Not that optimism has ever been an easy sell, not even in Emerson's time. The word itself started out under a cloud. It made ts first appearance, as "optimisme", in the February, 1737 number of a French Jesuit journal, Mémoires de Trévoux. Its author coined the word as a means to have some fun at the expense of the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz. Leibniz had proposed that God had -- I hope that I get this straight -- created the "best (i.e. the optimum) of all possible worlds" given what He had to work with, among components of good and evil. (This seems to me to raise more questions than it answers, but I must, perforce, leave that to the philosophers.)
Voltaire soon picked up the baton with his creation of the buffoonish stand-in for Leibniz, Dr. Pangloss, in Candide, or Optimism. I can't improve on the Wikipedia summary:
The novella begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism (or simply optimism) by his tutor, Pangloss. The work describes the abrupt cessation of this existence, followed by Candide's slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not outright rejecting optimism, advocating an enigmatic precept, "we must cultivate our garden", in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
With the great international success of Candide, optimism suffered an important setback.
Back even in Herman Melville’s time, Americans were of (at the least) two minds about optimism. One of Melville's most celebrated creations, Bartleby the Scrivener, took as his mantra "I would prefer not to." The critic Richard Chase remarks that Melville
learned to say 'no' to the boundlessly optimistic commercialized creed of most Americans, with its superficial and mean conception of the possibilities of human life, its denial of all the genuinely creative or heroic capacities of man, and his fear and dislike of any but the mildest truths. Melville's 'no' finds expression in the tragic-comic tale of Bartleby the Scrivener. . "
Even so, taking one thing with another, Americans remained, on the whole, optimistic despite disasters, financial and otherwise, right up until the Great Depression. Belief in the inevitability of progress was oxygen to a damn-the-consequences surge of innovation. Take as emblematic the creations of the mechanical engineer turned chemist Thomas Midgley (His years were 1889-1944.) The historian J.R. McNeil remarked that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth history."
Midgley's story was told compellingly by Mark Bernstein in the Spring 2002 issue of American Heritage [The article can be found in the archives at americanheritage.com] Bernstein writes that:
When the Arizona Diamondbacks won the World Series last fall, team officials rushed to thank everyone who had contributed, from the players to the owner to government officials and fans. No one mentioned the name of Thomas Midgley, yet without him, there might well be no Diamondbacks, for his two great discoveries made today ’ s Southwest possible. Only the hardiest souls braved Arizona ’ s desert heat until Midgley ’ s development of Freon made air conditioning commonplace. Similarly, his leaded gasoline allowed the high - performance engines that the region’s long distances and tall mountains demand. Before him, air conditioning was reserved for a few large public buildings and wealthy homeowners; owning a refrigerator required a mass of bulky and dangerous machinery in the basement; and cars couldn't climb hills or hit top speed without sputtering dangerously. Decades after he died, a new generation of scientists would learn that both of Midgley’s great discoveries had come with great costs attached. The gasoline that had revved up America’s cars was also dumping lead into the atmosphere, and the chlorofluorocarbons that had cooled the nation and chilled its food were also destroying the earth’s protection against the sun’s rays.
(Midgley's life ended in a manner few would wish on anyone. In 1940 he contracted polio, and for a period was trapped in an iron lung. Then, in 1944 “he met a sudden and shocking end. He disliked being lifted out of bed to his wheelchair, so he had used his training as a mechanical engineer to design a harness and a system of pulleys that allowed him to move about unaided. On the morning of November 2, 1944, his wife found him hanging from his contrivance, strangled to death. “)
As optimism began its long decline into its present sicklied condition, it attracted more and more modifiers -- cautious, reckless, overheated, tip-toed, heedless, relentless, guarded. . . A while back, I began a catalogue of adjectives but soon gave it up as the list began to creep toward the size of my old Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. This trail of modifiers would tempt us to believe that perhaps we aren't as reckless about things as we used to be, when maybe we're just reckless about different things. Like climbing aboard a winged machine confident against all intuition that 20 tons of flesh, metal and baggage will take to the air as if to be a bird, rise to an unbirdly altitude, and deposit us and our laptop safely at a place miles, thousands of miles even, from where we began. There are people about who will tell you that the Hadron collider is an act of the most distressingly reckless form of optimism and that we shall all disappear into a black hole as a result.
Occasionally, one might find a Jesuit among one's fellow passengers aboard an airliner. I feel as if I ought to find occasion to ask one of them what their 18th century forebears had against optimism. Did they, perhaps, know something we didn’t? At this distance it’s hard to tell. Perhaps they mocked Leibniz only because, as Voltaire points out in the Preface to his Poem on Natural Law (written in 1751/1752) that the theologians very correctly saw through the optimists' argument, that this is the best world possible, and that it relegated the Fall, redemption and salvation to a strictly subordinate role in men's lives. Whatever.
Perhaps it is an "appropriate" optimism that we hanker for. The objection seems obvious: how are we to know in advance what is appropriate? We try, certainly, with our fretful planning and environmental impact reports only to find, as if we needed reminding, that things are a lot more complicated, more inter-hooked, than we realized, and so we let ourselves in for another set of unforeseen consequences. Entire literatures have sprung into foliage around such questions as “Is recycling self-defeating?”Thus we spend time, increasingly precious time, wondering how we got ourselves into this pickle, and how might we get out of it?
Perhaps the ancient Greeks and their predecessors had no need for the lexical equivalent of optimisme because they knew their gods intimately, and which of them ruled over what and how, if possible, to stay on good terms with them. It is only recently, as these things are reckoned, that we have come to have faith that whomever, or whatever, is in charge of the future will tilt the great pinball machine of life in our favor. I suppose that what Melville had in mind is what I think of as "infernal optimism". This is the form of optimism, regnant during the early days and adolescence of the Industrial Revolution, which tended to ignore the Law of Unintended Consequences and that the creator would insure Progress. Fat chance.
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