Optimism, Seneca and the Classics
Alain de Botton, writing in City Journal, has an interesting piece trying to resuscitate the importance of pessimism:
It’s time to recognize how odd and counterproductive is the optimism on which we have grown up. For the last 200 years, despite occasional shocks, the Western world has been dominated by a belief in progress, based on its extraordinary scientific and entrepreneurial achievements. But from a broader historical perspective, this optimism is an anomaly. Humans have spent the greater part of their existence drawing a curious comfort from expecting the worst. In the West, lessons in pessimism derive from two sources: Roman Stoic philosophy and Christianity. It may be time to remind ourselves of a few of their lessons—not to add to our misery but to alleviate our injured surprise and sorrow.’
While I think that our currently troubled economic times should remind us that things aren’t necessarily always going to get better, it’s worth pointing out that Seneca, or anyone living before the Industrial Revolution, was living in a vastly different world than ours. It’s almost too telling that Botton brackets the last 200 years as a time when the human psyche took a turn for the optimistic. If you look at any measure of well being — let’s say life expectancy — optimism seems like the natural reaction. Let’s look at these two charts:
As the first chart vividly shows, the world before the Industrial Revolution was vastly different from the world after it in a way that we can’t really appreciate. Greg Clark’s evocation of this transition is in Farewell to Alms is especially useful.
Before industrialization, any technological or sanitary advance that led to higher population and increased life expectancy just resutled in a malthusian “crunch” where the extra people would consume any surplus and the population would go back down as people died of hunger or disease. This brutal state of affairs, which of course inspired Malthus, would have an obvious effect on whether or not intellectuals counseled optimism or pessimism as the best default stance for evaluating the present and predicting the future.
Now, all of this is not to say that the tonic of someone like Seneca (or Keynes, or Minksy, or Marx) is useful in response to those who claim that just because things have been going well for a long time means they are going to indefinitely in the future. But notice how I reference three post-industrial economists as useful cautioners. I think what Botton is doing here, while intersting, actually shows the silliness of those like, say, Leon Kass, who insist that all the knowledge one needs to be a properly adjusted human being comes from humanistic study of classic texts.
When Botton evokes Seneca — a thinker who really is, in the grand scheme of things, quite obscure — to come to the conclusion that “Because we are hurt most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything…we must…keep in mind at all times the possibility of dire events” I wonder why he had to go to 1st century Rome to think of something that smart people have been saying for as long as smart people have been saying things.
Especially because he’s talking about a financial crisis that isn’t all that inexplicable if one looked at modern economic history or read the work of economists and economic historians who discuss the problems of instability and asset bubbles. If everyone were more familiar with the work of Minsky, or read Paul Krugman’s columns about the housing crisis, or listened to Nouriel Roubini or, if you want to get all Great Books-y, read Marx, of all people, about the inherent instability of capitalism, and you’d have a much more useful diagnosis of the problem of over optimism thinking about financial markets than if you read Seneca. Another example of this tendency would be if you cited Burke’s work as an explanation for the invasion of Iraq would be a failure, as opposed to say, citing past American invasions/occupations or past invasions or Iraq. Sure, a telling citation of Burke will get you to the general conclusion that cultures can’t be remade overnight, but a look at the British experience in Iraq or America’s time in Vietnam would be much more useful in evaluating the specific question.
As far as I can tell, in the context of debates about policy – really anything, but especially police – the main advantage that familiarity with great works gives you is the ability to cite a wide range of thinkers that people instinctively respect but aren’t that familiar with to support a position that you already have.
Both graphs taken from Brad Delong, who gives proper credit here.
