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“I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare—or, if not, it’s some equally brainy lad—who says that it’s always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping,” wrote P. G. Wodehouse in Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest.
There seems to be a great deal of pessimism about these days. You can almost picture banks of dark cloud trailing people as they walk to the bus stop or stand motionless on the escalator down to the Tube. Somewhere along the way, expecting the worst has become a regular state of mind.
An American friend recently asked whether I thought the Russians might now expand their attacks to include NATO factories producing drones and other weapons for Ukraine. “And if so,” he asked, “what would NATO’s response be? And what do you think the American response would be?”
I hedged my bets. It would depend, I replied. Was the strike deliberate? Which country had been hit? How extensive was the damage?
“So would NATO declare war?”
“Not necessarily,” I said, as if I knew.
NATO has spent years trying to avoid direct conflict with Russia. Any response would depend on the circumstances. Washington, too, would almost certainly coordinate closely with its allies while trying to avoid escalation.
What struck me afterwards was not the exchange itself, but the interesting assumption behind it. The questions seemed to begin from the premise that the most dangerous outcome was also the most probable. That seems increasingly common.
The same instinct—assume the worst, then treat it as inevitable—showed up a few days later, this time closer to home. Another friend, a Brit this time, wrote saying, “You are living through a societal collapse and don’t want to write anything about it?!” He has had the blues about Britain for some time now. “Do you realise how hungry Americans are to read about this macabre situation?” He then said: “It’s obvious all immigration restrictions are on [the] verge of being torn up and we will soon go the way of Spain. RIP the England we once knew.”
People often extrapolate from highly publicised incidents into narratives of civilisational collapse—a form of catastrophising rather than analysis.
For example, someone in the United States might post a video of a stabbing in London with the implication that the city has gone to the dogs. Yet London remains one of the world’s great cities, welcoming tens of millions of visitors each year. That is not to deny the reality of gang violence, homelessness or people waiting years for asylum decisions. But the existence of shocking incidents does not prove the broader proposition that London is unsafe. Real suffering deserves to be described accurately rather than exaggerated into civilisational collapse, because exaggeration ultimately obscures the people who actually need help.
These warnings sometimes also come with dry pops at Mayor Sadiq Khan for being Muslim, along with a spurious claim about Sharia Law for all Londoners. In other words, people’s perception of risk is often shaped more by what they repeatedly see online, or from the mouth of a president, than by what is true. One can believe immigration policy has flaws—that migration has placed greater demands on housing and public services than they can readily absorb—without concluding that Britain is collapsing or on the verge of becoming unrecognisable. Those are very different claims.
There is another American dimension that is maybe worth exploring. Many Americans consume British news almost entirely through social media clips, partisan commentators or sensational headlines. They may genuinely believe London is descending into chaos because those are the only stories that cross the Atlantic. Britons do something similar with American cities: one could watch enough footage from Chicago, San Francisco or Philadelphia to conclude that the United States is unliveable, when millions of people go about perfectly ordinary lives every day.
Discussions of artificial intelligence follow the same pattern. Some see every new model as evidence that civilisation is ending; others that a technological utopia is imminent. Both mistake uncertainty for certainty. We have developed an extraordinary ability to mistake the vivid for the typical. The exceptional event, repeated over and over on our screens, acquires the status of everyday reality. Whether the subject is war, immigration, artificial intelligence or the economy, we leap from anecdote to apocalypse.
Chesterton famously made the point that the business of journalism was often to announce that “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive. Today we might have to update this: social media persuades us that yesterday’s exception is somehow today’s norm.
Is there a little switch that can take us from the pessimistic back to the optimistic? Perhaps not, although the mind does sometimes perform curious acts of self-rescue. A distinguished Premier League football specialist told me he had wondered whether the World Cup had been so corrupt that the sheer scale of its corruption encouraged you to believe it could not possibly have been quite that corrupt. It was a bleak thought trying, by its own logic, to become less bleak.
But optimism does not require that kind of intellectual contortion. A pessimist often thinks uncertainty is bad news waiting to happen. As I see it, an optimist assumes uncertainty leaves space for good outcomes as well as bad.
We talk as though uncertainty was simply the place where Fate stores its lead pipes. In reality, it is also the source of almost every pleasant surprise.
Optimism is often mistaken for believing things will turn out well. It’s nothing of the kind. Optimism, for me at least, is the simple refusal to believe the worst possible outcome is also the most probable. It doesn’t deny war, terrorism, recessions or crime. It simply insists we should not live as though every distant rumble of thunder is the beginning of a downpour.
Wodehouse was right about Fate and the lead pipe. Sometimes it comes. The mistake is not acknowledging the lead pipe, but assuming Fate is forever lurking behind us with one in its hand. Most days she isn’t.
