Humans are unrealistically optimistic about the world and the future; we systematically underestimate our chances of experiencing unpleasant diseases, going through a divorce, or losing a loved one. About the only people who don’t see the world through the lens of this “optimism bias” are the clinically depressed. Depressive realism – the name given to the relative immunity of the melancholic to this illusion – suggests that we see reality clearly only at the cost of our mental health. This presents psychologists with an interesting dilemma. We are always caught between the delusion of wearing rose-tinted spectacles, and the debilitating affect of taking them off. Should we prioritise accuracy or happiness?
Sumit Paul-Choudhury comes down firmly on the side of optimism in this lively exploration of glass-half-full thinking and its relationship with social progress. What initially feels like it might be a self-help book turns into an eye-opening history of the idea of optimism, before exploring its potential to help us address social and ecological challenges. The tension in our relationship to optimism, between its motivating and its delusional possibilities, is present throughout.
The risk of a book called The Bright Side is that it evokes the farcical good cheer of Eric Idle’s character at the close of The Life of Brian, leading a trivial little sing song among a group of people who have been crucified. This is always a problem when seeking to promote optimism in the face of significant geopolitical and ethical challenges. It can seem perverse, amid ongoing suffering and uncertainty, to maintain that things will go well.
Paul-Choudhury is a science journalist and a man who has borne the premature loss of his wife to ovarian cancer. He is serious about optimism, but he is never glib or Pollyannaish. His book is as much a careful examination of the misuses of optimism as its uses. Here ideas are picked up, explored, and critiqued. Different perspectives are presented, and what unfolds is a convincing case that, while we might frequently feel we have grounds for pessimism, a particular form of optimism is the only morally serious choice.
This comes clearly to the fore when Paul-Choudhury is paraphrasing a prison letter of Gramsci’s; for “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” he suggests “the ability to see the world for what it is and press on anyway. That seems like a skill worth cultivating. But can we cultivate it?” Ordinarily at this point you might expect a how-to chapter, replete with affirmations and exercises to help the reader get into the required head space, but Paul-Choudhury’s version of optimism is something closer to a virtue than to a mood or state. Optimism can be cultivated perhaps, and wrestled with, but not easily or immediately won.
As such, The Bright Side’s wisdom is allowed to emerge slowly, as it weaves back and forth through different historical and philosophical approaches. Leibniz offers a starting point: the German polymath argued that, because God was omnipotent and benevolent, and could have created any number of different worlds, the world we in fact inhabit must be the best of all possible worlds, or the optimal world. This doesn’t mean that our world is flawless, only that, given the constraints of the complex creatures that populate it, it is as good as it could’ve been. Leibniz’s argument is not a simple endorsement of blithe good cheer. There is something tragic in its acceptance of human imperfection, but that didn’t stop it being mocked by Voltaire, whose satirical Professor Pangloss (a stand in for Leibniz) in Candide became a byword for a kind of reflexive optimism in the face of grim reality.
Versions of this back and forth recur whenever there are people advocating for optimism. It is easy to pillory the optimistic, easy too to occupy the position of world-weary know-it-all who refuses to be sucked in by tempting illusion. But that way lies cynicism, and in his career as former editor of the New Scientist, Paul-Choudhury has seen some of the corrosive impact that attitude can have on our ability to effect change. Take Greta Thunberg, in many ways a figure of optimism and inspiration. She, and other climate activists, have at times seemed to foster a kind of cynicism about the possibility of change, so pervasive is their hostility to the political mainstream. Or Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam; Paul-Choudhury cites a document written by Hallam that describes in lurid, almost pornographic detail how civilisation will fall apart as a result of climate change.
For Paul-Choudhury, Thunberg and Hallam risk being political pessimists, so interested in savage rhetoric that they threaten the very change they seek to bring about. As one model for the kind of optimism he is interested in, Paul-Choudhury offers instead Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian-American biochemist who won the Nobel prize for her work on mRNA vaccine technology. Even the medically unqualified among us now recognise the significance of mRNA vaccine technology in helping to mitigate the 21st century’s first major pandemic, but for much of Karikó’s career, her colleagues failed to appreciate her work. At one point she was unceremoniously ejected from the university that employed her, due to an inability to obtain funding for her research. She pressed on regardless.
This is one of the great pleasures of The Bright Side. Paul-Choudhury has an eye for interesting characters and for the intriguing, sometimes weird projects that mobilise them. So, along the way, we meet advocates of the voluntary human extinction movement; a philosopher who argues that we would be better off never having been born, and the mid-ranking Soviet soldier (Stanislav Petrov), who averted nuclear war by correctly and optimistically interpreting a computer signal as a system error rather than as a US nuclear missile launch. Presented with a choice about how to interpret events, the pessimists in this cast of characters assume that we are in a negative possible world; the optimists assume we are in a positive one.
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From Leibniz’s argument that we must be in the best possible world, to the modern conception of the multiverse (which assumes the existence of infinite and endlessly varying parallel worlds), Paul-Choudhury is interested in the notion of possibility, and of populating our imaginations with desirable futures. Multimillion-dollar scientific ventures with a single grand purpose are sometimes called moonshots. Paul-Choudhury suggests we employ the concept of “multiverse shots”; scientists and governments prioritising research projects to open up as yet unknown possibilities in the many possible versions of our future.
Paul-Choudhury’s optimism is rooted in the idea of cautiously investing because you know that things could be better, rather than recklessly assuming that they will be. He presents a fascinating and wide-ranging argument that is hopeful but never trite or self satisfied. With multiple expanding international conflicts, an ongoing global climate crisis, and the advent of Trump’s second term in the White House, it is a perspective that will be sorely needed in 2025.
