John Derbyshire - We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism

F OR W ALLY F EKULA

Brief is the season of mans delight.

P INDAR, Pythian Ode, No.8

A CALL TO PESSIMISM

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

E CCLESIASTES 7:4

This book is addressed to American conservatives. Its argument is that things are bad and getting worse for our movement, for our nation, and for our civilization. A large part of the reason they have gotten so bad is that too many of us have fallen into foolishly utopian ways of thinking.

Those ways of thinking are false because they are too optimistic about human nature and human affairs. The proper outlook of conservatives, I shall argue, is a pessimistic one, at least so far as the things of this world are concerned. We have been misled, and the conservative movement has been derailed, by legions of fools and poseurs wearing smiley-face masks. I aim to unmask them.

I have both a diagnosis and a prognosis to offer. The diagnosis is that conservatism has been fatally weakened by yielding to infantile temptations: temptations to optimism, to wishful thinking, to happy talk, to cheerily preposterous theories about human beings and the human world.

Thus weakened, conservatism can no longer provide the backbone of cold realism that every organized society needs. Hence my prognosis; hence my title. We are doomed.

By abandoning our properly pessimistic approach to the world, conservatives have helped bring about a state of affairs that thoughtful persons can only contemplate with pessimism. If wed held on to the pessimistic outlook thats proper for our philosophy, the future might be brighter!

This looks like a paradox, but really isnt, as Im using the word pessimism in two slightly different senses: to indicate low expectations of ones fellow men, and to name a belief about the probable future. If we expect too much of people, well be disappointed, and our schemes will fail. Heady optimism about human nature leads directly to disaster. To put it in the style of John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress: the Road of Denial leads to the Precipice of Destruction. Didnt the great utopian experiments of the twentieth century teach us that? Weve repeated those experimentsin a less brazen way, to be sure, but with the same inevitable result now coming upon us.

By embracing a proper conservative pessimism, we may yet rescue something from the coming ruin. At the very least, by returning to cold reality after our recent detour into sunny fantasy, well put ourselves in the right frame of mind for our new life in the wilderness.

The winning candidate in the 2008 presidential election promoted something called the politics of hope. Ladies and gentlemen of conservative inclination, I call you to our true, our proper home. I call you to the politics of despair!

This book is about what we have done to ourselves, to our society and culture. Its about the hopelessness of any project to save the situation based on current conservatism, perverted as it has been by smiley-face schemes of human improvement. Its about composing ourselves to a true view of humanity and human affairs, so that we can get through our individual destinies usefully and with maximum peace of mind in the dark age to come, preserving as much as can be preserved. Who knows? Once back in touch with truth, we might even see a revival of real conservatism: self-support, patriotism, limited government, federalism though of course, I dont hold out much hope.

Please be clear about the scope of the pessimism I urge on you. Dont mistake my thesis for any of those tabloid Chicken Little prognostications about particular economic, ecological, military, or cosmic misfortunes we may be able to science our way out of.

Have we reached Peak Oil? I dont know. (Neither, so far as I can gather from some extensive reading in this area, does anyone else.) Will global warming melt the polar ice caps? Sorry, I have no clue. Are suitcase nuclear weapons secreted in our cities awaiting a word of command from some terrorist mastermind or malevolent dictator? I really couldnt say. Shall we fall to some plague, some runaway particle-physics experiment, some asteroid strike or other celestial mishap? Or will human nature itself disappear into a singularity around the middle of this century, as futurologist Ray Kurzweil predicts? Beats my pair of jacks.

My book is not primarily about any of those things, though speaking as a constitutional pessimist, Id lay odds that one or other of them is lurking just round the historical corner. Things are bad and getting worse, any fool can see that, but I pin my dark banner to no one particular prediction. Despair should be large and general, not petty and particular.

Nor does my scope extend beyond this human state and this earthly life. Possibly there are other states and other lives. Though no longer an adherent of any religion, I maintain an open mind on these issues. They are in any case outside the purview of this book. Im writing about the communal arrangements of a particular social mammal on a particular planet. Believe what you like about matters beyond that; this book isnt concerned with them.

Thats all very well, you may say, but isnt pessimism enervating? If all is for the worst for us in this, the worst of all possible worlds, why bother? Why not sit around vegetating in a state of glum melancholia, like the angel in Drers fine engraving of that name?

That would be to misunderstand the nature of a thoughtful, considered pessimism. There is no necessary connection between a pessimistic outlook and a melancholy temperament. At most Ill allow that having a naturally glum disposition makes it easier to attain an understanding of human depravity, contrariety, mental incoherence, and imperfectibility. I myself do have such a disposition, and wont be trying to hide behind any fake jollity. Later in this book, in fact, I shall present some actual science suggesting that a glum melancholic is just the person you want to go to for the truth about human affairs. Yet plenty of active, convivial, and useful people have a pessimistic outlook. Some of them have done important things to improve their societies and lift up their fellow men.

Here are some of the gloomiest lines in all of English literature. They are by the poet Matthew Arnold:

the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Arnold was a witty and sociable man who loved sport and companionship. He worked hard at useful employment, was happily married to the same lady for thirty-seven years, and was a loving father to his six children.