(A version was written earlier today on the Second Renaissance forum, under the subject line of “connected community conversations”.)
2025-04-13
There seems to me to be a great apparent tension between views that appear optimistic and those that appear pessimistic. And I’ve been feeling that somewhere in myself recently. (Heart? Body? A difficult-to-name part of mind? Who knows…)
On the one hand, a strong dose of realism is necessary, counteracting naive false optimism. For sure, to act well, we need to see things as they are…… however, there we come back to the ontological point; the belief systems; the narratives. Let’s try our best to be clear that what we claim to see as things “actually” are (“actually” is such a weasel word!) we are basing our claims on what is uncontested, not just on our personal interpretation.
We need to see things as they are — and at the same time address the very human reaction of being emotionally overwhelmed, into a kind of depressive state in which I see the world’s problems as far too much, far too complex, for me to have any significant effect upon. For me as an individual, I see this helpless position as very understandable. For us, however, collectively, I don’t think so. And from there, to all the rest of the narrative, the positive story of connected community conversations.
Say you are a pessimist, deeply into the collapse narrative. When you say that you don’t share someone else's optimism, how sure are you that the person, whose view you say you don’t share, actually has the kind of optimism that you attribute to them? For me, there is a world of difference between a naive, magic-aligned optimism, that mummy or daddy or a fairy godmother will come and make things all right, and what seems to me to be a much deeper, spiritual optimism.
I’ll try to express this latter kind of “optimism” in a few words: Even if everything looks hopeless, if I listen to the true source (and you can call it your body, nature, the Spirit, God, etc.) I will find something that is mine to do, positively. I don’t know, and I won’t know, if this will have the effect I want it to have (the world is too complex for me to know that), but I will do it anyway, with more confidence if the connected community around me senses into my calling and resonates with it as true. And, I believe, as a connected community we can do a lot to encourage and help each other to find what is ours, positively, to do. A shift in culture is needed, though…
This, to me, is the optimism of Julian of Norwich, quoted by Eliot in his Four Quartets. People may of course brush this aside as “naive optimism”, but I would caution against hasty (and naive?) dismissal.