Blogging and optimism
Further to ruminating about the false intellectualisation of pessimism, I have been reading a collection of very short essays called What Are You Optimistic About, edited by John Brockman. The essays are by a widish range of thinkers (mostly people like Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins) and they express their optimism about things like increasing secularisation and decreasing tolerance of cruelty. The concept is probably better than the product, because the ideas are a bit repetitive and the essays often seem an excuse for grinding the same sorts of axes that their authors grind everywhere else.
Nonetheless it has made me wonder what sorts of things I am optimistic about and the first that came to mind as a possibility was the impact of blogging. I recently read the argument that blogging might play an important role in the evolution of democracy which I think is an excellent point.
My own thinking about it leans more towards CS Lewis’s hunch that ‘We read to know we are not alone’. One can only have so many books and can only guess, for the main part, what will be inside them. It’s a good system which I hope blogs and other websites will never replace, but at three o’clock in the morning there’s a unique comfort in googling a phrase like ‘sense of impending doom’ and reading that at three o’clock in the morning five years ago in Indiana, a young mother of two was sensing the same thing (and in the morning she had a smoothie with wheatgerm in it, walked the dog and seemed to feel better).
Hi Anna. I read the article and found it reassuring. I also felt proud of my Mother
who expressed the same sentiment years ago when responding to “yet another end of the world threat” She pointed out the numerous times since she was a girl this had been predicted.
We are all still here she smiled.
Such a fabulous woman, your mother. I hope she writes a book some day!