fm-2030

 

Quotations from Optimism One: The Emerging Radicalism.

Optimism One: The emerging radicalism. (1970). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

 

Today optimism is the only rational philosophical outlook for modern individuals. We have reached a stage in our evolution at which pessimism, fatalism, nihilism are no longer valid philosophical attitudes. (11)

But what justification is there for the modern world’s philosophical pessimism? We are daily growing, evolving, transcending awesome barriers, challenging basic premises of life on this planet – our dynamism is totally optimistic. Yet most modern individuals are still too afraid, too guilt-ridden, too brainwashed, to be openly optimistic or even to acknowledge the optimism generating our dynamic advances. The philosophical outlook of the modern world remains absurdly cynical and pessimistic. (13)

The wealthiest aristocrat in the so-called Golden Age of Greece or the Renaissance had fewer comforts, fewer rights, less security, less peace of mind, less leisure, less freedom of movement, less protection from suffering and death than an ordinary worker in a modern community. There are more learned individuals in the city of Athens today than in all the three- or four-thousand-year history of Greece. (14)

Consciously or unconsciously many Westerners do not want the Old World to change. They would rather the old societies remain languid and inert. In particular they want the East to remain cross-legged and contemplative – what they call spiritual – while they go about vigorously developing better existences for themselves. (20)

But the West must not take its idle romanticizing lightly. The European or American classicist who seeks to revive the philosophies and worlds of a Buddha or a Joshua is rendering the same disservice, perpetuating the same ills, as the Washington official who supports reactionary regimes around the planet. (20)

Glorification of the past and of backwardness has damaging repercussions not only in Asia, Africa, and Latin America but also in Old World communities of the United States and Europe. In helping perpetuate the past elsewhere American and European revivalists are also helping perpetuate backwardness in their own societies. In substituting one god for another, in submitting to the passivity and fatalism of ancient theologies and philosophies, they are only perpetuating their own infantilism. (20-21)

I say let us face it. We never had glorious civilizations. No civilization of the past was great. There is nothing to glorify in the Egyptian, Hebrew, Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Arab, African, Greek, Roman civilizations. They were all primitive and persecutory, founded on mass subjugation and mass murder. All humankind’s past is sad. (22-23)

… There has been no decline anywhere in the world. Mankind has been rising from the abyss – in some areas rapidly, in others slowly. At no time in the past was mankind better off than it is today. (23)

We must not try to identify with what we pretend we were but with what we can become. If we must believe in something let us believe not in our past but in our future – our own infinite potential. (24)

All this is not a repudiation of our ancestors. It is a tribute, particularly to the great visionaries of the past who exhorted their contemporaries to move on. For us now to cling to their philosophies and social systems is to go against their revolutionary spirit. Far ahead of their times, they are now far behind ours. (25)

The greatest tribute to the past is to outgrow it. (25)

The individual [in the pre-technological world] was compelled to subordinate his self to the demands of the authoritarian family, tradition, religion, and society. Absolute obedience was required of every child. … His wife was selected for him. So too was his lifelong job which awaited him at his father’s shop or farm. It was not the people he liked and admired who led or guided him. Rather he had to submit to a long line of autocratic figures such as elders, chieftains, village fathers, emperor kings, priests, prophets, and gods. … Individuality and creativity were strictly discouraged. Self-expression did not exist. The individual seldom spoke in his own voice. Rather he mechanically echoes the powerful voice of his clan and traditions. He spoke in a falsetto. His own voice was no heard from. The self-alienation was total. (35)

City-dwellers around the world still love to romanticize rural folks. Americans for example speak of the Midwesterners’ “rugged individualism.” But what individualism? This is a silly fantasy. There is still hardly any individualism in the Midwest, in the Saar valley or in other non-urban areas of the world. As a rule, people in rural areas are conformist, orthodox, traditionalist. They rarely have opportunities to develop or assert individuality. (36)

It is to the mass society of the big city that the individual runs to escape the mass identity and anonymity of the small town. It is particularly in a big city … that the individual can best discover and assert individuality. It is among the teeming multitudes that he can most clearly hear his voice, and it is among them that his voice – his own inner voice – will get a hearing … (37)

Mass society, mass technology, big business, and giant institutions, far from squelching individuality, have actually reinforced the trend toward expanding individuality. (36)

Massiveness generates its own dynamism, eroding and destroying conformity and inertia. … Mass technology and mass society create their own diversity. … There is both the economic power and the psychological individuality to create diversity and in turn to be influenced by it. In the closed economy and closed psychology of the pre-technological world there are no choices (37-38)

New York … changes more rapidly and more totally than pre-technological mud villages. … The change is ceaseless. On the other hand small towns in Europe and America remain unchanged for generations. In Asia and Africa village mud huts stand as long as the mud holds out. When the mud collapses, a new hut, the exact duplicate of the first, is slowly put up. The conformity and the inertia are granitelike. (37-38)

The pre-technological world had an internalized mass media which totally controlled individuals. Tradition, conformity, fear, ignorance, superstition, guilt, shame – these were the mass media of the Old World. (39)

The modern person does not view his technological creations as standing over, above, or even apart from him. His self-image has evolved beyond such deflated attitudes. He views his gigantic creations as extensions of his own self – expanding, not smothering, his freedom and individuality. He does not feel powerless or reduced by them but uplifted. (40)

Another fallacy is current, particularly in the West: the Industrial Revolution and modern technology have transformed people into machines. The fact is that people had been turned into machines long before the Industrial Revolution. … The struggle for survival reduced people to cogs in the impersonal assembly line of tribalism, authoritarianism, and rigid traditionalism. Robotlike, entire societies arose at exactly the same hour, dressed in the same manner, ate the same foods, drank the same drinks, lived in the same kind of lodgings, retired at the same hour. They used the same equipments, plowed and sowed and harvested in the same manner, used the same irrigation methods, worked the same hours, the same days, the same seasons. Entire societies worshipped the same gods, recited the very same words of prayer, went through the same rituals, harbored the same beliefs, the same fears, the same superstitions, the same expectations. (41-42)

Even today take any pre-technological town in, say, southern Spain or Ecuador – all the local people dress alike, think alike, sound alike. They speak in set formulas, give stock answers, mechanically recite traditional formalities. In backward communities of the Middle East … teachers repeat the same lessons decade after decade. Cobblers, carpenters, blacksmiths, cooks, make a living only if they mechanically repeat age-old patterns. Scholars and the learned are those who can faithfully recite classics. (42)

It was our hapless ancestors who functioned most like robots and machines. There was no escape from the assembly line. Deviation brought outright rejection, punishment – even death. (44)

… Existence was most mechanical and robotized when there were no machines. The machine has enabled the individual to become less machinelike. The machine is also helping humanize us. (44)

Those who attack the machine and modern technology are fighting the wrong battle. They are not helping to eradicate dehumanizing and robotizing social conditions whose roots are pre-technological. (45)

Technology is not the exclusive accomplishment of the West but an outgrowth of all humankind’s struggles and cumulative efforts. (46)

For us, the future-oriented, the machine does not have stigmatized associations. … We see the machine as warm and reassuring and uplifting. To us it is not cold and dehumanizing. We are not afraid of the machine. It poses no threat. It promises hope. (46)

In today’s technological communities, mechanical and depersonalizing influences still persist, not because of machines but because of repressive social, economic, and political traditions that die hard. (46-47)

By enhancing communication and transportation, variety and individuality, comfort and leisure, and by greatly reducing drudgery and suffering, modern machines are helping humanize us. (47)

We are outgrowing Puritanism, secretiveness, and rigidities of the past. In the year 2010 privacy will have far less meaning because shame and guilt and pathological fears will have been greatly reduced. It will not matter to people if their conversation is overheard, their finances publicly disclosed, or their lovemaking watched. (51)

In the Old World the individual hides himself from himself. He also builds walls around his family, wife, village. (52)

… The pre-technological person lacked not only individuality and privacy … but for many of the same reasons he also lacked individual identity. He was – and still is – totally submerged in the identity of his family, clan, tribe, village, sect. (54)

In the Old World … a woman too is … an appurtenance to the man. Until about a hundred years ago, in some Asian societies many a woman was even buried alive when her husband died. Without her husband she had no meaning. … In the Old World the concept of a free woman unappended to a family or husband does not exist. To be a free woman is to be a whore. (56)

In recent decades the steady rise of technology and the loosening of traditionalism and authoritarianism have enabled the individual in large urban communities of the world to begin shedding his inherited group-identity and assert his own individual-identity. The individual has become more and more mobile, fluid, and autonomous. . . . But now in the most modern communities of the world even individual-identity is losing its relevance. (58)

…In modern technological societies’ rapidly expanding individualism, mobility and fluidity are rendering the whole concept of identity obsolete. Identity is increasingly elusive and superfluous. As a rule, the young modern has no strong kinship ties. He does not belong to a clan or tribe or town or state or even country. He does not have a fixed profession, a fixed political position, a fixed morality, or a fixed philosophy of life. (59)

In the Old World and even in the industrial era an inability to remain settled in one place and committed to a lifelong profession, religion, or ideology was condemned as fickle, unstable, and traitorous. In our fluid age it is often a sign of the dynamic, evolving individual. It is a sign of fluidity – and fluidity defies identification. (60)

What is your lifelong profession? What is your philosophy of life? What is your party allegiance? Your ethnic group? Where is your permanent home? Your homeland? These are all increasingly irrelevant. They presuppose a certain stability and continuity. (60)

Non-identity is the new emancipation of the individual. An identity crisis exists only in those who have not adjusted to the new era of instant telecommunication and interplanetary travel – to the new liquidity, the new pace and rhythm. … They fail to see that the unstructured new pace, so disruptive to their generation, is exhilarating and stimulating to the modern youth who finds the structured life and the slow pace of the Old World disruptive. They do not see that the new rapidity and fluidity are not evidences of haste or tension, any more than the slow pace of the Old World denoted tranquility. (62)

. . . There is less alienation in modern technological societies than ever before, that far from living in an age of increasing alienation we are actually living in an age of increasing integration – integration at all levels of society. It is necessary to emphasize that at no time in the past were people less alienated from their parents, their children, the other sex, their students, their teachers, their employers, their leaders and minority groups, than they are in today’s most modern technological societies. (67)

The modern youngster can well do without a fixed family. It is the family that is having problems surviving in today’s world. The concept of family is giving way to a new concept – the community of mankind. Wherever we make a contact we have found a brother or sister. Our multinational friends are rapidly taking the place of the old kinship ties. We are well on our way to outgrowing family and home and homeland. We are daily reaching out to embrace more and more of the world. (74)

Today’s relations between men and women are increasingly fluid. But within this fluidity is more rapport and communication than ever before. (74)

Those who regard the disintegration of the family, increase in “promiscuity,” and resistance to marriage as evidences of alienation are using outdated values and criteria. They fail to see that marriage is becoming an anachronism in a New World of increasing psychological, sexual, social, and economic freedoms, endless alternatives and varieties. (78)

What does a “stable marriage” or a “stable home” mean in a world itself no longer stable? … Parents and child psychologists who still insist on a stable home for children are only fooling themselves. There is no longer such a thing as stability. Stability is an Old World condition. Children no longer need stable homes because as adults they will not live in a stable world. (79)

Any kind of exclusivism in human relations is inherently disruptive and destructive and leaves the individual vulnerable to considerable conflict and pain. (80)

To survive we no longer need tightly knit loyalties and commitments. On the contrary, to survive and evolve in our fast moving exploding world, we now need individuals who are fluid, resilient, dynamic, spontaneous, able to move along. Those who are prone to fixate and remain bogged down in dependent neurotic commitments will not fare well. (80)

The fluid relationship is not necessarily superficial and loveless. On the contrary, as a rule there is more integration, more humanness and mature love in these fluid relationships than in the static involvements of the past. (84)

People have never felt close to nature. They were always deeply estranged from it. In fact the further back you go in history the more alienated from nature people were because the further back you go the more you find they were at the mercy of nature. … How could they have felt at peace with nature? They were involved in a relentless struggle with it. A struggle for survival. (87)

A New Yorker feels closer to nature than a peasant of the Old World. He feels closer because he is less threatened by nature and therefore able to enjoy its positive aspects without being as helplessly exposed to its destructiveness. Moreover modern persons have greater leisure and inner freedom to enjoy nature. (90)

Nature is destructive. So long as its destructiveness has not been completely overcome, mankind will be estranged from it. (93)

Those who rhapsodize about nature should pay a little visit to a jungle. They should see firsthand what they idealize. This is where they will find the rule of force at work. Might makes right. Dog eat dog. Here they will find wild beasts tearing out each other’s flesh. A lion gorging itself on a struggling zebra, a serpent devouring a bird, the terrorized cries of an animal being pursued, the agonized shrieks of an animal being devoured. Only those who have witnessed at firsthand the daily holocaust in a jungle can grasp this. Here in one day there is more anxiety, more rapacity, more terror, more destruction and violence, than in all the ghettos of the world combined. This is nature at its most natural. (93-94)

Naturalists, lovers of “wild life,” and other purists who insist that nature must not be tampered with are all smart enough to live in cities. (94)

The resentment some express over mankind’s increasing control over nature reveals a deep cynicism about mankind itself. They think they would rather be at the mercy of “mother nature’ than at the mercy of their fellow people. I have greater faith in people’s potential for wisdom and humaneness than in the unfeelingness of nature. (94)

So long as nature, even in the smallest ways, makes decisions for us, we are not free. (95)

We have been mired in quarrels with our fellow people for so long that we do not yet fully realize that our enemy is not our fellow creature but nature, of which our own destructiveness is a product. (95)

Our estrangement from nature will end only after we have remade nature. … We must divest nature of all its ugliness, its cruelties, its tyranny. We have been attempting this from primordial times. We will continue to alter ourselves and nature till no sea can drown us, no earthquake can bury us, no heat can burn us, no cold can freeze us, no fall can maim us, no violence can destroy us. (95)