The OLD Philosopher – John M. Mille
Some people are insatiably addicted consumers of news. I am one such person.
Last week as I was reading one of the several news magazines to which I subscribe, it suddenly occurred to me to ask myself: Am I an optimist or as pessimist? I concluded that I am neither a complete optimist or a complete pessimist. Instead, I must be either a pessimistic optimist or an optimistic pessimist. Then, after pondering this psychic quandary further, I initially decided that I could most accurately describe myself as an optimistic pessimist.
These two two-word terms are not synonymous. No one can be equally a pessimist and an optimist without mentally splitting in two. But, when the adjectival “-ic” is added to either word to modify the other word, it is possible to be either a pessimistic optimist or an optimistic pessimist. (To the reader: You cannot understand what I have just written without stopping to think what it means, so I request you do that --- now, please.)
…As an optimistic pessimist, I am optimistic about nature, but I confess to being pessimistic about human nature. If there were no humans on Planet Earth, likely our orb would keep circling the sun until the sun burns itself out, and plants and animals would keep replenishing themselves in evolutionary fashion for as long as the Earth lasts. But because humans do exist, we have the capacity, and evidently the twisted inclination, fairly soon to kill our planet. And that’s where my incipient pessimism kicks in.
The Anthropocene is the genesis of climate change. It is not mere meteorology that is doing this. All of us as individuals and all of us collectively are doing too little to save the Earth. We are too self-centered and too human-centered to join together to prevent the destruction of the only God-given planetary environment we shall ever inhabit. To imagine that a few of us can successfully leave this world for some other world is a hubristic pipedream. That is the ultimate cost-prohibitive venture. Use all that money to save this planet, for heaven’s sake, rather than trying to go to another one in outer space.
Decades ago I thought I had jettisoned the Calvinism in which I was raised as a Presbyterian youth and then as a Presbyterian minister. However, there is enough undeniable truth in the theological thought of the brilliant reformer of Geneva that one can never become genuinely sanguine about us, about Homo sapiens. We are without question a somewhat sordid species. The “news” validates that truth every day.
In my mental flight of fancy about myself last week, I decided that I definitely am not a Nellie Forbush, much as I might l prefer to be. Nellie is the female lead in Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s South Pacific who sings the song, Cockeyed Optimist. Some of its lyrics are worth repeating for our purposes in this essay.
“When the skies are a bright canary yellow/ I forget every cloud I’ve ever seen./ So they call me a cockeyed optimist/ Immature and incurably green./ I have heard people rant and rave and bellow/ That we’re done and we might as well be dead./ But I’m only a cockeyed optimist/ And I can’t get it out of my head!”
One of the primary reasons that the incomparable team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein were so successful is that they both evoked sunny optimism in all of their Broadway shows. Furthermore, optimism sells far better than pessimism, which is a large part of why they were so successful.
In my introspective plunge, it became clear to me that my pessimism about human nature is borne out by the types of biblical books and biblical people I strongly favor. To me, the triumphalist Israelite nationalism of the Pentateuch and the history section of the Bible is more off-putting than captivating. Give me the fierce preachments of the Old Testament prophets or the sardonic sagacity of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. I am much more drawn to the probing thrusts of the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels than by the divinized certitudes of the Jesus proclaimed in the Gospel of John.
I can’t agree with Nellie Forbush that we might as well be dead, nor can I, as an optimistic pessimist, find much hope that miraculously the Earth’s human population are going to coalesce in this century, finally creating the Peaceable Kingdom. When we have been slaying one another with endless zeal for the past five millennia, there is nothing to hint that all of us have instantaneously come of age.
Nonetheless, I have endless optimism about the most important factor in creation, and with that I want to end this short essay. A mind like mine does not allow itself to gravitate to endless paeans of praise for humanity, but it does so for God. The one who created everything that is everywhere in the ever-expanding universe did not create all of it to end. The universe shall presumably go on forever, whatever may happen to Planet Earth. The current species of hominids who imagine that they are governing the earth will not go on eternally, but creation itself will never terminate.
God is the answer to every unanswered question, the hope for every hopeless situation. We should and must reserve our greatest optimism for God. He (or She if you prefer) will never abandon us. From every one-celled plant or animal to the most gifted human who ever lived, God loves everything in His creation. Therefore He will always be there to support us, but He will do it in His own way. Likely that will not always mesh with our way. Besides, it is so easy for us to lose our way.
The last song in the musical Godspel is “Long Live God.” It begins slowly and softly, but it builds as it repeats the tune of the opening number, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Again and again it repeats the refrain, “Long live God, long live God.” It ends gloriously.
I am optimistic that billions of believers of all sorts, as well as non-believers, will keep trying to prepare the way of the Lord. That gives me hope, and I might even say optimism. For the rest of my life, however long that may be, I shall be an eternal optimist about God and an optimistic pessimist about us.
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Having addressed how yours truly sees himself on the Pessimism/Optimism Scale, perhaps it would help were you to ask yourself: Who, or what, am I?
-May 4, 2021
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.