The Uses of Pessimism E-Book

Roger Scruton

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Scruton argues that the tragedies and disasters of the history of the European continent have been the consequences of a false optimism and the fallacies that derive from it. In place of these fallacies, Scruton mounts a passionate defence of both civil society and freedom. He shows that the true legacy of European civilisation is not the false idealisms that have almost destroyed it - in the shapes of Nazism, fascism and communism - but the culture of forgiveness and irony which we must now protect from those whom it offends. The Uses of Pessimism is a passionate plea for reason and responsibility, written at a time of profound change.

Leseprobe

THE USES OF PESSIMISM

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Roger Scruton, 2010

The moral right of Roger Scruton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 84887 201 1

E-Book ISBN: 978 1 84887 881 5

Printed in Great Britain

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Contents

Preface

ONE

The First-Person Future

TWO

The Best Case Fallacy

THREE

The Born Free Fallacy

FOUR

The Utopian Fallacy

FIVE

The Zero Sum Fallacy

SIX

The Planning Fallacy

SEVEN

The Moving Spirit Fallacy

EIGHT

The Aggregation Fallacy

NINE

Defences against the Truth

TEN

Our Tribal Past

ELEVEN

Our Civil Present

TWELVE

Our Human Future

Preface

In this book I examine optimism in what Schopenhauer called its ‘wicked’ or ‘unscrupulous’ (bedenkenlos) form, and show the place of pessimism in restoring balance and wisdom to the conduct of human affairs. I don’t go along with Schopenhauer’s comprehensive gloom, or with the philosophy of renunciation that he derived from it. I have no doubt that St Paul was right to recommend faith, hope and love (agape) as the virtues that order life to the greater good. But I have no doubt too that hope, detached from faith and untempered by the evidence of history, is a dangerous asset, and one that threatens not only those who embrace it, but all those within range of their illusions.

At first, the old myth tells us, the only mortals on earth were men, to whom Prometheus brought fire in defiance of Zeus. In revenge Zeus ordered the creation of the first woman, who was given in marriage to Prometheus’s brother. Her name was Pandora – the all-giving one. And as a wedding gift Zeus gave her a box, instructing her never to open it. Giving way to her curiosity at last, she opened the box, releasing into the world death, disease, despair, malice, old age, hatred, violence, war and all the other evils that we know. Pandora closed the box at once, and one gift remained inside – the gift of hope: the only remedy, but also the final scourge.

My concern, in the first instance, is with certain fallacies that seem to justify hope, or at least to make disappointment bearable. My examples come from many areas, but they share a common characteristic, which is that they show, at the heart of the unscrupulous optimist’s vision, a mistake that is so blindingly obvious that only someone in the grip of self-deception could have overlooked it. It is against this self-deception that pessimism is directed. A study of the uses of pessimism will reveal a most interesting feature of human nature, which is that obvious errors are the hardest to rectify. They may involve mistakes of reasoning; but their cause lies deeper than reason, in emotional needs that will defend themselves with every weapon to hand rather than relinquish the comfort of their easily won illusions. One of my purposes is to trace these emotional needs to their prehistoric source, and to show that civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our species, but that are useful no longer.

The belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an attentive reading of the Iliad, still less of the Old Testament. The fact that it did so is a sober reminder that the argument of this book is entirely futile. You may enjoy it and agree with it, but it will have no influence whatsoever on those whom it calls to account. The irrationalities that I explore are, as the neuronerds put it, ‘hard-wired’ in the human cortex, and not to be countered by anything so gentle as an argument.

The theme of the collective unreason of mankind is not new, and you might wonder whether there is anything to be added to the great survey that the Scottish poet Charles Mackay published in 1852, entitled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Mackay’s study of prophecies, superstitions, witchhunts and crusades is a grim reminder that all the things that he sardonically describes have continued in the same frequency and to worse effect since his book was published. Mackay felt that mankind had at last entered a period of scientific knowledge, in which crowds would allow themselves to be corrected by the experts whom previously they had preferred to burn at the stake. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The great crowd movements of communism, Nazism and fascism, in which false hopes were to transform themselves into marching armies, had yet to appear over the horizon. And the rise of the scientific expert did little more than rebrand the witch-hunts and genocides of the twentieth century as rational decisions, for which science had shown the need. The ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ was justified by ‘Marxist science’, the racist doctrines of the Nazis were proposed as scientific eugenics, the ‘Great Leap Forward’ of Mao Zedong was held to be no more than an application of the proven laws of history. Of course the science was phony; but that merely shows that, when unreason triumphs, it does so in the name of reason.

In a more recent study, Scared to Death, Christopher Booker and Richard North have examined the panics that have swept across the civilized world in the last two decades. These panics show the other side of unscrupulous optimism: the equally unscrupulous pessimism that comes when false hope is deflated. All of them – from the hysterical belief that two million British people were about to die from the human variant of mad cow disease, to the apocalyptic vision of global warming, from the fear that all the world’s computers would shut down at the millennium, to the campaigns against lead in petrol and passive smoking – have been presented as ‘science’. And all of them have ignored evidence and argument in favour of a preordained conclusion, accepted because it gives direction and force to a mass movement of the righteous, assembled to cast out the devil from our midst. Those who question or resist are singled out as scapegoats; witchhunts of the sceptics go hand in hand with adoration of the heroes such as Al Gore who are pointing the way to salvation. And when the panic is over the crowd disperses, having achieved neither relief nor self-knowledge, but merely the readiness for another scare.

In two other recent studies – How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen, and Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont – indignant intellectuals have pointed to the ways in which nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of the optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.

Some of my observations are indeed anticipated by those estimable authors. But my purpose differs from theirs. My theme is less the ‘madding crowd’ than the scheming individual: the one who, troubled by the imperfect prescriptions contained in custom, common sense and law, looks to another kind of future, in which those old ways of compromise are no longer required. Unscrupulous optimists believe that the difficulties and disorders of humankind can be overcome by some large-scale adjustment: it suffices to devise a new arrangement, a new system, and people will be released from their temporary prison into a realm of success. When it comes to helping others, therefore, all their efforts are put into the abstract scheme for human improvement, and none whatsoever into the personal virtue that might enable them to play the small part that it is given to humans to play in bettering the lot of their fellows. Hope, in their frame of mind, ceases to be a personal virtue, tempering griefs and troubles, teaching patience and sacrifice, and preparing the soul for agape. Instead it becomes a mechanism for turning problems into solutions and grief into exultation, without pausing to study the accumulated evidence of human nature, which tells us that the only improvement that lies within our control is the improvement of ourselves.

I have benefited greatly over the years from discussions with Bob Grant, who read an early draft of this book and made many useful criticisms and suggestions. My thanks go also to those who have set an example, by following the rule of agape, striving to love people as human beings without hoping that they will turn into something else. I single out Gladys Sweeney and her students at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, Ian Christie, Jonathan Ruffer, Helena Pechoučková, my sister Elizabeth, and above all my wife Sophie, who has had a particularly hard case to deal with, and yet who still manages to smile.

Sperryville, Virginia, May 2009.

ONE

The First-Person Future

Every scientific advance is welcomed by those who see a use for it, and usually deplored by those who don’t. History does not record the protests that surrounded the invention of the wheel. But it certainly records the protests that surrounded the invention of the railways. For the great critic and social philosopher John Ruskin the railways were a ruthless assault on rural tranquillity; they destroyed the sense of place, they uprooted settled communities, they overran the countryside with steel-clad ugliness and urban sprawl. They set us all in motion, when the true point of human life is to stay quietly where we are. They were, in short, the end of civilization as Ruskin knew it.1

Yet how quaint does Ruskin’s cry of heartfelt protest now seem. Oddly enough, the railways of England were built according to designs influenced through and through by his writings, and in particular by Stones of Venice; they are looked back on now with intense nostalgia, as symbols of peace, place and distance. One of the most famous invocations of rural settlement in English – ‘Adlestrop’ by the poet Edward Thomas – describes a tranquil country railway station viewed from a train. And campaigners against automobiles propose the railways as their ideal of a safe, environmentally friendly and aesthetically pleasing link from place to place across a continent.