is of a fundamentally different character.

Optimism, in fact, is an attitude, an emotional orientation, a psychological posture, a feeling -- a meta-feeling, even, a feeling about feelings, the feeling that we should  feel as if failure is impossible. Notice even how different this is from an intellectual determination, for example, to think that failure is impossible, or from the conviction that the wisdom of history shows, as Churchill put it, that success is never final and defeat is never fatal. An optimist does not labor in such trenches of the human condition.

Another reader whom Rod quotes at length declares that

surely traditional conservatives do not fetishize optimism.

Surely this is correct, and surely accusing someone of 'fetishizing' something is very in right now. But optimism seems to be a fetish, generalizing (from Thomas Pynchon's superior definition) that a fetish is a piece of something whole that gives pleasure but is not itself something whole -- "not real, but an object of pleasure." So with the feeling of optimism as an emotional attitude.

Thus Obama's relentless optimism, in which the character of any act is not to be judged but the attitude of upbeat unfailingness that gives it its character. Thus the President's 'relentless' optimism, which cracked luridly when he snapped that the surge would work "because it has to." As it did crack, optimism's beating heart showed. It is generally infantile and dangerous to expect that whatever you want is good for you, and all the more so to heighten that sensation to a perceived right. Truly perilous is the self-conscious effort of the optimist to act as if it were a right, the satisfaction of which is really only inevitable, despite the secret knowledge that the truth is otherwise.

Comments

[John Savage]

Thank you! I was really hoping someone would come around and call them out on this.

[danny bee]

But it's conservatives and religious nuts who run America who think the future is eternal and God loves America more than any other country. Wrong wrong wrong. There is no God. This is where conservatives go way wrong. sorry but true

[brittney]

this is a bunch of bullshit!