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The Optimism of Uncertainty

The word “optimism,” used here, and in the subtitle of my book, makes me a little uneasy, because it suggests a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. But I use it anyway, not because I am totally confident that the world will get better, but because I am certain that only such confidence can prevent people from giving up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; it is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. I wrote this essay to show that there is some evidence in support of that possibility. I should mention that I first wrote about this in a much longer piece requested by John Tirman of the Winston Foundation.