The Edgy Optimist
A bit more than a decade ago, I launched a column for The Atlantic and Reuters and then Slate. It was called “The Edgy Optimist.” The goal was to take a weekly look at what might go right, rather than focus relentlessly on all that is going wrong. Now, in a time of deep pessimism bordering on despair, I’m re-launching “The Edgy Optimist,” and I hope you will join me.
When I started the column, the prevailing mood was dark in the United States, but today, arguably, the mood is far darker, with few corners of the world immune from the belief that tomorrow will inevitably and inexorably be worse than the present. Polls of public opinion in country after county confirm that publics everywhere feel a deep sense of unease about politics, the economy, the climate and above all, the future.
In this maelstrom of negativity, optimism can feel almost offensive. It seems to fly in the face of the intense struggles so many confront. My optimism says not that we are overstating our problems but that we are underestimating our capacity to solve them, and my edginess is that there are dangers in not looking at the upsides.
This is not about firemen saving cats in trees; this is about how we shape our future. Pessimism can create its own dystopian doom loop: the despairing conviction that we lack the ability to create a better world can itself be toxic. As the mid-20th century thinker Karl Popper reminded us, not only does no one know the future but the future is itself unwritten. There are many possible futures, and we are all in the business of determining which one will come to pass. Societies that are mired in cynicism and negativity have a hard time getting out of their own way. Why start a business, have children, get an education, dream dreams if you believe that everything is going to hell? Better to get what you can while you can, live it up, and watch as Rome burns. That is not a recipe for a better world.
When I started the column in 2012, I wrote that “to deny the challenges and perils of our world, particularly the changing nature of our material and economic lives in the West and how we can ensure sustainable prosperity and growth in the years to come well, that would be foolish. But it is equally wrongheaded to dismiss arguments to the contrary as foolish. Behavioral psychologists have shown that when people feel fearful, anxious or pessimistic, warnings about the dangers that lie ahead sound smarter and wiser than alternate views that suggest more constructive outcomes.” I tried, in two years of columns, to shine light on what was working in the world and to examine what wasn’t calmly rather than hysterically.
Then, in the fall of 2020, at the height of the pandemic and at the apex of the fraught presidential election, I launched The Progress Network. The goal was to marshal voices and highlight stories that pointed us toward a future of our dreams rather than of our fears.
At any time, there are a plenitude of stories and a plethora of voices emphasizing what is going right in our present and suggesting what might go right in our future. But those tend to be overwhelmed by a social media ecosystem fueled more by fear and outrage, by hot emotions, and by the age-old human attraction to drama. There are, as Tolstoy reminded us, no novels about happy families because happy families are dull. That is also why there is no “good news” in the media and social media ecosystems; good news doesn’t get nearly as many clicks. The Progress Network, and its newsletter “What Could Go Right?” along with the podcast of the same name were meant to be an antidote.
This new version of “The Edgy Optimist” continues the work I’ve been doing in stops and starts for more than a decade. What does it mean to be an optimist in a time of pessimism? Optimism has hugely negative connotations today (oh the irony). It is seen as naive. The world around us is clearly beset by manifold problems. If optimism means that we’re supposed to ignore the evidence that those problems exist, then optimism is in fact misguided.
But there’s another way to look at optimism. The theoretical physicist David Deutsch describes optimism not as that Panglossian “we live in the best of all possible worlds,” but as the humility of Popper’s initial statement: the world ahead of us is inherently unknown, and its possibilities are infinite. Therefore, the belief of certain doom, the pessimism that says we are all headed for bad things, is in and of itself an expression of human arrogance. It is the arrogance of certainty, that future outcomes that we are still in the process of creating are inherently known and certain.
Optimism, therefore, isn’t the certainty that tomorrow will be better than today; it’s the certainty that we have the capacity to make it so. The 1950s and the 1990s in the United States were a time of over-weaning optimism, about democracy, about capitalism and about technology. If AI had been invented in the 1990s, we would be now heralding its promise to liberate humans from the drudgery of work, to end diseases forever, to solve the resource problem and climate challenges. Today, we focus primarily on the perils of AI, which makes sense given the prevailing mood. The euphoria of the 1990s was overstated and often absurd, but it bears wondering how overstated and absurd the pessimism of today is.
Had I written the Edgy Optimist in the late 1990s, I would have cautioned that the utopian visions of a perfect future were doomed to disappointment and failure, and I wrote a book called A Visionary Nation that said just that. Edgy optimism entails saying “hey, wait a minute” in the face of unreasonable optimism just as much as it entails saying that same in the maw of unremitting pessimism.
So come with me each week as I look at politics, economics, markets and technology, domestically and globally, through a different lens, through the lens of edgy optimism. Often, I will look to the past as a guide, and often as a way of saying, “Hey, take a deep breath, calm down, we’ve been here before.” Not every column will be upbeat; in fact, I expect many not to be. There are things that annoy me, agitate me, animate me with urgency, and there are things that I may want to call out. But I don’t want to give any of that too much fuel, because there’s enough outrage and fear and despair already in the ether. I also won’t avoid confronting questions that some people would rather not ask, on the left, on the right and everywhere in between and beyond. The only way to find balance is to always examine our assumptions, always challenge our deeply held beliefs.
Just as with the Progress Network, I hope that these columns begin a conversation, and I want all of you to be part of it, with me, with each other and with the people, and companies, and communities of which you are all a part. The future is our story to write, individually and collectively. Let’s write it well.
