Dalwhinnie is on vacation and Rebel Yell is cycling around Ottawa a lot. The world continues to go to hell at its accustomed pace and there is little we can do about it. For my part, I am trying to spend fewer hours at the computer. A vacation involves the lessening of worldly concerns, and the Internet is a relentless nag about being concerned. I do not really care about any Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 2020. Donald Trump will crush the one eventually chosen and only wilful blindness will prevent people from seeing it and the media from saying so.
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An interesting article appeared in Quillette regarding styles of pessimissm. “Four Flavours of Doom: A Taxonomy of Contemporary Pessimism” examines the issue well. The author, Maarten Boudry, identifies four kinds of doomism. I am guilty of at least one kind.
The Nostalgic Pessimist
In the good old days, everything was better. Where once the world was whole and beautiful, now everything has gone to ruin. Different nostalgic thinkers locate their favorite Golden Age in different historical periods.
The “Just You Wait” Pessimist
Some are prepared to admit, unlike the nostalgists, that the world has improved considerably over the past two centuries. But, they maintain, this cannot possibly last. The hubris of modern man, with his naïve belief in progress, must be punished sooner or later. I call this the “Just You Wait” school of pessimism
The Cyclical Pessimist
This kind of pessimist will agree that things are going pretty well at the moment, but he doesn’t think our current run of luck is historically exceptional. Humankind has experienced periods of relative prosperity and peace before, but all have come to an end sooner or later. The course of history, for the cyclical pessimist, comes and goes like the tides or the seasons
The Treadmill Pessimist
The treadmill pessimist accepts the reality of some objective measures of progress (more wealth, less violence, longer and healthier lives), but maintains that—despite everything—we haven’t really made advances where it truly matters. Like Alice and the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, we have been running ourselves ragged only to find, when we take a breath and look around, that we are still in the same place where we started
Beaudry concludes:
Of course, we are not living in the “best of all possible worlds,” as Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss believed, but we may well be living in the best of all hitherto available worlds. If we want to create a better one, thus proving Dr. Pangloss wrong once again, the methods of science, free markets, and liberal democracy provide our best hope of succeeding. When will Westerners regain their belief in progress?
I am not an eco-doomist I am a cultural declinist and concerned about Islam’s invasion through adventitious exploitation of our lack of cultural antibodies.
Choose your doom. You can talk about one (ecological carbon fixation) but you cannot talk about the other (educational decline and islamic invasion). Why is this? Whose interest is served?