Optimism & Pessimism

Someone recently told me that contrary to the opinion of most over 30, the upcoming generation gives them great hope for the future. I find this attitude better than the more prevailing attitude that the upcoming generation will somehow doom the world. The challenges of millenials and post-millenials are great, and they are a very different generation than any that has come before. They are the first generation to grow up completely within the context of the world being truly 'wired up' by the internet. I was of the generation that saw all of this happen before their eyes as they grew up, so I have some idea as to just how different the change will be. But the new generation has unique challenges, not insurmountable challenges. There is good and bad in the prevailing culture of every generation, and that is no different than this one. The new motto of "trust no one under 30" is as dumb as the old motto which was its inverse.

But I disagree that the next generation somehow gives me hope. I work with young people and see who they are, good and bad, all the time. They are no better nor worse than any other group of people, overall. They are different, not better or worse. But people will always fail you. The one persisting fact of human nature is sin. When this person said this, I was reminded of these words from Reinhold Niebuhr's BEYOND TRAGEDY (Chapter 6)

"A very special form of human self-confidence developed after the war in the so-called youth-movements. Trust the young man, they declared. Old people are shrewd, designing and cowardly, and so habituated to ancient vices that the possibility of a new creation is not in them. Trust youth. It is heroic and self-sacrificing. It brings a fresh conscience to the world, and is outraged by the evils which its elders have so long accepted. There is some truth in this estimate, as there is in every preceding estimate of human capacity. The progress of the world does depend upon the vigour and hope with which each new generation approaches age-old problems. But it is significant that all these youth movements of Europe have in this latter day been captured by the various nationalistic hysterias of the Continent. It is instructive that the most fanatic disciples of fanatic religions are young people; and that the peace of Europe is imperilled most by the young people who did not know the horrors of the last war but long for the romance of the next. What could be more pitiful than this corruption of European youth? Parents and instructors are powerless against it. Human pride has taken just another form. The form is peculiar but the pride is the old sin of Adam. This pride prevents young people from realising that their "singleness" of heart is frequently the direct consequence of their emptiness of head. Cursed be the mast that trusteth in the young man as the hope of the future.

....

Trust no man. Every man has his own capacities but also his own weaknesses. Every historic group in society has its own unique contribution to make. But there is no form of human goodness which cannot be and will not be corrupted, particularly in the day of its success. Let the wise man destroy the superstitions of the priest, and the poor man disprove the pride of the wise man; but then a new prophet must arise to convict the priest-king of the poor of the perennial sins of mankind to which he is also subject.

Ultimate confidence in the goodness of life can, in other words, not rest upon confidence in the goodness of man. If that is where it rests it is an optimism which will suffer ultimate disillusionment. Romanticism will be transmuted into cynicism, as it has always been in the world's history. The faith of a Christian is something quite different from this optimism. It is trust in God, in a good God who created a good world, though the world is not now good; in a good God, powerful and good enough finally to destroy the evil that men do and redeem them of their sins. This kind of faith is not optimism. It does not, in fact, arise until optimism breaks down and men cease to trust in themselves that they are righteous. Faced with the indubitable fact of human history that there is no human vitality which is not subject to decay and no human virtue which is not subject to corruption, hope in the meaningfulness of human existence must be nourished by roots which go deeper than the deserts of history, with their periodic droughts."

In fact all of humanity would do well to read that entire chapter of BEYOND TRAGEDY. Trust cannot be found in any particular form of humanity. Every historical situation contains within it the seeds of both achievement and destruction. No, not seeds, but rather threads. And those threads cannot be easily disentangled. I live a life of hope, knowing that in the end all will work out, somewhere, somehow, because I have experienced a God whose love is beyond all imagining, and whose very suffering is the foundation of creation and redemption, who is defeated but takes that defeat and turns it into victory, who is crucified, but then resurrected. It is God who gives me hope.

I work and fight and struggle because I know that the degree to which God suffers to give that hope is in my hands. I work hard because I know that along the way to victory the defeats that may be suffered along the way can come at a terrible cost. Humanity's ability to screw things up is something I try never to underestimate. Life can get horribly difficult on the way to the Promised Land. Thus, I fight and work and struggle, and have a generally pessimistic attitude about what MIGHT lay in wait in the future. Yet this pessimism never overtakes my optimism, and my hope that anything is possible and that what will ultimately win out is the good and the beautiful.

The truth is that I have no idea what form those hopes may take. Perhaps it isn't about this world at all, though I find that to be a rather depressing thought that flies in the face of much of the Bible. What I know is that I have encountered a reality, that I have experienced things, that I can reasonably trust to be revelations of a God whose goodness is beyond measure, and whose ability to redeem this world is real. Trusting that reality, trusting that hope, I can find a foundation for creative moral action in the world without closing my eyes to the facts of history and human nature as they actually are. I do not know how people without that experience and without faith are able to continue to hold on to both.