Speaker: Dr Bill Cooke is president of the Warrington Lit & Phil, author of eight books and editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Wellsian. He has just finished a manuscript on the theme of optimism and pessimism.
Brief Synopsis: The pace and scale of events are leading many people to a pessimistic assessment of our prospects. And yet there is a large body of literature assuring us we live in the best of times, where violence and poverty have fallen to levels unparalleled in history. So should we be optimistic or pessimistic about the future. Bill Cooke offers a new way to look at this conundrum.
Full talk synopsis:
Speaker: Dr Bill Cooke
Subject: Can we be optimistic about the future?
Bill began his Presidential Address by posing three overarching questions:-
1. Is optimism in philosophy still fit for purpose?
2. Must pessimism be seen in entirely negative terms?
3. Does a positive approach require one to be optimistic?
and posited that in each case the answer was NO. From the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the present day, humanity has assumed that it can exercise a degree of control over its environment – hence the prevalence of optimistic philosophical views during this period. In contrast, recent-day evidence that potential solutions such as quantum mechanics have now reached the limits of their scalability greatly reduces confidence in their successful application to issues such as climate change and the speed of change in AI.
Optimism smacks of a sense of entitlement which is illogical and unsubstantiated. It is prone to the best-case fallacy, extrapolating from past progress and jumping to the unwarranted assumption that it will continue in a linear fashion.
Bill made a distinction between two varieties of pessimism : cold and warm. Cold pessimism is entirely negative, often little more than thinly disguised self-interest and would appear to be a series of moods rather than a set of arguments. Like both optimists and cold pessimists, warm pessimists assume the worst case, but differ from them in formulating realistic action plans, monitoring progress against them and taking corrective action as necessary.
Warm pessimism thus occupies the middle ground between cold pessimism and optimism. All too often these two are seen incorrectly as polar opposites rather than points on a continuum, which militates against meaningful dialogue between them over this potentially fertile middle ground.