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still poised, the pile of topics still in place, and the area around him still utterly deserted. I
turned my back on this poignant sight and strode quickly away. The phrase “Barns of Indi-
ana” is still capable of waking me up at night with a guilty start. In my dreams I rewind the
spool of history, return to the bookstore, stride genially up to the little man's table and buy
a dozen copies of his topic. But the truth is that I shamefully backed off, and will never be
able to undo this despicable act.
There is, to be sure, a positive side to American starry-eyedness. In the end, what matters
in human affairs is not optimism or pessimism but realism, and it is sometimes realistic to
be hopeful. Hope is not necessarily naive, and Americans are indeed superb at problem-
solving. They are resourceful, ingenious, inventive and constructive. It is just that you can
be all these excellent things without suppressing the truth that all human beings finally
come to utter ruin. In fact, these virtues are all the more commendable if you can practice
them while staring failure candidly in the face. Otherwise one buys one's cheerfulness on
the cheap. The early American Puritans were aware that a virtue which does not wrestle
with negativity is worthless.
What one might call pathological optimism is actually a form of weakness, despite its
square-jawed grin and steady gaze. It reflects a fear of confronting loss, and loss is far
more central to being human than accomplishment. As such, it is just as unrealistic as the
professional pessimism of so many of the British, for whom gloom is a kind of religious
obligation. Americans keen on self-motivation are warned by specialists in the field who
visit their companies not to read newspapers or watch TV news because of their negative
content. Thinking about the slums of Mumbai might ruin their chances of a raise. Because
there is not much they can do about famine in Ethiopia, such events are offensive to the
cult of the will. Optimism of this kind is as much a disavowal of reality as psychosis, if
somewhat less spectacular. The United States has disastrously failed to exploit the power of
negative thinking. It has refused to take the point of Bertolt Brecht's dictum: “Scepticism
can move mountains.”
The British, by contrast, have no such credulous trust in the magic of the mind. They
are unwavering in their assurance that problems, like sin for Evangelicals or alcohol for the
AA, are phenomena in the face of which we are entirely helpless. If an American and a
Briton were together in a prisoner-of-war camp, the Briton would fade gradually away with
a plucky little grin and the American would escape. There are, of course, plenty of Americ-
ans who refuse the lie of the omnipotent will. If there is the general's view of how the war
is going, there is also that of the medical orderly who has to mop up the blood. Working
people, for example, tend to be more realistic than their superiors, since they are closer to
the ground. For those further from the facts, optimism is easy, but realism is fatiguingly
hard.
One reason why Americans are encouraged to be hopeful is that gloom is felt to be polit-
ically subversive. In this, too, the United States is a thoroughly Victorian kind of place.
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