Photo: Alonso Nichols

The Editorial We

Beyond Optimism

Is the glass half empty or half full? Careful, it’s a trick question. You are being asked to declare allegiance to one of two rather questionable world views. If you answer “half empty,” you must be a pessimist—one who finds difficulty in every opportunity (as Churchill put it), is fond of citing Murphy’s Law, believes in the curse of the Bambino, and in the eighties had a bumper sticker that said “Life sucks and then you die.”

The other answer—the one you are supposed to give—is even more damning. It brands you as an optimist: one who believes, despite festering heaps of misery and injustice, that the world is about as good as it can get. Optimists like to think that things work out for the best. And to sustain that belief, they become masters of rationalization, like Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss. “There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds,” Pangloss assures Candide. “For if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunégonde, if you had not been put into the Inquisition, . . . if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado, you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio nuts.”

Both optimism and pessimism have the same fatal flaw: the presumption that things are proceeding according to plan. We onlookers can only marvel as life continues on its upward or downward march. The passivity of that stance—the idea that we must ignore the world’s torments, à la the optimist, or resign ourselves to them, à la the pessimist—makes me think of Monty Python’s condemned men, dangling from crucifixes, musically exhorting one another to “always look on the bright side of life.”

Do you have to choose between optimism and pessimism? No, you don’t. What you can be instead, and perhaps already are—I say as I trot out my Merriam-Webster—is a meliorist. A meliorist is someone who believes the world can and should be better, and that people have the capacity to improve it. There is nothing passive about meliorism. Probably every dragon slayer, every reformer, heretic, utopian, entrepreneur, or creative artist who ever lived would qualify as a meliorist. Every Tufts student training to be an “active citizen” is a meliorist. Magazine editors, in their own small way, can be meliorists, too. It was in this spirit that my last column acknowledged progress in areas such as alleviating hunger and slowing population growth—a shout-out that one reader interpreted as Panglossian (see Letters).

I suspect that many people who are trapped in the false choice between optimism and pessimism are actually meliorists and don’t know it. They are just waiting for somebody to come along with a dictionary and set them free.

—DAVID BRITTAN
EDITOR