Travel Reference
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Victorian novels were not really allowed to end badly. The point of art was to cheer you
up. Pessimism and socialism went hand in hand. Miserable people are likely to be socially
disaffected. You therefore need either to get them to grin, or to deepen their misery to the
point where they are too depleted and demoralised to do anything about it. People who are
both powerful and dissatisfied are peculiarly dangerous. In general, cheerfulness is on the
side of the status quo. The battle between the left and the right is among other things one
between satire on the one hand, and good, clean, wholesome humour on the other. Good,
clean, wholesome humorists tend to find satire nihilistic, and irritably inquire what one
proposes to put in place of whatever is under fire. Bad, unclean, unwholesome humorists
should resist this moral blackmail. Satire may be negative in content, but it is supremely
positive in form. There is no criticism, however scabrous, that does not implicitly subscribe
to an alternative vision of things.
The belief that you can change the world by positive thinking is a kind of magic. It is
the sort of faith one imagines an infant might have. Perhaps there is a touch of such magic
in the cult of political correctness, for which to purge language is to purify reality. If you
cannot get rid of racial inequality for real, you can always do so vicariously by changing
the way you talk. This is not to suggest that speech and thought are unimportant. Europeans
tend to see optimism and pessimism as ways of judging situations, whereas Americans see
them as ways of creating them. If you are too despondent about your prospects, you are
unlikely to succeed. People who are sour and snappish because they have no friends are un-
likely to have any friends. Optimism, on the other hand, is a force which can fashion what
you desire, rather like a wizard's wand. Cheerful people are more likely to be successful
than despondent ones because of the way other people treat them, though they also seem a
lot more likely to end up murdered. News reports almost always describe the youthful vic-
tims of homicidal maniacs as having been zestful, bubbly, fun-loving people with hordes
of friends and a great future ahead of them. Miserable people rarely get murdered.
In this sense, both optimism and pessimism can be self-validating. For Americans, they
are ways of doing something, not just ways of describing something. Not to have what you
want is a problem, but it is also a sort of solution, since to feel your lack keenly enough
is to be moved to get what you desire. Perhaps this is what Marx had in mind when he
wrote that humankind sets itself only such problems as it can solve. Hope is a self-fulfilling
prophecy. There is a grain of truth in this, along with a heap of delusion. Feeling hopeful
is not going to catapult a destitute drug addict into the White House, though it might help
to send a rich, reformed one there. Besides, if a destitute drug addict feels good about him-
self, then he shouldn't. To feel satisfied with himself is to do himself an injustice, just as he
would if his life was faring magnificently but he continually put himself down. People who
feel bad about themselves may be eminently rational in their self-estimation. They should
not be persuaded out of it by a lot of consoling lies.
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