A couple of months ago I was surprised to hear a colleague describe me as having a pessimistic outlook. It was momentarily jarring because I had long seen myself as fundamentally optimistic, inclined to see the best in people and circumstances until developments forced me to do otherwise. But I immediately realised that if you’d only met me in the last few years, it would be obvious that my outlook was immensely pessimistic, if not actively bleak. The events which began with the defeat of Corbynism in the 2019 UK election and ran through the pandemic and into a whole sequence of losses in my personal life, left me with the tendency to expect the worst only to be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t materialise. I’ve come out of this period of my life vastly more resilient, almost indescribably so, than I went into it. But at the cost of an optimism I would like to sincerely like to reclaim.
Following that conversation I found myself preoccupied by this Brian Fallon song which I’d hated when it was initially released pre-pandemic. In contrast to the hyperactively melancholic, at points vaguely traumatised, early music he produced with the Gaslight Anthem, these solo albums felt like twee Americana. But listening back to them over the last few months I reached a much more charitable reading, in which “dreams of classic cars and movie screens” are reclaimed as choices about how to see the world. The compulsive quality of these visions is left behind in his middle age, but the choice to return to them, again and again, remains. No longer oscillating between imagined optimism and bleak reality, instead engaging with bleak reality through the optimism of imagination. If you wanted to be Lacanian about it, you could say that Brian Fallon has traversed his fantasy. The problem is not the fantasy itself but rather a mode of living it in which the imaginary becomes unmoored from the real.
And what did it mean for all these years I spent chasing them ferris wheels
That were always gone like visions come the morning?
But there's not one day I regret
And I would do it all again
So if I go down, Lily, I'm going down believing
I’m pretty sure I’m the first (and possibly last) person to refer to Brian Fallon and early 20th century polymath Frank Ramsey in the same sentence. But the ethos of these later albums reminds me of what the young Ramsey presented here, published as Epilogue in There is Nothing to Discuss in Foundations of Mathematics:
In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have a reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.
https://inters.org/Putnam-Fact-Value
I’m re-reading After Virtue at the moment and I was surprised to see how clumsily the otherwise impeccable Alisdair MacIntyre reads Ramsey’s intervention here, situating it as a straight forward extension of G.E. Moore’s escape from moral realism. In contrast Ramsey’s outlook is a pragmatist’s embrace of sensibility, making a choice about how to cultivate an outlook because of the moral significance of how that choice shapes action. It could easily be framed in terms of virtue ethics, as the cultivation of moral sensitivity with implications for practical reasoning. A defensive bleakness makes it more difficult to see humanity as “interesting and on the whole admirable”. It accentuates the darkness and leads you to avoid the light, even as it finds its way in through the cracks that you cannot see.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act … Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act … Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.
Hope In The Dark: The Untold History of People Power by Rebecca Solnit loc 101-115
Mark Carrigan 