The Rise of Cruel Optimism
Another cause of our inability to pay attention (via Johann Hari's book Stolen Focus)
Continuing my free series on Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus. After this post, I am planning three more posts in this series, which will complete the overview of the book. You can find the previous post in this series here (and from it link back through all the previous posts) :
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The focus of today’s post is Chapter 8 of Stolen Focus: “The Rise of Cruel Optimism,” which is such a distinctive chapter that it merits its own post. Central to its distinctiveness for me was its central concept – “cruel optimism” – which was new to me. The term, the origin of which Hari attributes to historian Lauren Berlant, refers to the suggestion that a deeply rooted social problem can be solved by individuals making tweaks to their everyday lives. He writes:
[Cruel optimism] is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture – like obesity or depression or addiction – and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon – but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people it will fail (150).
Hari explores stress, as another social problem that often is addressed by cruel optimism. He cites as an example, a “bestselling book by a New York Times reporter,” which suggests that: “Stress isn’t something imposed on us. It’s something we impose on ourselves” (150). As one who has known stress intimately at points in my life, I resonate with the absurdity of this unnamed book’s simplistic thought. Hari notes that books like this one often point to meditation and mindfulness as sufficient ways to address stress. While I am certain, from my own experience, that that mindfulness and meditation are effective in dealing with the symptoms of stress, they do little to address directly the stressors that are bearing down upon us. These stressors, Hari observes are often socioeconomic in nature: low wages, poor working conditions, poor or nonexistent health insurance, obligations to care for children or family members who are ill, etc. If you can find the time to meditate in such challenging life situations, it may help you endure them and to be less tense in the midst of them, but it cannot actually address the issues that are stressing you.
Further Examples of Cruel Optimism
After Hari’s introduction to the concept of cruel optimism, I began to see instances strewn throughout contemporary life. One of the most striking is the practice of greenwashing. In the dire face of the climate change crisis, individuals are enticed to buy this product or that product which is marketed as being good for the environment. In egregious cases of greenwashing, specific words (e.g., “eco-friendly” or “sustainable”) or images of wildlife or nature might be falsely used to market products that have no environmental impact or are even ecologically detrimental (See this helpful explanation of greenwashing). But in more common instances, the compulsion to buy a product that one might not have otherwise bought, just because it is environmentally friendly in some way, is also a form of greenwashing. Greenwashing aims to make the consumer feel good about themselves, while doing little or nothing to address the present climate change crisis.
Cruel optimism is also at work (to some extent) in the American system of democracy, which has mostly functioned throughout its history as an aristocracy wrapped in a thin veneer of democracy. It is the wealthy and the privileged, which historically has been white men (and still proportionally remains as such), who govern and set the vision for our nation. Deep injustices are embedded in our society and are propagated by our nation around the world. And what solution is offered to the average citizen? VOTING! Yes, voting is not the only way that we are encouraged as citizens to participate in the governance of our land (there’s appealing to legislators, and protest, and running for office, etc., etc.), but increasingly over my half-century of life, voting has increasingly been pushed as the way to change things. And we’ve seen an escalation in amount of attention and that are devoted to electoral politics resources in recent decades, especially at the highest levels of the federal government.
And yet, when the ruling parties offer up two repugnant choices whose platforms are both built upon resistance to transformative change, as they have in this year’s presidential election (granted one is substantially more repugnant than the other!) , and when that election will be decided by voters in a tiny fraction of states, we start to get a taste of the cruelty that is fed to us in the optimism of mainstream narratives about voting. To quote Hari again, voting as the solution to many of our society’s ills “is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that … it will fail.”
I should clarify that I am not opposed to voting (though I was at earlier stages in my life). Rather, what I oppose is the optimism about what voting can accomplish. Voting might have the capacity to keep some evils at bay, and perhaps sometimes that might be enough, but when the whole electoral system is designed by the ruling class to marginalize minority groups and to remain in power, transformation in the direction of a society in which all can flourish is going to be glacial in its pace and is going to be resisted by those in power.
Breaking the Cycle
Hari, of course, introduces cruel optimism as one cause (among many) of our present inability to pay attention. But it also is precisely a lack of attention that makes us vulnerable to cruel optimism in its manifold forms. We’re so desperate for change and susceptible to quick and easy solutions, that we fall again and again for the cruelly optimistic options that the powers drop in front of us. We desire healthy bodies, healthy minds, healthy communities, and a healthy society, but we aren’t attentive to how sick we actually are in all of these arenas. But if real, transformative change is going to happen, we’re going to have to break the cycle of inattentiveness and vulnerability to ineffective optimistic solutions.
As Hari closes this chapter, the primary solution he offers is this: “We are … going to have to collectively take on the forces that are stealing our focus and compel them to change.” While there is probably a good bit of truth in this solution, there also is something to be said for grassroots communities that embody an alternative way of being that is in radical opposition to the life marked out by the prevailing forces. Communities, that is, that are guided by what Walter Brueggemann has described as the prophetic imagination.
More will be said in this series of posts about solutions for the inattentive malaise in which we find ourselves, but in the next couple of posts, we will turn to the final causes of inattention that Hari explores.
Always blaming white men, injustice, blah, blah, blah. so sad you all don’t have some better and more creative to talk about. it gets so old.
Several layers in this. I feel
The author would be Better to address each rather than blur the narratives.
The stress one forgets that if you have a chronic disease , exercise brings it on, stress is not necessarily social pressures, it isastress factor in fatigue syndromes and frustrating as a long desired nice walk or even yoga makes it worse. If one is to highlight this cruel
Optimism which certainly exists, the author should come up with solutions and not just blame .