Why I'm an Optimist
art is as strong as fear
Popular opinion these days suggests the World is Going to Shit.
From the encroaching Prospect of Global War to Climate Catastrophe to the Rise of the Far Right, I'd be a fool—or so our Holy Op-Ed Culture suggests—to suggest that the next decades will be among the most inspiring in human history.
Yes.
To be clear, I don’t revel in what’s coming, and I shan’t chant in vengeful protest dance around the pyre with devilish mask + cloak in hand, raving about The End is Nigh! whilst consuming copious pharmaceuticals psychedelics, nor shall I pander to the cult of emotionality at the expense of equanimity, championing a distinctly megalomaniacal puritanical insistence on virtue signaling as if telling anybody how wrong they are has anything to do with human empathy.
No.
I don’t believe in angels or demons, nor can I ignore the pendulum swing of history. Yes, it’s going to be a rough couple of years—decades even—but if there’s one thing I believe in, it’s humanity’s enduring ability to forge beauty from within the crucibles of our darkest instincts.
When I think of the turmoil of recent human history and the beauty it inspired (and I mean the term inspired literally, i.e. breathing life back back into something); when I think of the Enlightenment, for example, and of Rousseau’s On the Origins of Inequality or Voltaire’s Candide or Denis Diderot, who helped invent the Encyclopedia, for The Muse’s-Sake, all of whom risked their lives for the sake of their art during an era when to question and to subvert was considered an affront not only to the King but to God; and when I think of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man and her suspicion of all the Enlightenment promised, including—but never limited to—the legacy of slavery, colonization, and subjugation of entire continents thanks to a supposed taxonomy of human “races”; when I think of the modernists and their ability to conjure a world with a simple sentence, gifting us—the readers—the agency to plumb the depths of our own psyches; when I think of other artistic pioneers of the early twentieth century, of the Charlie Pattons and Buddy Boldens and Jellyroll Mortons and Sidney Bechets and Louis Armstrongs and Eugene Bullards and Josephine Bakers and countless others who brought a new kind of sound nicknamed jazz to Paris; and when I think of the existentialists, of Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir and James Baldwin and Viktor Frankl, people who managed, somehow, to remain absurdist optimistic, their minds rising from the ashes of not one but two World Wars; when I think of the art that blossomed from the wounded earth of the twentieth century, of Miles Davis, Nat King Cole, Bill Evans, Buddy Holly, Joan Didion, Elvis Presley, Orson Welles, Lucile Ball and so many more; when I think of the 1960s and the Cold War and imagine the seeming impossibility, back then, of remaining optimistic after witnessing the assassination of MLK and Malcom X and Medgar Evers and Bobby Kennedy, not to mention the atrocities committed in the name of democracy imperialism in Vietnam and Cambodia; when I remember that during that era, too, the world was blessed with Jimi Hendrix and James Taylor and Marvin Gaye and Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin and Paul McCartney and Curtis Mayfield and John Lennon and Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut and Maya Angelou and Julio Cortázar and a thousand more; when I think of those artists and so many others I have yet to discover, let alone name, I can’t help but feel optimistic because even in back then, they were able to find the light.
So set me like a seal upon my heart: art is as strong as fear.
Out there beyond the cacophony of power, ego, rage, incessant scrolling, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and out further still, somewhere beyond the pandering pundits, proselytizers, influencers and politicians, art remains the most powerful proof of our shared humanity and the most enduring tool we have to inspire breathe life back into the wonder of human existence and all of its billions of iterations.
p.s. I’ve just sold out of the limited 1st edition (300 copies) of my latest novel, The Requisitions, which is about maintaining our humanity during inhumane times. I’ll have more details on the release of the global edition in the coming weeks but suffice it to say you can now find The Requisitions anywhere books are sold (my vote is always that you call/walk into your local bookstore and order a copy).
Finally, I chatted about publishing and writing and all the rest of it on a podcast this morning, the Cultural Studies Podcast. It was an edifying chat with Toby Miller, a British/Australian cultural and media studies scholar, about what inspires me, what troubles me, and how I feel about this strange, wondrous world.
You can listen to the podcast via Apple, Podbean, or right here embedded in this post:
onwards and upwards,
Samuél