THE OPTIMISTIC SPECTATOR: To Hell With the Pessimists
Johnson, Paul
THE OPTIMISTIC SPECTATOR PAUL JOHNSON To Hell With the Pessimists HEN I FIRST CAME TO LONDON, halfa century ago, the head of the journalistic profession was Arthur Christiansen....
...It is not just that ~e are told all politicians are fools, rogues, or both, '.businessmen crooks, sportsmen cheats, and clergyman 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...
...That put the paper squarely on one side of the fundamental argument opened up in 1710 when Leibnitz published his Thdodicde...
...Hoping to inspire one of these lapidary remarks, I asked him, "To what do you attribute your success, Sir...
...This combination of optimism and democracy makes intellectuals grind their teeth in rage, and explains the violence and the irrationality of what they write...
...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...
...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...
...QED: be grateful...
...Beaverbrook made him edially Express, and over the quarter-century ot his rule there he raised its circulation from 1,700,000 to well over 4 million...
...And pessimism of the most unbending kind is the pervading sentiment of the media today...
...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...
...This was made fun of by Noel 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...
...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...
...There must be many people like me who cannot turn on the television without dread, or open a newspaper without a feeling of gloom...
...Although they never say so openly, intellectuals dislike the entire democratic process because it assumes that people like manual laborers, shop-girls, bus-drivers, and dustmen have just as much judgment and wisdom as themselves, and as much right to share the decision-taking...
...Their teaching, therefore, is essentially pessimistic...
...There is absolutely nothing in the world today from which we can take comfort...
...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...
...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...
...The Express of those days exuded good cheer and glamour...
...I t was true...
...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...
...It is true that this policy sometimes led to disaster...
...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...
...The idea that one-manone-vote democracy can actually work is anathema to the pessimists...
...No wonder press circulations and TV ratings are plunging...
...If I were running a newspaper or a television channel today, I would take every legitimate opportunity to strike an optimistic note...
...The doctrine ofoldArthur Christiansen is much closer to the truth of human nature...
...Let us all give three cheers for life...
...And even today it is still the official political religion of China...
...T HESE INGRAINED, pessimistic attitudes about humanity help to explain the violent antiAmericanism which is almost universal among intellectuals...
...and how forgotten today...
...The opportunities facing us are inexhaustible...
...Beaverbrook said, "I want my newspaper to inspire a song in the heart...
...Chris" was much admired in the trade...
...He replied, "Optimism...
...In due course Voltaire came along to refute this argument, prompted by the horrific Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed over 60,000 people...
...Pessimism is a killer, and people know it...
...A man like George Bush, who honestly believes that it is America's mission and dutyto export democracyto the world, and that it can be done, given time, resources, patience, and enthusiasm, is anathema to their deepest instincts...
...How true...
...In 1938 he came up with the headline, "There Will Be No War--this year or the next...
...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 acenturybefore collapsing...
...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...
...Chris was always looking for things which would cheer up "The Man in the Back Streets of Derby...
...He continued, "We must print the bad news, but let us print the good news too--there is plenty of it if you look...
...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...
...I considered it a signal honor to have a drink with t his employer, Lord Beaverbrook, called 'ublic House...
...THE OPTIMISTIC SPECTATOR PAUL JOHNSON To Hell With the Pessimists HEN I FIRST CAME TO LONDON, halfa century ago, the head of the journalistic profession was Arthur Christiansen...
...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...
...That is the nonsense to which pessimism brings its adherents...
...So cheer up and go for it...
...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...
...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...
...Itwas the finest popular newspaper in the world...
...The first contradicted his omniscience, the second his omnipotence, the third his benevolence...
...But as a rule the policy of optimism worked, and put on sales...
...It may be argued that utopian revolutionaries are by nature hopeless optimists in that theybelieve a perfect society can be created by humankind...
...The world is an infinite mine of riches, crowded with clever people who can exploit it...
...Article and cartoon courtesy of The Spectator magazine in London...
...But to get to that point they must first demolish the existing order 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2006 PAUL JOHNSON completely, and to do this they must persuade a sufficient number of people that things cannot be gradually improved...
...MARCH 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49...
Vol. 39 • March 2006 • No. 2
