Consider "hopeful skepticism" as a default attitude

In My Humble Opinion
1

Cynicism is rife, on these boards and elsewhere. I don’t want to get into why, or whether it is justified. I have frequently felt cynical at times, not just about politics, and not just recently either.

I read an article today on NPR, linked below, about a different sort of attitude which the subject of the article is calling “hopeful skepticism,” and it really strikes a note with me. Here is a quote from the article:

Zaki’s antidote to cynicism is what he calls “hopeful skepticism.” Though people sometimes confuse skepticism with cynicism, Zaki says they are different.

“Skeptics think like scientists and they don’t imagine or assume that people are great or that people are terrible. They wait for evidence to figure out who they can trust and who they can believe in,” Zaki said. “Because of that, they learn more quickly and are able to adapt to new situations.”

There is, of course, lots more. I hope folks will read this and consider it.

2

One of the things that helped me get through the aftermath of 2016 were a few words by a naturopath I was seeing. She said “None of us could imagine that that guy could ever become president. If something that crazy can happen, something crazy positive could also happen.” The one upside of chaos is that anything can happen and it might not all be bad.

3

This kind of thinking equates the ease of wantonly tearing things down for the yucks with the difficult work of building up a workable system of governance and democratic institutions. And the reality is that “this guy” became president because “None of us could imagine” such a thing happening, just as we now have people saying not to worry because the courts and Constitution will keep it all in check even though there is no reason to believe that to be the case.

It is certainly healthy to be cautiously optimistic, or in bad times to hang on to threads of hope even as the fabric unravels, but the kind of child-like trust that some hero figure will come along and reverse all of the stupid mistakes and gullibility that got us to this point, or that AI will solve climate change, et cetera, is a symptom of the actual problem of not taking responsibility and facing the objective reality of bad things happening around us.

Stranger

4

“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”* is how the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937, put it. Considering he spent 10 years in Mussolini’s prisons, you gotta give him credit.

*that’s how it’s usually rendered in English

5

As a philosophy, “hopeful skepticism” might be worthwhile in a general sense. But if this is about Trump, let me say that as an antidote to what happened on November 5, nope.

I recall that after the shock of 2016, I engaged in some correspondence with folks who were even more despondent over the election than I was. I pointed out that a number of advocates of important causes, like Al Gore in the cause of climate change mitigation, were being welcomed at Trump Tower to make their case as the new administration began to take shape. This was the “hopeful skepticism”.

It turned out that Trump just loved to have supplicants pleading with him, because it fed his pathological narcissism, even more so when he subsequently exercised the power to do the opposite of everything they wanted. And Trump 2.0 is shaping up to be ten times worse than the first one.

“Hopeful skepticism” may be a useful philosophy in rational times, but these are not the times we currently live in.

6

“A hopeful skeptic to me is not somebody who is naive, not somebody who thinks that things are great or will be great,” he said. “But rather someone who’s open to learning about what people are really like and using that common ground to try to craft a future that more of us want.”

So, all our political leaders and billionaire oligarchs are just misunderstood, and really have the average person’s interests and welfare at heart. Bring on the revolution.

7

It’s not about Trump.

There have never been rational times. If the times were rational, we wouldn’t need to think much about this kind of thing. Do you think that cynicism gets you where you want to go? If not, do you have an alternative to offer?

I don’t understand how you could twist the message in this article to your outcome. It says to look at the evidence and judge accordingly. If you have evidence (and we do) that some people are despicable, despise them. This isn’t rose colored glasses that are being espoused here. This is about actual realism, which also means not always assuming the worst before you know enough to judge.

8

Yes. Cynicism is warranted when some aspect of the social order is so fundamentally broken that nothing but a foundational change from the ground up is going to fix it, and hopeful skepticism in such cases is just tilting at windmills.

Three examples come to mind: One is any hope that America will ever have meaningful gun control without a fundamental change in the prevailing gun culture. Another is any hope that America’s health care system can be brought in line with the rest of the developed world in terms of costs and overall outcomes without revamping the entire system and basing it on a model with a fundamental philosophy of universality and regulated fees.

The third is a bit harder to define, particularly since you say this discussion is not about Trump, and Trump is temporary anyway. What is deeply concerning is that more than 77 million Americans thought he’d be just a fine president, or at least better than Kamala Harris. It’s the adoring crowds that pack his rallies and cheer at the imbecilic things he says, and has been saying for a decade, particularly in the runup to this election. It is, in a word, the problem of an uninformed fascist ignorati easily duped by demagogues and a flood of disinformation from right-wing media and the cesspool of social media.

My purpose here isn’t to debate any of these things. It’s to answer the question of when cynicism is warranted and what the alternative is. Sometimes there’s no alternative to realism, and the realistic fact here is that none of the three things I mentioned are likely to change much without a major sea change in the American zeitgeist. It’s true that there’s been a big positive change in the area of gay rights, but I suggest that this was possible largely because it didn’t affect the majority of citizens, not because everyone suddenly became enlightened, though some did. Look what’s happened to abortion policy, which does affect a large segment of the population; it’s suddenly regressed 50 years.

9

‘Trust but check’ is a saying I’ve lived by recently.

If something looks fishy, don’t assume the worst immediately. But if your suspicions end up being confirmed, cut off contact at once and don’t give second chances.

I’ve found it a relief to give people a fair opportunity to prove that they are genuinely good. I’ve also found it a relief to carry on without looking back if they prove to be not worthy of my trust. Fewer nerve-wracking “what-ifs” in both cases.

10

I think you’re missing @Elmer_J.Fudd’s point, or at least interpreting it differently than I did. It’s not about advocating for a more optimistic prediction of the future. It’s about questioning the idea that we can predict the future.

11

The ignorance, intolerance and and anti-intellectual direction that the US and much of the western world has taken is much, much worse than I could have imagined 10, 20 years ago. Cynicism has had a hot streak of correct predictions.

I think however that there is an important distinction still to make; between cynicism and acceptance.

12

If cynicism is the philosophy, then nihilism is its practice. Because no matter what we do or why we do it, we can’t do anything without making it an ego trip.

We could be expected to be disappointed, since the demographic of the SDMB be born in the afterglow of victory in WWII, American supremacy, and that brief burst of Liberalism between Nixon and Reagan.

Since the 80s, Stoicism has re-emerged as a working philosophy for people who’ve had to realize that, as average persons, they have ever decreasing control over their lives in this era. Self-reflection instead of self-indulgence; instead of the nihilism (or, more commonly, hedonism/materialism), or the many, many other false value systems where people seek refuge.

Reinforcing the nihilism is a disappointment with one’s fellow human beings (currently the Trump voters, but there’s always some badge of failure in fashion). Disappointment… compared to one’s own clear-thinking self. (But then, one always knows the down and dirty about oneself, and that constantly nags).

Happiness is not man’s natural state, but hope is our constant condition, a paradox long recognized. Also long recognized but little practiced is our need to like each other, as a way out of self-inflicted misery.

“Hopeful skepticism” may just be an attempt to walk two paths at once, while pretending to walk the right path; however cautiously. In rejecting nihilism I only acknowledge that the right path’s destination is something a long, long away that I may not even understand. But disliking humans because of their propensity for beguilement is not “skepticism,” it’s just misanthropy.

“Above, below, all around are the movements of the elements. But the motion of virtue is in none of these: it is something more divine, and advancing by a way hardly observed it goes happily on its road.” - Marcus Aurelius

13

Well, that’s evidently true. But I think the febrile hope that things are going to magically turn around and that “something crazy positive could also happen” is so unlikely as to be magical thinking. Even without Trump taking the nation backwards in social progress and sideways into autocracy, we are facing serious, potentially existential threats to industrial society that no one is really taking effective measures to avert, and this development is going to both make those threats worse and even retard our insight as to how bad they actually are. There is no guardian angel that is suddenly going to emerge that will fix these problems even if Trump keels over a bucket of KFC and JD Vance suddenly flowers into a progressive-minded advocate for science and rationality that is the contraposition of his current persona.

Stranger

14

The problem is that Trump and The Bad Times didn’t just “happen”-they were deliberately forced on us by miseducation, media manipulation and politics, and the same are in place to absolutely prevent any counter measures from just happening on its own. “Hopeful skepticism” is a joke, in my opinion, because it depends on an imaginary balance. If a useful balance is to be had, it will have to be forceful, deliberate, long-term, and with the knowledge that it will be actively (and very nastily) opposed.

15

“Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect” - Santayana

AFAIAC, a healthy skepticism should be one of one’s default settings in life.

And hope: it all depends on what one’s hope is in. Anything in this fallen world can fail us. My hope and trust are in the love of the Lord which is beyond all understanding. Mind you, I’m not giving up on this world, or this country, yet. Far from it.

16

My default is “Il faut cultiver notre jardin”.

17

The anticipatory angst is killing me.

My default is:

“Get this party started.”

I expect to be eating a lot of Kummerspeck (grief bacon).

18

I’ve noticed a lot of people professing Stoic worldviews recently, whether they are aware of their origins or not. It seems to me that Stoicism has seeped (back?) into the public sphere, in the West at least, in the past few years.

On the one hand, I can definitely see the appeal, and to be frank, I’ve found that applying the Stoic outlook in my daily life has certainly made me more… serene, perhaps.

On the other hand, the paranoid in me cannot help but wonder whether this trend could be a concerted effort by the powers that be to neuter opposition. If there’s a consiracy theory I could consider seriously, this is the one.

19

Realism is good I think. But there’s a very human tendency to react to emerging fascism with facile cynicism, and that’s lame. A variety of facile cynicism is militant pussydom: of course we’re not going to have free speech in 2026; of course Trump will invade Greenland; of course the Federal Reserve will be corrupted.

All of the preceding could happen. But facile cynics are basically obeying in advance, with warmed over virtue signaling ladeled on top. My personal preference is for bravado, summarized in the expression, “Not without a fight”. TPM’s Josh Marshall talks about optimism as a moral choice, as distinguished from a forecasting method: the latter can be pollyanna.

One crisis at a time. Addressing the underlying problems of industrial society will call for creativity, realism, and the slow boring of hard boards. It’s a very different fight.

So match the temperament to the times. Timothy Snyder:

  1. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.

If intermingling happens, I’ll ditch the bravado and consider other mechanisms.

20

The problem is that we’ve been kicking that can down the road so long (and now, for at least four more years, and likely indefinitely) that there is no more time for “one crisis at a time”. We’ve tacitly signed off on a +2 °C mean global temperature above the pre-Industrial baseline, likely before 2050 (and maybe significantly earlier), and probably something around +3.6 °C by end of century if not before. There is effectively nothing we can actually do to stop this because the world has given a collective shrug and just mocks the “Just Stop Oil” protestors for throwing soup on paintings (which is pretty dumb but at least gets them in the news, unlike the legions of climatologists and cryosphere scientists projecting increasingly dire warnings that are totally ignored as a kind of freak sideshow to all of the oil and gas deals going on that the COP meetings) but we should at least be taking measures to improve resilience and maintain knowledge and capability in the increasingly likely collapse of industrial society.

But, of course, we aren’t because “One crisis at a time”, and we are frankly focused on the wrong and mostly manufactured crises of culture wars and immigration, not climate change, erosion of scientific literacy, or applying an economic model with a tag line other than “Drill, baby, drill!” Basically, we are completely fucked at this point, not for a want of a nail but for melting down all the nails to make a crown for an idiot king.

Stranger