Doug asked this tough, but important, question:
"What is it about the left that it draws so many people of gloomy temperament who only want to see the worst in the world? We used to be about possibility, transformation, finding the seeds of the new in the womb of the old. Now we're about why everything sucks and is getting worse."
^^^^
CB: Maybe, even though we should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, if our generation experienced advances in our youth followed by regressions in the last 30 years ( in some summary sense), it's hard to fulfill the ideal of optimism of the will. In other words, it is not so much that the left draws people who have gloomier temperments than average, but rather left people's moods are reflective of an objective, historical downturn. Maybe we need a secular form of the "power of positive thinking", since there _is_ a certain reciprocal influence between the movement leaders' subjectivity and the objective situation; that is, if the left, leaders of the movement, are blue, this aggravates the downturn in objective conditions.
I agree with Doug, if he implies we on the left have a responsibility to, by act of will, accentuate the positive, even if we feel gloomy based on what our intellects tell us.
Jeremy Cronin touches on this topic in his Monthly Review article "Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Reply to John S. Saul"
Cronin says: "Saul's article has two layers, two sensibilities, two organizing paradigms running through it. To borrow and amend Gramsci's epigram, we have, woven imperceptibly together, a healthy pessimism of the intellect, and a problematic cynicism of the will."
And further
" There is much by way of emphasis and detail that I would want to qualify or amend, but I agree substantially with the broad analysis of the last twelve years or so in South Africa that Saul makes in his pessimism-of-the-intellect mode. So what's the problem? The problem is that this general analysis is continuously trumped by another paradigm, another sensibility. This second approach is announced in the very title of the article, "Cry for the Beloved Country: The Post-Apartheid Denouement," and in the opening paragraph: "A tragedy is being enacted in South Africa, as much a metaphor for our times as Rwanda and Yugoslavia..."(p. 1). Note the literary and rhetorical flourishes: "denouement," "tragedy," "metaphor," and a title that evokes the novel (Cry the Beloved Country) by the doyen of white South African liberalism, Alan Paton. They announce a paradigm of imminent closure, the revolution that is about to be (has always been about to be) betrayed. This is Greek tragedy, and as Brecht said of such tragedy, it renders the spectator a passive observer. All we can do is emote, as Saul himself says: "One does not know whether to laugh or cry..." (p. 1).
But the imposition of this tragic reading onto what is, in my opinion, still a relatively open-ended, complex, and highly contested reality results in a number of internal disjunctures in the course of Saul's article."
http://www.monthlyreview.org/1202cronin.htm
>From the South African context we have "pessimistic intellect/optimistic
will" type slogan "The struggle continues; victory is certain" , when the
objective conditions under Apartheid were quite gloomy.
Gramsci himself was probably in the Fascist prison when he coined the "motto".
Charles