The best of all possible worlds?

In response to my post about gratitude, Bodhisagan commented:

I've always thought being grateful for a crappy life was one of the things that traditionalists love to say but never really believe it themselves (life is a gift, even when you were burned over 99% of your body by your crack head mother's boyfriend for fun and now you live digit-less and people cringe at your appearance...).

This poke at unwarranted gratitude reminded me of Voltaire's novel, Candide, in which the protagonist, Candide, and his tutor, Pangloss, experience numerous misfortunes. Despite this, Pangloss often proclaims that "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds". A dose of reality-based optimism is healthy because it keeps people motivated when life becomes difficult, but Pangloss takes it way too far and can't even recognize that he's got problems. As a result he does not take action to solve his problems or think about how to avoid new ones. He thinks he's happy, but his life could be much better if he were not so naïvely optimistic.

Voltaire's thinking and writing about optimism were probably influenced by his optimistic lover, Émilie du Châtelet, a brilliant mathematician, physicist, and author. Her upper class lifestyle may have influenced her optimistic outlook, but sadly, a late pregnancy cut her life short.

While Émilie's optimism appears healthy and reality-based, the optimism practiced by Nathan Price, the evangelical Baptist missionary in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Poisonwood Bible, and by President George W. Bush, is of the dangerous type that Pangloss advocates. Nathan Price's attempts to convert a village in the Belgian Congo to Christianity and George W. Bush's attempts to bring democracy to Iraq both result in failure.

Everything that goes wrong with their missions is not the fault of Nathan Price and George W. Bush, but problems are aggravated by their shared character flaws. Both are ignorant, and incurious, about the cultures they attempt to change. Both are arrogant and refuse to admit errors or take the advice of others. Both are stubborn and refuse to change direction, continuing to put the lives of others in danger. The combination of ignorance, incuriousity, incompetence, arrogance, dishonesty, indifference, power, and stubbornness in pursuing their goals, even with the best intentions, has many unintended evil consequences. But it is their misplaced optimism, combined with their deep religious faith, that allows them to view any success as a sign from God, and any failure as a test of faith. The resulting "stay the course" mindset leads to spectacular failures.

Bodhisagan also commented:

If things suck I say don't stew, but get mad and do something about it, if you are in a position to.

Extreme pessimism, with the disheartening view of insurmountable problems, is just as dangerous because the resulting inaction often leads to self-fulfilling prophecies. Pragmatism, like the scientific method, is a better way because instead of pretending that problems don't exist or that they are too hard to solve, they are identified and studied, the knowledge gained is used to design solutions, and then those solutions are tested in the real world. Failures are tweaked or discarded and successes are put into more widespread use. We won't ever arrive at Utopia, an elusive target because new problems will always arise, but with pragmatism we'll choose better solutions and make slow, steady progress.