For an historical overview of the "Origins of Optimism," I recommend this erudite piece that takes down Steven Pinker, Bill Gates, Ezra Klein, and Gottfried Leibniz, among others...
Consider the techno-optimistic take of New York Times columnist Ezra Klein on the climate crisis. His op-ed headlined ”Your Kids Are Not Doomed” notes that due to climate change the world’s poor will face “vast expanses of suffering” and we rich-worlders “will have looted the future of billions of people to power a present we preferred.”
But for this nice-guy neoliberal progressive, those mountainous miseries can’t outweigh “political realism.” The unassailable logic of “political realism” mandates that only an awesome “vision of more” is viable for NYT-reading elites. In Klein’s green future of abundance, electric cars thrillingly accelerate faster, induction stoves nix indoor pollution, and life just keeps getting better — first and foremost for his elite audience, and only many generations later for the global poor, assuming they survive the tsunami of suffering headed their way.
Klein’s maneuver helps his readers feel good as they materially (and thrillingly) accelerate away from the quagmire the poor are doomed to be caught in. This kind of optimism has the darkest of underbellies, it is but a thin veil over morally-poisonous pessimism.
Klein, like most of our political class, assumes that we citizens won’t ever do what’s right without incentives or personal gains. Even in a global crisis where billions will suffer, viable policies must be “win win” and profitable, or fun and easy for the powerful. Klein asserts that “A climate movement that embraces sacrifice as its answer or even as its temperament might do more harm than good.” The key question is, more harm for whom?
In this neoliberal market-optimist worldview, looting to provide the elite with their treats is just how the world works, extending the centuries-long trend of genocidal violence and plunder under liberal imperialism. This sort of optimism, twinned with justice-twisting “political realism,” sabotages material and moral progress that should prioritize gains for the less-blessed, least powerful, and most vulnerable.
Life in a biosphere-wide crisis can’t be a feel-good festival, a jolly moral picnic for the privileged. The climate and biosphere emergencies warrant a world-war-footing and fitting courage to face the needed hard work and sacrifice.
Yet Klein and company seem to lack the courage and integrity to even accurately inform audiences that multiple international climate authorities have declared rapid cuts in elite consumption to be essential. Climate analyst Chris Shaw has argued that liberalism lacks the conceptual resources to face such challenges: liberals act as if “free market choice is more important than the maintenance of a viable biosphere.”