Optimism is Underrated

Despite warnings of imminent catastrophe, the world has never been more peaceful or prosperous. Shouldn't we be more cheerful? By Fred Pawle.

The catastrophes supposedly awaiting humanity continue to become more terrifying. The planetary apocalypse that environmentalists have been prophesising for decades seems quaintly passe in comparison to the predictions that are now being made - often by classical liberals, unfortunately - about an even more destructive force: people.

Douglas Murray’s best-selling The Strange Death of Europe argues persuasively that European culture is “exhausted” and will soon submit to chaos and violence. Jonah Goldberg’s The Suicide of the West redefines the past 300 years of civilisation as a “miracle” that people today neither understand nor arguably deserve, and will be replaced by the unspeakable cruelty of “human nature” if we don’t learn to appreciate and defend it. Kevin Donnelly’s How Political Correctness is Destroying Australia argues that existential threats are undermining our own civilisation.

All of these extrapolate from Mark Steyn’s After America (2010), which predicted mush of the decay we see in liberal democracies today and warned that “great convulsions” lie ahead. To top off this bleak picture, the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia has found 58 per cent of millennials now look favourably on socialism.

While we are not inclined to dismiss the alarms raised by these authors, it is pertinent to be reminded that, as Robert Menzies told the nation in the dark days of 1942, “Those who tell us not to be optimistic do us a disservice.”

That line is from The Importance of Cheerfulness, one of the Forgotten People radio broadcasts, made only months after the Japanese had invaded Singapore and bombed Darwin. “Cheerfulness is a shining weapon in our national armoury,” Menzies went on to say. “Hitler and Mussolini have forgotten, if they ever knew, how to laugh. It must be a sad business to be a dictator anyhow.”

It was our “capacity for making good cheer in the midst of disaster” that always “brought our race to victory,” he concluded.