Nabobs of Negativism : American optimism is the last refuge of rubes and Babbitts, say the influential pessimists. But can a society without hope still try to improve itself?

‘Postmodernism is modernism with the optimism taken out,” the historian Robert Hewison wrote a few years ago. In case you don’t follow the nomenclature, “postmodernism” has been the dominant intellectual milieu since roughly the 1960s. And therein may lie a large part of the explanation for the downcast frame of mind that has descended on the United States--namely, a drift toward intellectual pessimism has been pounding the hopefulness out of us.

No one doubts that American society exhibits trends that denote alarm--for example, the growing gap between rich and poor. But most indices of U.S. life have been positive for years, even decades: with the environment improving, material prosperity secure, the arms race over, public health rising, race and gender barriers eroding.

Yet, through the same years that U.S. life has mainly improved, academic theory and intellectual commentary have grown increasingly pessimistic in their appraisals of the America prospect. This swing away from optimism is not just a matter of aesthetics: It may backfire by persuading voters that society should give up trying to solve its problems.

Some degree of retreat from good feeling was inevitable for the post-Vietnam United States. After all, the vast baby-boom cohort came to awareness at a time when schoolchildren were taught to sit covering their heads in rehearsals for nuclear obliteration. This was not a formula for a generation inclined to believe in a better tomorrow.

The civil-rights era bought some progress but also disquieting proof that segments of American society staunchly opposed basic fairness. Following the Vietnam War, and the realization that U.S. leaders could be drastically wrong, no sensible person would want to be without skepticism regarding the course rthe country may take.

But the wrong lessons seem to have been learned: that government can no longer solve society’s flaws; that problems inevitably expand faster than solutions; that the country is sliding downward. The well-founded bad feelings of the Vietnam and civil-rights eras are being applied to arenas of American life where they have no business. Somehow it’s become proper, almost required, for Americans to be pessimistic--and a violation of etiquette to point out the many positive trends that suggest optimism. Ever more negative intellectual appraisals of the America prospect are a leading current in this unhappy tide.

Of course, serious thinkers are not expected to be jovial: One role of the intellectual is to warn society of its faults. But unbalanced by affirmation of society’s gains, negativism can recoil in the wrong direction. Societies with an optimistic view of themselves are often those that seek social progress, while pessimistic societies become locked in cycles of decline. Today, everyone assumes Americans used to be optimistic because things were getting better, and now are pessimistic because things are getting worse. But is that cause and effect right? Historically, American society improved in no small part because Americans were optimistic. But once optimism is discredited, why bother to fight for reform?

Because America now conceives of itself in despairing terms, valiance regarding the country’s potential for self-reform has nearly disappeared from political thought. Last year’s political debates between Congress and the White House were almost entirely pessimistic--one side claiming that government was making life awful, the other that cutting government was making life awful. The presidential campaign seems poised to follow the same morose script. Optimism has been so thoroughly stamped out of the U.S. political spheres that nearly all candidates and commentators feel more secure with pessimistic pronouncements.

It’s understandable that no one today wants to boast of America as “the country that went to the moon.” Yet, we should boast of America as the country that took care of its elderly, improved the environment and is dismantling its nuclear weapons. That kind of constructive boasting will remind us that other important challenges can be overcome, too.

The serious-book business is an indicator of the trend toward canonical negativism. Many of the most important nonfiction books written through the 1960s--”Manchild in the Promised Land,” “Silent Spring,” “The Other America”--were ferocious in their depictions of the nation’s faults. But they were also written to inspire change: They advocated programs of reform, challenging society to make itself better. This is a fundamentally optimistic exercise.

People still write books containing agendas for reform--but the focus is increasingly on volumes that decree sweeping crises and find the situation hopeless. “The Population Bomb,” in 1968, said it was already too late to prevent global starvation that would engulf the United States. “Limits to Growth,” in 1972, declared it too late to prevent resource calamities. “The Fate of the Earth,” in 1982, supposed nuclear obliteration was close to inevitable. “The Hot Zone” and “The Coming Plague” (both 1995) professed that unstoppable hyper-disease will kill millions.

None of these books advances any hopeful program of reform. The best each offers is palliatives to make catastrophe less harrowing. Instead of challenging society to rise above itself, many intellectuals today seem to counsel that we should give in.

That gloom has become the norm is indicated by how readily pessimistic ideas are embraced. For example, “Losing Ground” called federal anti-poverty efforts futile despite the fact that the percentage of Americans living in poverty declined for most of the 20 years prior to the book’s publication. In the current intellectual climate, it is often assumed that anyone decreeing a catastrophe must be right.

Intellectuals rarely play luminary roles in American society, as happens in Europe and Latin America. But their ideas are the plankton at the base of the food chain that supplies the media and politicians with ideas. One reason journalistic and political negativism now seem so pervasive is that a high percentage of the intellectual ideas entering that food chain are negative. Most of what appears in thinking-person’s magazines is negative. In turn, the ideas end up distilled by pundits and politicians into columns or speeches still more negative than the originals, plucking out the sexy pessimism and discarding the qualifiers.

As example is the “bowling alone” theory proposed by the Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam. Last year, Putnam published an article in a small-circulation journal suggesting that American participation in community was waning: His big point was people now bowl alone rather than in leagues. The bleakest possible interpretation of this theory--that civic America is dying--was quickly seized on by President Bill Clinton, by other politicians and by pundits. Though downcast in tone, Putnam’s original article is nowhere near as pessimistic as subsequent commentary based on it.

Sullen commentary about America is not new: Partisan Review, the leading cerebral magazine of the ‘50s, had its share of sneering. But its negativism focused on mass culture--making sport of bland role models of the Eisenhower era. It was rare to find an article predicting the collapse of the society, the kind of trepidation now a staple. In a historical inversion, academic journals now often celebrate mass culture--reinterpreting Madonna as a savant of gender ontology, for example. But on the day’s great issues, writing and thinking are only considered sophisticated if fatalistic.

Wide-ranging negative views have become part of the regalia of education. John Kenneth Galbraith phrased it this way: “Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist.” People with taste are pessimists--only rubes and Babbitts so provincial as to hold rosy views.

That pessimism now connotes refinement can have a perverse impact for a society where levels of education are increasing. In the Ivy League and other top universities, often the most admiration flows to the student who is facile at delivering clever put-downs of classics or deriding other people’s theories. Putting down ideas (fundamentally negative) is rewarded, while offering one’s own ideas (fundamentally positive) is subtly discouraged, as offering an idea exposes the speaker, in turn, to criticism.

Baby boomers with this predilection have now proliferated throughout the professions. Many are lawyers: People trained to attack the positions taken by others, as opposed to advancing constructive alternatives. Many have entered politics, where the campaign mechanisms of both parties are now tuned almost entirely to negativism. Protestations aside, most of the Washington establishment can’t wait for the 1996 presidential campaign to go negative, for negative campaigning is now Washington’s national sport.

The bright young minds at foundations and think tanks churn out studies of what’s wrong with other people’s ideas. And today’s well-educated media mainstream has become so reflexively negative that it scoffs at optimistic news as some kind of trick.

In the end, perhaps the strangest aspect of today’s intellectual aversion to optimism is that it denies credit to progressive government, an ideal most contemporary thinkers would say they espouse.

Since the 1960s, the main impulse of U.S. government has been progressive. If it’s true that, during these years, American society has become irredeemable, then liberalism must be a failed philosophy. But it isn’t true. In recent decades, the percentage of Americans who live in poverty has declined, longevity has increased while most measures of public health have improved, rights for minorities and the disabled have expanded, old age has ceased being synonymous with destitution, air and water pollution have diminished, living standards have risen (for most people), occupational safety has risen, education levels have reached all-time highs, personal freedom has never been greater and, perhaps most important, nuclear disarmament has begun.

It is not Pollyanna-ism to point such things out. It is progressive, because the impelling force of postwar American improvement has been the progressive premise that no injustice should be tolerated because society can win the fight to make itself better.

Today, it is lamented that voters seem weary of do-good initiatives. Perhaps this happened because voters were falsely persuaded that everything’s getting worse. A more hopeful vision--of the United States as a country with many problems but also a remarkable record of solving problems it turns its mind to--might renew the collective determination to pursue the America yet to come.*