When the world is turning darker, it is not more optimism we need, but courage and compassion, writes Quan Nguyen.
“But your victories will never be lasting; that’s all.”
Rieux’s face darkened.
“Yes, I know that. But it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.”
“No reason, I agree…. Only, I now can picture what this plague must mean for you.”
“Yes. A never-ending defeat.”
Albert Camus, The Plague, p.115
In the 1947 book The Plague by French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, the two protagonists Rieux and Tarrou discuss the prospect of struggling against a plague that is so deadly and dangerous that, despite smaller victories and the few lives saved due to their organising, they might not be able to stop it regardless of what both of them do.
The novel found new popularity during COVID-19, but was originally designed as a parallel to the French resistance against the Nazi occupation, the constant, overwhelming threat faced by the resistance, and the prospect of not being able to make a dent against fascism under the worst possible circumstances. Facing such bleak prospects, Camus diagnosed how some people will embrace religion, flee into hedonism, or try to profiteer from the crisis and misery. But even in the face of hopelessness and constant, certain defeat, the moral duty of every human being remains the same: to confront and end the crisis, to alleviate suffering, and despite never-ending defeat ahead of you, to keep struggling against oppression.
As we look to 2025, progressives, radicals and leftists are facing the abyss. War, exploitation, climate and ecological breakdown, anti-feminist and anti-queer backlashes are not only putting us on the back foot, but threaten irreversible harm for the most vulnerable classes in society, both here in Scotland and everywhere across the world. New “innovations” are helping landlords to use AI in their price-gauging, target aid convoys with drone strikes, or help corporations entrench the surveillance of their workers. The new Trump administration not only threatens women’s rights in the US by abolishing “no-fault divorce” and abortion rights, but will embolden anti-feminist organisations globally, including their already well-organised, US-funded pro-life prayer gangs here in Scotland. Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” plans for new oil and gas explorations will, according to climate scientists, almost certainly put the 2C target (the “safe” limit for global warming) out of reach, and spearhead a new wave of climate denialism. For authoritarianism in all its forms, from Trump to Putin, Netanyahu to Khamenei, Modi to Xi, Bolsonaro to Milei, this means power despite their animosities and contradictory politics pulling against each other. For us it means years, maybe decades, of constant defeats.
Faced with this, a lot of the conventional wisdom both on the left and beyond is to keep our optimism and to stay hopeful. In order to not give up – so it goes in our movement practices, in our speeches and our day to day conversations with other organisers – we have to cling to the positives, the victories we have achieved. We need to keep in mind successful strikes, court cases, electoral victories and inspiring speeches and marches we organised. We have to remember the progress we have made, however gradual and small the achievements are. We need both hope and optimism on the left because without them, fatalism beckons – and neither we nor the peoples we are defending can afford giving up.
Hope can mean several things. Being or feeling hopeful can describe an emotion that we all feel when confronting the struggle, a feeling of grasping the possibility for change. Surely, there is nothing wrong with that, and maybe we cannot even help but feel hopeful. Hope can also mean a belief, or an expectation on how things will go, how we expect the struggle to turn out – and it is this kind of hope that is wedded to optimism in a way that risks disarming the left.
The problem is that optimism easily slides from the view that things will get better, into the sense that even if things go wrong they are part of a positive process, a story of progress. The history of optimistic thinking often relies on two beliefs: firstly, that there is a deeper reason or meaning to the suffering, setbacks and failures we go through, and secondly that there is a “plan” to how history unfolds, and a narrative that events follow. This kind of optimism is associated with religious thinking. Philosophical optimists often try to console those who suffer by pointing out how our suffering gives meaning to our life and its journey, because suffering and evil are necessary parts of the world that God created, and are part of God’s greater plan.
Philosophical optimism is not uncommon on the left, even where religious thinking has no foothold. We often try to console ourselves after setbacks and failures by describing the deeper meaning of the sacrifice, the grander journey of the struggle, to point out that our suffering has not been in vain. We see a strike ballot fail, a march with low turnout, evictions and deportations going ahead despite our resistance, exploitative and oppressive laws getting passed by neoliberal or reactionary governments, and we tell each other that there is a reason behind our failures and defeats. That reason may fit some narrative or theory of change we have: that the enemy’s success will make our victory even more likely in future, or that our failure will help us rebuild the groundwork of our movements. These stories have famous philosophical precedent. Karl Marx theorised that even as things get worse, in the end the contradictions inherent in the capitalist condition will inevitably lead to the abolition of capitalism. Our failings give meaning to our struggle because our setbacks are part of the march of history towards our success.
The problem with this optimism is not only that the significance or celebrations of our successes are often untrue or unwarranted – many of the victories we cling to are brittle, easily undone by the reactionary side, and invite us to overestimate the depth and relevance of some of our achievements. The deeper problem is that clinging to optimism not only creates a dissonance between what we hope for and what the material reality we see, but that it can alienate, demotivate and exhaust us, thereby jeopardising our organising and plunging us into even deeper despair.
Our failures on the left cause us sadness and hurt, in addition to their material consequences. In their drive to console, optimists often point to the deeper meaning of our suffering, of the role our set-backs play in the grander picture. What they fail to see is that their efforts of consolation shift the burden of responsibility for our desperate feelings back onto us. Through the optimist’s lens, if I feel sad and hurt, it is really my fault for not seeing the bigger picture or the grander reason behind our failures. Telling a trade unionist, a climate activist, a migrant justice organiser that our failures have meaning and are a part of our journey towards victory is not only patronising and demeaning. To their despair, it adds the feeling that they are responsible for their own despair, and that there is something wrong with their feelings, unable to see the truth that others see.
Pessimists like Camus warn us of the dangers of these false hopes wedded to optimism: vertical hope from above, like waiting for salvation from God or a better existence in the afterlife, but also horizontal hopes that promise progress towards an end goal, a historic achievement at the end of the journey. These hopes not only lead us astray, but they overburden us, and in the end, with our expectations set as high as the end of history, they burn us out quicker than they can console us.
Optimism can also erode our care and understanding for each other, as the arch-pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer notes. If we focus too much on how far we stick to the rules, follow the narrative, and keep up hope, we end up resenting those who do not live up to that standard, who do not feel as hopeful as they ought to, or who do not believe in the grander plan. On Schopenhauer’s prescription, care and compassion for our fellow sufferers arises from focusing on their suffering and taking it seriously, without trying to explain it away.
So, if not with optimism and hope, with what should we face the struggles to come? Philosophical pessimists do not think that everything will get worse. Pessimists instead ask us to suspend our expectations, do away with grand narratives that promise us salvation, and expect nothing. Pessimists ask us to take seriously the suffering and failure we all experience, without seeking to read a deeper meaning into it. Our suffering, our setbacks, and our failures are not part of a progression or journey. They are what they are. They are bad, sometimes catastrophic, and we need to face them. From the acceptance of our suffering and the rejection of narratives and expectations of progress, solidarity with our fellow sufferers can arise, and with it the courage to face never-ending defeat.
Pessimism is found in the struggle for Black lives in the US, where Afropessimists like Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson rejected the narratives of racial progress, accepted the deeply entrenched afterlife of slavery that lasts to this day, and acknowledged the reality of anti-Blackness embedded into everyday life. Accepting that there is no immediate resolution to anti-Black racism is bleak – but in its admission its bleakness can free us from false hopes and open us for genuine care and solidarity for Black lives. Perhaps there are lessons here for the left in Scotland, where we need to free ourselves from false hopes more than ever.
Pessimism, according to Camus, is not a philosophy of giving up, or withdrawing from the struggle. The struggle often seems impossible, even absurd, to the point that it is fruitless to see any meaning in even trying. This rings true today, as we are overwhelmed by so many interlocking crises, atrocities and moments of outrageous injustice. But this does not release us from our responsibility as organisers and activists, regardless of how much we are dwarfed by the scale of the challenge. We need to face never-ending defeat, and we can do so without optimism. We can face it with genuine solidarity like the Afropessimists want us to, with compassion for those who suffer like Schopenhauer recommends, and as Camus asks us, with the courage to confront the struggle. Let’s get to work.Further Recommended Readings:
Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947
Frank Wilderson III, Afropessimism, 2020
Mara van der Lugt, Dark Matters – Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering, 2021
Quan Nguyen is a philosopher currently living between Dublin and Edinburgh.