The cup really is Half-Empty

To deny the essence of rationality - causality - for the sake of being ‘positive’ or ‘optimistic’ is to embrace the return of superstition and the supernatural to public discourse.

To be an optimistic soul with a ‘positive outlook’ is held to be one of the great virtues of the age, particularly in a country as sunny and philistine as this one. Accordingly, we are continually admonished that the correct attitude to life is to see the symbolic glass as half-full, rather than half empty. This observation is frequently accompanied by an irritating aura of smugness, the speaker (or writer) oozing palpable self-satisfaction at having offered some profound philosophical insight, rather than a tired old cliché best left on a bus ticket!

Well, I’ll be positive here and acknowledge that the cranial cavities of many of the people who regularly cite this little homily are also half full!

Beyond being a version of the agreeably banal truism that it’s best to look on the bright side, what does this observation have to offer us? One: it's a key tenet of aggressors and totalitarians everywhere, and two: it often embraces a logical refusal to acknowledge both causality and our responsibility to be skeptical and cautious.

The Nazis were an optimistic bunch. They used to regularly upbraid the German populace to brighten up and get with the program. A Good German should not dwell on the negative side bemoaning street-thuggery, tyranny, racism, concentration camps, and the likely consequences of large-scale war - but instead should focus on the glories of the coming Reich and the bright opportunities afforded by the lebensraum it was affording itself by force. Cue unprecedented violence and disaster.

It’s kind of democratic (‘a Coalition’) with a bit of Nietzsche thrown in...

Fast-forward a few decades to ‘The Coalition of the Willing'; now, there’s a positive kind of name! It’s kind of democratic (‘a Coalition’) with a bit of Nietzsche thrown in (‘of the Will’). It’s the Can-Do team! And what could they do? Save the world, bring Democracy to the Middle-East, and be home by lunch time. Only the moaning minnies and the ratbags doubted it. Even hitherto-lefties like Christopher Hitchens wanted to be Can-Do guys. And did they all do it? Well, no - the ratbags were right, as it happened!

Let’s think of some other Can-Do teams - Enron comes to mind. If ever there was an institution that could have benefited from a little old-fashioned, skepticism, this was the one. These forward-thinking giants were consistently lionized by the corporate media until they inevitably disappeared up their own fundamentals. But the Enron philosophy was really a triumph of infantilism - if you really believe hard enough, you can fly! -and this notion still has a disturbingly tenacious grip on the corporate world.

Let’s go back and look at the glass question another way. Imagine I’m standing by the banks of the Darling River here in Australia, holding a glass that is half full (or empty) of water in the midst of the worst drought in our history. Surely if I’m in any way entitled to see myself as a rational manager of limited resources I must insist that the glass is half empty! To do otherwise is to deny the direct causal link between our history of overly-optimistic consumption and the disaster we now stare in the face.

To deny the essence of rationality - causality - for the sake of being ‘positive’ or ‘optimistic’ is to embrace the return of superstition and the supernatural to public discourse.

We might hold, for instance, to the chipper notion that we can continue to extravagantly burn fossil fuels, and then make the transition to a nuclear economy because at some unspecified date human ingenuity will enable us to scrub carbon out of the atmosphere, or find a way to dispose of millions of tonnes of long-lived toxic waste. This is nothing less than a species of idiocy! To hold that technology must evolve to fix our ills as required is a faith, not a science. Faith says "We’ll find a way out, let’s keep going, our hope will light our way forward!Boring old Rationality says "When on a dark night and the very brink of disaster, until such time as a route to safety can be clearly illuminated we should stop treading the path!"

One of the most blackly amusing features of the age is that these insuperably reckless ideas are put forward by people who claim to be conservatives!

Indeed, one of the most blackly amusing features of the age is that these insuperably reckless ideas are put forward by people who claim to be conservatives! When the glass is raised the true conservatives say that if it’s already half-way it’s only going to continue to go down. We need to be sure of how long what we’ve got will have to last, and where any next top-up (if any) is going to come from - before we down the remainder.

True conservatives say that the environment is an irreplaceable resource that, when clearly under threat - as it clearly is now - must be stewarded with the utmost caution. And in this country these conservatives are much more likely to be found in the Greens - and amongst the greenies - than in the Liberal Cabinet!

Try taking a step back and conceiving how truly, breathtakingly stupid it is to be conducting a radical experiment with the only atmosphere we possess. Or to cling to the nonsense spewed by a handful of professional spoilers funded by the oil-majors rather than listen to the majority of the world's actual scientists. It’s hard to imagine a more dangerously radical notion.

Ladies and Gentlemen, raise your glasses. Let’s take a cautious sip - to pessimism!