In Defense of Optimism

I do not typically enjoy being around optimists. They exhaust me. Usually when I am interacting with them, my mind strains vigorously to sift through their positivity and find something phony so that I may at last absolve myself the responsibility of taking the person seriously. I suppose I am assuming that most optimists are not being completely authentic in their response to a given situation. Perhaps I do not despise optimists as much as I simply dislike people who are inauthentic. For if I am completely honest with myself, I believe there lies in me the makings of a closet optimist. Sure, on the exterior I like to remain cynical and scoff at those that are dandied and disillusioned by the temporary sugar highs of life. But internally, I am similarly wired, with hopes tied to emotions of improvements to be made to my life and situation, with the overall belief that at its foundation existence is good. Or as John Mayer might sing, "I know the heart of life is good."

For the last couple weeks I have been reading a biography of G.K Chesterton called Defiant Joy. The title is fantastic for such a man and the excerpts the author uses from Chesterton's writings and critics are well chosen. The author (Belmonte) gives the refreshing image of a man who is the most perfect depiction of the word jovial. Anyone who has spent any amount of time reading Chesterton knows with what light, wit and life the man writes. Chesterton has an amazing ability to bring humor and light to profound topics while somehow not disrupting the seriousness of the subject.

As so often happens when I read Chesterton, he slaps me upside the head with the simplest of statements. No complicated language, just light words with heavy implications. He writes, "No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy."

I am waiting for my wife to write on the book she read about humans being dependent rational animals. Because I think Chesterton struck gold when he realized the debt which we as individuals owe for our own existence. We did not bring about our own existence. How easily, in following Chesterton's quote, does that give us the greatest excitement to be alive. Perhaps only the grateful attitude gives way to the deepest joy. The deepest sense of appreciation for that which created us can restore the greatest joy to exist at all.

Optimists annoy me probably because I assume that they are being fake or have not endured enough hardship to think life is not rainbows and kittens. However, I believe Chesterton would argue that an "easy" life is not one void of bad things happening. Instead, it is of having never weighed the depths to which one is indebted to the other. When one is not cognizant of the appreciation that is owed, then it matters little what one accomplishes with his life. It leaves the door wide open to be disgusted and annoyed at every little thing that goes wrong.

Perhaps the height of the problem comes with the greatest tragedy of life - death. It is death that is allowed to creep into our belief as being the most unfair, unjust reality of our existence. To the unbeliever death is the expiration date of life, love, pleasure, and all else that goes with it.

C.S Lewis writes a great little piece in "The Worlds Last Night." He speaks of our Lord, weeping at the tomb of his friend. At first glance, what a confusing thing it is that the one who must have known he was to conquer death would find it a reasonable thing to cry at his friends passing when in just a few moments he would raise him from the dead. But perhaps this was one of the most human things Jesus did. Lewis writes, "Nothing will reconcile us to - well, its (death’s) unnaturalness. We know that we were not made for it; we know how it crept into our destiny as an intruder..." 

Anyone who has had to go through the death of a close friend or family member knows the grief, the feeling of pure injustice that such a person had to die. It is such an event that can rattle the greatest of men to their knees and begin to doubt the "good" that they held supreme. We must identify death's unnaturalness and be grateful to the one who has defeated death, the proclaimer and creator of life itself. Only then can we live as the most authentic of optimists and live as defiant joy personified, as Chesterton did and spoke of here, in his own words:


"I had often called myself an optimist to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessimism. But all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world.The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home." 
-Orthodoxy, G.K Chesterton

Tim