How well situated is humanism to face the challenges of the twenty-first century? In particular, what solutions can humanism contribute to the global ecological crisis from which the climate emergency is emerging as the defining crisis of our times? The omens don’t look good, because for a long time, humanism has associated itself with a sanguine optimism centered on progress. In 1933, as Adolf Hitler was about to transform his country along the lines of tribalism and hatred, the Humanist Manifesto (now known as Humanist Manifesto I, because it had multiple successors) felt confident enough to declare: “In every field of human activity, the vital movement is now in the direction of a candid and explicit humanism.”¹ Nearer the end of the twentieth century, the theme continued when the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH), now the Council for Secular Humanism, released what it called “The Affirmations of Humanism.” Among them was this expression of optimism:

We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and rationality rather than blind faith or irrationality.²

While American humanism was casting the struggle in Manichean terms as a contest in which pessimistic thoughts bore the hallmarks of evil, in Britain the contest was thought effectively to be over. In 1967, novelist and critic Marghanita Laski gave the Conway Hall Memorial Lecture, which traditionally centers on humanist concerns. She spoke of the secular responsibility to build a new society. Why? “I think the answer must be, because we have won … unbelief in religion, in both its fundamental tenets and in its institutions, is the order of the day.”³ And in New Zealand, the local humanist organization felt the need to defend itself from the charge that in criticizing religion it was “flogging a dead horse.”⁴ Yet in a way many humanists of the 1960s and 1970s could not have predicted, religion proved itself far more resilient than they supposed.

Humanism’s tendency toward optimism has not gone away. In The Little Book of Humanism (2020), edited by Andrew Copson and Alice Roberts, a series of quotations are gathered in a “bedside companion” style that banishes anything not radiating uplift and serenity. “Sometimes when we look around at the world, we can get depressed. But in fact, this is one of the best—if not the best—times to have ever been born.”⁵ Outside of the organized humanist movement, a prominent spokesman of this mood is the British journalist Matt Ridley. “Rational optimism,” Ridley wrote in 2010, “holds that the world will pull out of the present crisis because of the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialize honestly for the betterment of all.”[6] Forecasts of this type look as unreal as those that, half a century ago, predicted the demise of religion. We have seen that religion has proved itself far more resilient than humanists believed. Mid-twentieth-century humanism comprehensively misread the situation, largely because it was unthinkingly optimistic. And we are now seeing that contentment with our “golden age” is not the most helpful of attitudes needed to resolve the climate emergency. Rather, it is this confidence in progress that looks jaded, outworn, and ripe for retirement. So the questions we must ask ourselves now are these:

1. Is this tradition of optimism in humanism still appropriate?
2. Must pessimism be seen in entirely negative terms?
3. Does a “positive attitude” require one to be optimistic?

The answers, I will argue, are No, No, and No.

Optimism, Pessimism, and the Best-Case Fallacy

What is the basis of optimism? It is a confidence, even an assumption, that the future will be kind to us. But how reasonable is this? Does it not suggest a sense of entitlement? And does it not blind us to the scale of the problems ahead? “We moderns,” writes the Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton, “have become accustomed to the idea that we can modify our environment to suit our needs and have acted accordingly for some 300 years. We are now discovering that our intoxicating belief that we can conquer all has come up against a greater force, the Earth itself.”⁷ Neither is this concern new. Eighty years ago, H. G. Wells asked: “What is the real position of Homo sapiens in relation to his environment? Has he the mastery we assumed he had, or did we make a profound miscalculation of his outlook?”⁸ Humanists glossed over or ignored Wells, as many of them are now ignoring people such as Hamilton.

In the twentieth century, optimism presumed a degree of credibility because of the unprecedented success of science in solving problems for us. But in the twenty-first century, we realize that some limits have been reached that may affect our expectation that science will once more extricate us from the mess we have made for ourselves. Among the limits (actually arrived at in the twentieth century) are:

• The speed of light as a universal speed limit (relativity);
• Applications of continuous functions in mechanics (quantum mechanics);
• The impossibility of simultaneous determination of the position and momentum of particles (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle);
• The impossibility of a logical system that can be proved to be both complete and consistent (Gödel’s theorem).⁹

This is not, of course, to say that science will not help in the twenty-first century. It will, if anything, be even more important. But what has changed is our reliance that science can maintain our entitlements while we carry on as before. In the face of this new situation, the need has arisen for a new conversation between the optimistic and pessimistic strands of humanist thought. The time will come, wrote Albert Schweitzer a century ago, when “pessimistic and optimistic thought, which have hitherto talked past each other almost as strangers, will have to meet for practical discussion.”¹⁰ That time has arrived. It won’t be an easy conversation, not least because of the considerable lack of awareness of the constructive role pessimism can provide. Albert Camus understood the issue: “The idea that a pessimistic philosophy is necessarily one of discouragement is a puerile idea, but one that needs too long a refutation.”¹¹ George Orwell thought the same. “Creeds, parties, programs of every description,” he wrote in 1940, “have simply flopped, one after another. The only ‘ism’ that has justified itself is pessimism.”¹²

To argue for pessimism is not to insist on taking up the gloomiest position on all subjects or to resist any plan of action. Pessimism is not the same as fatalism. This is the mistake made by people such as E. M. Cioran and John Gray, who end up reducing pessimism to little more than self-indulgence. Here is Cioran: “As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. … Forever be accursed the star under which I was born, may no sky protect it, let it crumble in space like a dust without honor!”¹³ Oh, for heaven’s sake. John Gray is little better when, after lambasting humanists and others for their commitment to progress, he offers nothing better in return than to “seek the company of mystics, poets and pleasure lovers rather than utopian dreamers.”¹⁴

Another such gathering of poets is the Dark Mountain Project that, at first glance, offers a way ahead with its “Eight Principles of Uncivilization.” The Dark Mountain Project is a contemporary expression of pessimism, inspired largely by the American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1972). Many of its stated principles are sound. Humans, it says, are not the “point and purpose of the planet.” We live in an age of “social, economic and ecological unravelling.” And it looks askance at fitting solutions to pre-set problems. But, rather like John Gray, the Dark Mountain Project then seems to lose its nerve and retreat into a shell of storytelling. With the same sort of Byronic self-indulgence Cioran wallowed in, it declares: “Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.”¹⁵ [For another perspective on the Dark Mountain Project, see Paul Fidalgo, “Post-Humans on a Sterile Promontory: The New Myths of Transhumanism and the Dark Mountain,” FI, April/May 2021. —Eds.]

The point missed by these advocates for self-indulgent pessimism is the same one the facile optimists fail to see. They both assume our only option is a simple yes/no choice between optimism or pessimism. But this is a false dichotomy. Twenty-first-century humanism needs to occupy the middle ground between apocaholism, the space occupied by indulgent pessimists, and utopianism, the space occupied by optimists. This middle ground can be occupied by the principle of meliorism. Meliorism is the idea that positive change might be achieved, but it gives proper emphasis to the implication that it might not be achieved and that what does transpire may not be what was originally intended. It is more hesitant and reflective than brash progressionism. Pessimism looks to avoid what the British philosopher Roger Scruton has called the best-case fallacy and to factor in considerations of human error. The best-case fallacy is where one looks uncritically at the best-case scenario of any decision.¹⁶ It is a feature of the twenty-first century that this is no longer a credible option. By way of example, consider the case of Ridley, who has labeled his position “rational optimism.” No better example of the best-case fallacy can be found than when he declares that the “extreme climate outcomes are so unlikely, and depend on such wild assumptions, that they do not dent my optimism one jot.”¹⁷

If we are going to understand fully the implications of seeing our age as the Anthropocene, we are going to need drastically to reassess the role Homo sapiens may play in the planet’s future. In the same way that self-indulgent pessimism is part of the problem, so is sanguine optimism. But reflective pessimism has a valuable role to play, because it is the means by which we look beyond the best case and consider other options, less happy options, that are just as likely to ensue. Pessimism avoids the best-case fallacy when it asks what might go wrong. With decisions looming on the scale of climate change, the stakes are high. What Greta Thunberg had in mind when she said she wanted people to panic was to shake them out of their sanguine confidence that things either aren’t as bad as we are told or that something will come along and sort things out without us having to change the way we live. This is what Thunberg said to the gathering of the mighty at Davos in January 2019: “Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”¹⁸

Part of the problem with optimistic humanism is its naive anthropocentrism. Key to any understanding of the changes threatening us all is the role humans have played in creating it. Here is Schopenhauer’s core insight: “The chief source of the most serious evils affecting man is man himself; Homo homini lupus” (“man is a wolf to man”).¹⁹ More recently, the British critic and cultural theorist Stuart Sim has fashioned a worldview around pessimism. “Pessimism,” Sim writes, “is about doing everything we can to check our meaner, self-interested side from coming to the fore, because we know that it will if it is allowed to.”²⁰ No longer can we afford to see “man being the measure of all things” solely in positive terms. We are at the point where man is the measure of all the wrong things. Anthropocentrism is the final expression of tunnel vision. In contrast, I would argue, pessimism is the peripheral vision of philosophy.²¹

The Tradition of Pessimistic Humanism

Once we start looking, we see a long and rich strand of humanist thought that understands this way of looking at things. Bertrand Russell was deeply suspicious of our tendency toward anthropocentric conceit. He gave it poetic expression in his essay “The Free Man’s Worship”: “In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create.”²² The aphorism for which H. G. Wells is best known runs along similar lines: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”²³ Robinson Jeffers spoke of “inhumanism” as part of his visceral reaction to what he saw as the sanguine anthropocentrism of early twentieth-century humanism. In a way that resonates in the twenty-first century, Jeffers disliked its focus on self at the expense of nature.

An important voice for twenty-first century humanism was the Continental historian and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, who set the starting point of his humanism at Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the places where many said humanism came to grief. He offered a way forward: “A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.”²⁴

Even when defining humanism, a proper place for pessimism can be found. “Humanism, it seems to me,” wrote the British sociologist Ronald Fletcher in 1968, “has to recognize an inescapable undertone of tragedy in the world. … All that we are, all that we love, all those things, people, and values to which and to whom we are attached by love, perish. Nothing of an individual nature seems permanent. Nothing is certain. Humanism can offer no consolation.”²⁵

More recently, the American philosopher Erik Wielenberg has built on these insights when he’s spoken of naturalistic humility, which “involves a recognition of the tremendous contribution of blind chance to the fates of human beings, and it is precisely such a recognition that should lead us to acknowledge an obligation to assist the less fortunate among us.”²⁶ It is in the spirit of naturalistic humility that we could look once again to the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s Declaration of Interdependence, signed in Buffalo, New York, in 1988, which involved a range of humanist luminaries of the time. Its concluding section read: “We have a clear duty to future generations to curtail excessive population growth, to maintain a healthy environment, and to preserve the earth’s precious resources.”²⁷ Roger Scruton’s preferred mechanism for realizing this sort of humility is what he calls judicious pessimism. I prefer to call it reflective pessimism, simply because reflective sounds less legalistic than judicious. In this way, reflective pessimism

teaches us not to idolize human beings, but to forgive their faults and to strive in private for their amendment. It teaches us to limit our ambitions in the public sphere, and to keep open the institutions, customs and procedures whereby mistakes are corrected and faults confessed to, rather than to aim for some new arrangement in which mistakes are never made.²⁸

We can very usefully transfer the notion of reflective pessimism toward the broader issue of the ecological crisis.

The American philosopher J. Baird Callicott has argued in the same way, though the term he prefers is “desperate optimism,” on the grounds that there is no survival value in pessimism.²⁹ We shouldn’t get too tied up by words at this stage. There may not be a major difference between what Callicott is calling “desperate optimism” and what I am calling “reflective pessimism.” My concern is that any retention of the label optimistic permits us also to retain some element of the best-case fallacy, where we hope the planet will be saved without us having to change our lifestyles. The danger of an optimistic viewpoint is that it seduces us all too easily into succumbing to the best-case fallacy at a time when this is no longer an option.

It’s important to note that this is not some radical new reading of humanism. The very brief survey given here should help illustrate this rich seam of humanist thought that we need to consider more fully if we are to have something constructive to say in the face of the global climate emergency. Pessimism, in alliance with skepticism, looks to challenge the more fanciful schemes of optimists who predicate ambitious schemes on the perceived ability to improve human nature or, even worse, to assume its inherent goodness.

Pessimism, viewed in this way, serves as an essential counterbalance to the anthropocentrism latent in much twentieth-century humanism that poses at least an impediment, possibly a threat, to our successful negotiation of twenty-first-century challenges. Optimism will only blind us to the scale of what needs to be done and the time we have left in which to do it. The pessimistic outlook of assuming the worst is essential if we are going to take the climate, political, and economic challenges of the decades ahead seriously enough to have any chance of overcoming them. “Despair. Accept. Act. … Only by acting, and acting ethically, can we redeem our humanity.”³⁰

[1] Humanist Manifesto I, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1973, p. 7.

[2] “The Affirmations of Humanism” can be seen in Free Inquiry to this day, usually on an inside cover.

[3] Marghanita Laski, The Secular Responsibility, London: South Place Ethical Society, 1967.

[4] NZ Rationalist & Humanist, December 1970–January 1971, p. 3.

[5] Andre Copson and Roberts (eds), Alice, The Little Book of Humanism, London: Piatkus, 2020, p. 124. Emphasis in original.

[6] Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist, London: Fourth Estate, 2010, p. 10.

[7] Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species, Crow’s Nest, NSW, Allen and Unwin, 2010, pp. 30–31.

[8] H. G. Wells, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, London: Secker & Warburg, 1939, p. 18.

[9] Newton Garver and Seung Chong Lee, Derrida and Wittgenstein, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994, p. 10.

[10] Albert Schweitzer, Civilisation and Ethics, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1946 [1923], p. 12.

[11] Albert Camus, “Pessimism and Courage” in Resistance, Rebellion and Death, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963 [1960], p. 41.

[12] George Orwell, “The Limits of Pessimism” (April 25, 1940), Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. I, 1920–1940, London: Penguin, 1970 [1945], p. 585.

[13] E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, London: Penguin, 1975 [1949], pp. 185–86.

[14] John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, London: Allen Lane, 2006, p. 206.

[15] Dark Mountain Project, Eight Principles of Uncivilization, Oikos – Logos – Nomos (wordpress.com).

[16] Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism, and the Danger of False Hope, London: Atlantic, 2010, pp. 22–23.

[17] Ridley, op. cit., p. 333.

[18] Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, London: Allen Lane, 2019, p 40.

[19] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, New York, NY: Dover, 1958 [1818] Vol. II, pp 577–78.

[20] Stuart Sim, A Philosophy of Pessimism, London: Reaktion Books, 2015, p. 68.

[21] I owe this wonderful phrase to Don Stevens, “What’s So Good about Optimism?” Free Inquiry, Spring 1990, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 48.

[22] Bertrand Russell, “The Free Man’s Worship” in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1917, p. 48.

[23] H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, London: Waverley, 1921 [1920], Vol. II, p. 608.

[24] Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century, London: Atlantic Books, 2005 [2003], p. 195.

[25] Ronald Fletcher, A Definition of Humanism, London: Rationalist Press Association (RPA), n.d. [1968], p. 13.

[26] Erik Wielenberg, Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 115–16.

[27] Paul Kurtz, “A Declaration of Interdependence: A New Global Ethics,” Free Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4, Fall 1988, pp. 4–7.

[28] Scruton, op. cit., p. 37.

[29] Floris van Den Berg, Harming Others: Universal Subjectivism and the Expanding Moral Circle, doctoral dissertation, 2011, p. 219. I thank van den Berg for drawing this to my attention.

[30] Hamilton, op. cit., p. 226.