Realistic Optimism

A Few Notes Toward a Theory Of

• The symbolic import of this month which grows ever more holy,

• Mass extinction,

• and Optimism in the wake of seemingly insurmountable challenges.

When asked by a friend via text what was on my mind, I replied with the above.

I’d had dinner with a geologist the night before, who specializes in noting in both lab and field evidences of the causal forces behind mass extinctions. This led to the occasional allusion, as would be expected, to the nature of the mass extinction currently in process. But, rather than bringing a dour cloud to the discourse, the converse instead involved our accounts of classroom teaching, and the many resources abundant in that milieu.

Then, this morning, spurred by a prompt on the UTOK Circle, I watched a dismal but provocative meditation on the nature of the meta-crisis by Daniel Schmachtenberger. Again, however, in the context of the UTOK community, we came to see the threats as necessary opportunities to confront challenges and create meaning within and without in the pursuit of well being in the cosmic order.

My friend then asked me:

How do you ground your optimism? What is its source?

Realistic Optimism

• I call my variety a realistic optimism, and frame it by distinguishing two things I don't believe:

  • I don’t believe in a fairy-tale happy ending where everything will just work itself out if we let it be, nor even if we work hard to try to change things.

  • I don’t believe that things are actually "good" rather than "bad" and that it's all just a matter of attitude. While we can characterize things as preferable or not based on our positions and assumptions, in the call to Wisdom it is requisite that we allow ourselves the discomfort of having our assumptions challenged.

• Making these distinctions, I assert that my optimism is the decision to optimize, or make best of, that which is currently available within my own power.

• Some of the things which are within my own power directly involve my own health and well being, which need not be needlessly sacrificed unless there is something I'm doing which obviously hurts others.

• All of this boils down to a spiritual/ontological fidelity for me in some life-affirming force that lies beneath, gives source to, and transcends it all, and which can be intuited via Logos to we who are humble enough to listen to one another and look for opportunities to aspire toward Goodness, Beauty, and Truth.

• I don't have much to say about what happens if and when we fail — I can't make sense of destruction, evil, or suffering, other than that my psyche is affected by them such that they compel me to seek Better. But I'm not going to make a metaphysical claim about that. That said, that reality (of suffering, and the intuition which arises from me in its wake) gives me heart and intuition that there is something to aspire toward even when things seem impossible to my limited cognition.

An (Unintentional) Experiment

I’ve had the misfortune throughout life to experience suicidal ideation from time to time. Worse, I’ve had issues with alcohol abuse and dependency. Even worse, I’ve been on Facebook and Twitter when drunk and experiencing suicidal ideation. Even more worse, I’ve posted to the feed messages which intimated these goings-on.

Better, these mistakes have caused me to witness strangers’ outpourings of concern. There is an instinctive tendency for sentient beings to go out of their way to offer assistance when another is at seeming risk of demise. This is not the only human response. Sometimes, human response is the converse (or inverse?!) of this. That said, this is often the response, if only by a few who take that line of being into consideration. The fact that these few exist is an emblem.

We see the same thing in the “rest” of the “natural” world. We can start with chimps and bonobos.

Community of the Unknown

It is not impossible that, post-extinction, our remains might serve as a helpful site of research for beings outside of our immediate social group (conventionally called, banefully, “aliens”) much in the way that, at age 19, I had ejected from my social sphere via my father’s econ to spend time dirtying my toes with the dust of ash and seeing the good people of Pompeii preserved.