I believe human beings have the capacity to change
Optimism, just about
I am not, for all my manifold shortcomings, a man who is unaware of his faults. Chief amongst these are arrogance and a tendency to underestimate others. Of course, I’m aware that even saying that I’m aware of my own arrogance might itself be interpreted as a note of arrogance.
Anyway, how does my haughtiness manifest itself? It was very noticeable back in my comedy days. Often I’d see a new act at one of their earlier gigs and think ‘They’ve got nothing, they’ll never make it’ or, even worse, ‘I’m way better than them.’ (Comedians only really have two reactions to other ones: ‘Bastard’, or ‘No threat to me.’) Then I’d catch the same act six months to a year later and find their comedy improved beyond all measure and them well on the way to success.
It’s that’s instinctive arrogance of mine, that ability to write people off, which is in a competitive field my greatest character flaw.
Yet of course this underestimation contains within itself a seed of optimism. It means that, from what I’ve witnessed, people genuinely have the capacity to change. To improve, to surprise others and even themselves in what’s within them. And I think I do really believe that in my heart; I do not believe that humans are fated to remain as we are. I believe that we are mutable creatures, who can invent ourselves anew and that is why, whatever my own struggles, I think I am at heart an optimist. In Geneva, I looked out across the lake and realised I was no sort of Calvinist.
Is everyone beyond a certain age by default an optimist? After all, we’ve all had plenty of time to get off the ride by now. I am always beguiled by the life of Samuel Beckett, who concluded that existence was a lamentable affair quite early on and continued to live it until the ripe old age of 83. Indeed by all accounts increasingly agreeably; after all, if ever a man was born for old age.
Meanwhile the beatific Keats, full of joy and relish in beauty, conked out unwillingly aged 25. What Keats would have done with another 58 years to live! At a shallow glance pessimists, from Schopenhauer to Cioran, seem to be a fairly long-lived species, in the same way as Peter Brook remarked on the healthiness of tragedian actors. Perhaps there is something comforting in the stability of glass-half-emptyism, where nothing can really shake your view that life is never worth the candle.
It seems to me that optimists are inherently exposing themselves to a wider range of emotional outcomes. After all, if you do have hope that things can improve, that things can work out, you open yourself up to the risk of being genuinely hurt when they don’t. This is where pessimists chime up that they expect the worst so are never disappointed. But of course pessimists are deeply disappointed, or they wouldn’t have become pessimists in the first place; pessimism is, in effect, romanticism curdled by disappointment, the burnt embers of an open-hearted embrace of the world. Pessimists are, in Kafka’s words, failing to avoid the one sorrow they could have avoided, the sorrow of holding themselves back from the sorrows of this world.
We all know the disappointment of, at a time when our own lives are going well, coming back to find our parents unchanged. Stuck in the same old quarrels, the same resentments, the same disputes they want to air but not resolve. The friend going on about the same old woman who’s long since moved on. The woman who embroiders a fantasy of redemption around a man who takes her for granted. People who’ve made their stasis into a virtue. Of course, stability is a good thing, but stability within sub-optimal circumstances is often a sad and deliberate choice. It’s for this reason that I tell my friends that happiness is always the braver option; happiness risks.
At the same time, we all know people who finally made the change. The person who has at last left the stale relationship. The one who eventually launched their business. The person who after all this time got that novel done. Even, in a social sense, the football team which has after 129 years broken its trophy duck. Any instance where someone has refused to let their old ways and their old circumstances define them.
And one optimistic move begets another. The person who has cleared out one thing which was holding them back out whatever misplaced loyalty is liberated to do it again and again, to become bolder and more efficient. We talk a lot about the pain of heartbreak, but what about the joy of healing from it? There’s a beautiful if lonely strength to realizing you can survive almost anyone leaving; you just have to accept pragmatism’s triumph over romanticism.
For good or ill, the absence of other people is survivable.