In the investing world, bulls are deemed reckless and speculative whilst bears are regarded particularly thoughtful and rational. In the world at large too, optimists are seen as delusional whilst pessimism is justified given the inevitable troubles surrounding us. Yet, as this author argues, optimists are the ones with the power to change the world. Sumit Paul-Choudhury, an astrophysicist turned journalist (edited the New Scientist, the widely read popular science magazine), says he became an optimist the night he lost his wife to cancer. This is an adaptation from his recently published first book – The Bright Side.
True to his science background, he invokes the German polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, (credited alongside Newton for inventing calculus) to explain his belief in optimism:
“…His [Leibniz’s) inspiration came from his realisation, in the early 1680s, that the path taken by light through a system of prisms or mirrors always followed the ‘easiest’, or ‘optimal’, path from source to destination. As the contemporary philosopher Jeffrey McDonough argued in A Miracle Creed (2022), he soon realised that many other phenomena followed a similar ‘principle of optimality’ – including, perhaps, the entirety of God’s creation.
Up until that point, it had generally been assumed that the cosmos was precisely the way it had to be. Leibniz, on the other hand, argued that God could have chosen from many laws and ingredients when making the world, but some combinations would not be internally consistent. So God, in His wisdom, chose the particular combination that led to a world that was both ‘simplest in hypotheses and richest in phenomena’. That might not be a perfect world, containing no suffering or evil, but it would be the best of all possible worlds. While there might be many possible ways to make a world, there’s only one optimal way. And this view of the world came to be known as optimism.
…Leibnizian optimism reminds us that we cannot see or understand the whole design of the world. And if we attempt to fix one problem at one time and place, there will likely be consequences elsewhere that we can’t anticipate. Climate change is a byproduct of the massive economic uplift engendered by the Industrial Revolution. The collapsing demographics of many societies result in part from huge improvements in infant mortality and life expectancy. The technology that lets you read my ideas here also reshapes societal norms and disrupts our polities.
That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to improve the world: it means we should expect perfection to remain perpetually out of reach. That’s not such a bitter pill to swallow: a few technological fantasists aside, no one really expects utopia to arrive tomorrow, or the day after that. But we can still strive for the best of all possible worlds. The key to making Leibniz’s version of optimism relevant to a secular, 21st-century worldview is to make ‘the best of all possible worlds’ an aspiration, not a statement of belief. We may or may not live in a multiverse; but we can better shape the Universe we do live in if we think about its unrealised branches and forks – whether those lie along roads not taken in the past, or the paths we might walk into the future.
…optimism can take the form of blind faith that the future will be brighter than the present. Most of us, in our everyday lives, need some of that faith in order to keep moving forward when times get tough, when obstacles present themselves and the future is full of unknowns. But when it comes to how we think about the world we live in, and the challenges we all face, Leibnizian optimism – the original optimism – provides a fertile way to evaluate our options and shake off our feelings of fatalism. The world, and the future, is always full of possibilities – and we can always strive to make it the best of all possible worlds.”
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