Radical Optimism

"Things can only get better

Can only get better if we see it through

That means me and I mean you too

So teach me now that things can only get better

They can only get, they only get, take it on from here

You know I know that things can only get better"

Was 1997 as good as it gets for us?

That was the question posed at dinner a few evenings back to a group of self-identifying left leaning progressives deeply unhappy at the recent coup and the new 'government' comprised almost entirely of people so alien as to be barely recognisable as members of the same species. 

That kind of conversation tends to oscillate, sometimes at speed, back and forth along the spectrum from demoralised to utterly incandescent.  

For many of us there is a sense of profound pessimism. Increasingly people openly discuss emigrating; seeking dual nationality or an Irish passport or moving to Scotland and hoping that it might become independent. In a word fleeing a version of England which seems less and less to have anything positive to offer.

Yet the new government trumpets an obsession with optimism. Which made me think not only about whether 1997 was truly the highpoint in my lifetime but also about the uses and abuses of optimism in politics and political discourse.

In 1997 optimism too was the touchstone. Things could only get better. After 18 years in government, the tories had been trounced and seemed likely to be out of power for at least a generation. The threat of nuclear annihilation had dissipated. Arms control was being strengthened. Europe was reunited following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A Democratic President was re-elected in the US.  This was a world at least in Europe in which liberal democracy seemed to have clearly won the day; a Europe of Vaclav Havel not Viktor Orban (at least not in his current guise).

Many of these hopes were ultimately frustrated. In particular, many of us ended up on huge marches and demonstrations against war in Iraq.

Yet the version of optimism on offer in 1997 was genuine. It had identified, progressive ambitions, a version of the future that was genuinely different to the past, and a set of programmes to achieve it.

There was also positive political valency; despite the rhetoric of 'what matters is what works', there was still enough of a sense that the broad inclination of the government would generally be in a progressive direction whatever the vicissitudes of policy. There was a clear belief in the active power of the state to change lives for the better, whatever the ensuing madness of new public management theory and the associated obsessions with targetry.

So when it comes to optimism the 1997 version had distinct characteristics: a sense of direction,  goals which aimed to secure change from the past, a rational engagement with real world issues which needed to be understood in order for a practical programme of change to be put in place. In other words the rhetoric had a reality and there was broad congruence between them. Lived experience at least in large part reflected political ambition.

Whilst reflecting on all of this I happened to listen to the latest Such Stuff podcast which was intriguingly titled 'Radical Optimism' and focused on A Midsummer Night's Dream. This optimism is radical in that it indeed suggests the positive power of living in a dream state for a period as a collective experience in which the focus is on our similarities rather than our differences and in which we get to know each other in the same way as the characters change as a result of their experiences whilst dreaming. The collective experience of the groundlings in the Jacobean theatre is to be distanced from everyday life, taken out of ourselves and allowed to reflect the on the possible. Given a different perspective; not manipulated or instructed but empowered. Athens is different at the end of the play because of what happens in the dream.

This version of optimism envisages changing both the people and the world by virtue of the people reflecting on the world they wish to see.

Art in the possible.

Contrast that with the 2019 version of 'optimism'. 

Rather than A Midsummer Night's Dream the book that springs to mind is 1984.

What we are now experiencing is what might be termed the political project of optimism. Its characteristics are majoritarian and authoritarian. It demands belief in the same way as a cult. If the dream state radical optimism of the groundlings is a profoundly democratic concept; the political project of optimism is one that is associated with monarchs and demagogues - it requires acquiescence to an imposed belief system.

True optimism does not remove rationality or scepticism; it co-exists with and channels them. Authoritarian optimism treats both as bogus. Naturally, any  questioning is by definition not optimistic.

This optimism is majoritarian not collective. It does not seek to allow us to understand our differences and our possibilities. It does not want a collectively owned and developed sense of the future achieved through deliberation. It needs an 'other'. It  needs enemies who would betray it.

This version of optimism has no congruence with the real world or with lived experience. Far from using a limited dream state to think differently and change the world, the political project wants to put the world into a permanent dream state of delusion.

Fundamentally, the political project of optimism is actually not even about optimism.  It is not about thinking differently to change the world. It is not about thinking at all, simply believing or at least securing a wilful suspension of disbelief. 

So the 2019 version of optimism is profoundly pessimistic. It is a classic example of doublespeak. On the surface the UK variant may seem at odds with that practiced by the bedfellows on the other side of the Atlantic who quite explicitly base their authoritarianism on fear. Fear of losing status; making something great once again. Yet clearly both of these political projects are firmly and deliberately rooted in the past. There is no coherent sense of what the future might comprise, just high profile gestures that suggest that some aspect of the past will be reintroduced or reimposed.  

The future with which the political project of optimism actually seeks to connect is a more specific version of the past: it is nationalistic but it is also neoliberal. It seeks the absence of things. In particular the absence of regulation and of taxes. The absence of control on the powerful. This optimism is a version of nostalgia designed to usher in a turbo-charged version of the late 19th century.

It is a fraud being perpetrated on a grand scale with demonisation of anyone or anything that has the temerity to question it.  New Labour may have been criticised for stealth taxes. The political project of optimism has an entire stealth agenda to be secured through brainwashing.

But for a moment back to a more positive version of optimism. The radical optimism of the groundlings is still vibrant. We can see it in Extinction Rebellion. The most frightening and truly pessimistic aspect of our times is that not content with destroying the habitats of the animals with which we share the earth we are intent on destroying the whole planet and ushering ourselves towards extinction. The only way we can combat this is through a version of radical optimism in which we think ourselves coherently into a different future and have the strength and the bravery to take the steps required. It means facing the unpalatable head on and it requires change from us all on an almost unimaginable scale.

Not bromides and bollocks and just 'believing'. Rather, hard, rational, practical, sweeping changes that have the prospect of alleviating the worst.

Optimism may kill us but we can't live without it.

The profound question for our species and our planet is whether the political project of optimism or radical optimism emerges triumphant.