Judgements, moods and emotions

The question that each of us should be asking may be posed in a variety of ways: “How should I accommodate the pessimistic and misanthropic perspective?”, “How should I adjust, shape and conduct my life in the light of it?”, “How should this perspective inform my life?”, or “What tone or stamp to my life should it give?” Before we consider some answers to this question, it calls for some elaboration.

First, I want to emphasize again its first-person character. It is not the question of what would be the most beneficial way for “us” – human beings in general – to respond to the harsh assessment of the human condition. Perhaps it would be good for people, animals and the planet if we travelled by aeroplane much less, but that does not settle whether I should take fewer flights. My situation might, in certain ways, be special or relevantly different from that of others, and anyway I am certain that most people are not going to give up flying. That various scenarios might be desirable is neither here nor there, as far as my decisions are concerned, unless they are also realistic. A focus on the merits or otherwise of unrealistic scenarios is an evasion of the question of how I should accommodate to pessimism and misanthropy.

Second, why does the question matter? Why should I want or need to make this accommodation? After all, I agree with any number of judgements about humankind – how it evolved, for instance, or its technological progress – but I don't usually ask how these should inform or shape my life. Or, rather, I won't ask this unless the judgement is one that challenges some settled conviction of mine. Darwin's account of human evolution did challenge certain Christian beliefs and many Christians indeed felt a need to accommodate this new theory of our origins. Likewise, the dark visions of the human condition expressed by powerful, persuasive voices like the Buddha's or Schopenhauer's can come as a shock to people who encounter them for the first time. By puncturing people's confidence in sunnier estimates of our condition, these dark perspectives are disturbing and disquieting, and call for a response.

The rhetoric of refuge

Michel de Montaigne, whom we encountered earlier as a representative of pessimism and misanthropy, wrote that while we should, by all means, have wives, children and property, we should also “set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop”. For it is there that we may establish “our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum”. He is advising us that, to lead a good and contented life, a person requires refuge, a place set apart from even the more pleasant and laudable occupations of everyday life.

The frequency of references to a need for refuge among those whose judgement on humankind is negative, several of whom we’ve already met, is striking. Montaigne's remark reminds one of his compatriot, Pascal’s, famous comment that “man's unhappiness springs from … his incapacity to stay quietly in one room … at home”. Although famous, this is usually misunderstood to mean that it is essential to be able to be alone and enjoy solitude. Pascal's actual point is that staying at home is a refuge from “quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions” and the pressure constantly to indulge in “diversions”.

Here are a couple of more recent examples. In W. G. Sebald's book, Austerlitz, a schwarzsehend character – reflecting to an extent the author's own perspective – describes how, in a decadent world, he keeps himself apart from current affairs, avoids newspapers, and creates “a kind of quarantine” in order to “maintain his existence”. Aldous Huxley writes of “the urge to escape”, and to seek refuge from, a world in which most people lead lives that, when not “painful”, are “monotonous, poor and limited”, except when indulging in “orgies and intoxicants”.

Innocence

A refugee escaping from one country to another hopes to find there a better place. One hope is that the new place will be more innocent – less guilty – of what is being fled from, such as corruption and oppression. Here is the first way, I propose, in which, analogously, nature provides the quietist with a better place than, and so the prospect of refuge from, the human world. If nature is a realm of innocence, then it promises relief from the disquiet that shadows the pessimistic, misanthropic vision of humankind.

Among writers who have turned to nature for solace and refuge, the trope of nature's innocence is familiar. Thoreau refers to “the indescribable innocence and beneficence of nature” and the “cheer” that each affords. The garden in Andrew Marvell's “Thoughts in a Garden” is a place not only of “delicious solitude”, but of “fair quiet” and its “sister”, “innocence”. For the philosopher and dramatist, Friedrich Schiller, natural beings “are what we were” – our “lost childhood”, where we “unnatural” creatures might again experience “pure innocence”.

But how can we regard nature as innocent, given the scale of pain, terrible deaths and other kinds of suffering that innumerable creatures experience in the natural world? Isn't nature, in the words of one philosopher, a very “cruel mistress”? The nature writer, Annie Dillard, observes that “it is rough out there … gruesome … grotesque … a universal chomp”. One reason the Buddha regards rebirth as an animal as terrible is because the lives of countless animals are themselves terrible.

Reminders like these rightly challenge romantic, sentimental conceptions of the natural world as a kind of Eden whose only blemish was Adam and Eve. Encouraged by poetry and paintings that represent nature as an idyll, by children's books full of cute creatures, by eco-tourist hype, and by dithyrambic television documentaries of the “What a Wonderful World” genre, such conceptions, although relatively recent, are remarkably popular and resilient. But they cannot, of course, be taken seriously.

The man was returning, after a gap of thirty years, to the landscape in which, as a teenage boy, he loved to wander. He could remember clearly the forest of Scots pine and birch through which he would walk almost every day and, beyond its fringe, the fast-running river that joined the loch to the sea. He could still picture the hillside that rose from the opposite bank of the river: amongst the heathers and bracken, he would, on clear days, see deer, fox, rabbits, even weasels and badgers – all of them under the watchful eyes of the red kites that circled above.

Three decades on the place was very different. The forest had gone: only the stumps of the trees remained, jutting from muddy soil criss-crossed by bulldozer tracks. The river no longer tumbled, but flowed languidly, towards the sea, its surface covered with scum from a salmon farm built further up the loch. On the hillside beyond, the heathers and bracken had disappeared, burnt by fires resulting from the freak temperatures of the summer. There would, the man knew, be no deer, foxes or rabbits inhabiting this desert. Most of them would anyway have become victims of the shooters who, in recent years, paid large sums of money to kill almost anything that moved. The red kites, with no animals to keep an eye on, had flown elsewhere.

As he looked at this devastated environment, the man fought to suppress the animosity, hatred even, that he started to feel towards humankind. The desolation before him was, after all, down to human beings, not “the forces of nature”. This was so even with the heathland fires, which registered humanly engineered climate change. Nor were the interventions responsible for the desolation the result of honest mistakes or of benign intentions gone awry. Instead they manifested human failings: greed, hubris, cruelty, indifference, mindlessness, and many others.

Incipient feelings of hatred towards human beings were not new to the man. Whether on his travels, through watching television documentaries, or reading about the fate of species and environments, he had encountered many other instances of human depredation of the natural world.

Egoism?

There is more, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, that we want to know about quietists – notably, the modes or strategies of living consistent with their aspirations. But we already know enough about quietism to consider a charge that is sometimes made against it – that of egoism. This is a complaint that, historically, has often been levelled – by, for example, both Mahāyāna Buddhists and Confucians against the Theravāda monk whose goal is to become enlightened, or by the Catholic Church against the Molinists for their disregard of “good works”. I don't want to enter into the intricacies of these particular cases, but they indicate that there are two grounds for the egoism charge – quietism's eschewal of meliorist, activist ambitions and its focus on the first personal question of how to live. Neither of these grounds are sound.

The critic of quietism argues, first, that quietists demonstrate their egoism and self-centredness by asking “How should I live in response to the pessimistic, misanthropic judgement of the human condition?”. The question implies, critics allege, that, for the quietist, it is only his or her own life that is of concern. Well, it is true that the question is selfdirected and that self-cultivation, or care of the self, is quietism's primary focus. But this does not imply that the quietist life is selfish, self-centred, or egoistic in the sense that these terms have in ordinary discourse. Quietists, that is, do not ignore the interests and well-being of other people or creatures except in so far as these bear upon their own advantage.

For the quietist, selfishness – and its many neighbours, including greed, vanity, insensitivity, and lack of charity – are failings or vices. They are dispositions one should try to be rid of, not to indulge. In exercising virtues, the quietist's motivation is not self-advantage, but to counter the failings responsible for much of our suffering and, in doing so, to live a good life. The critic is guilty of confusing self-cultivation and self-concern with self-advantage and self-centredness. Put differently, there is confusion between self-reflective attention to the I or ego and exclusive preoccupation with one's own interest – egoism, that is.

Why nature?

My focus in this and the following chapter is on the refuge from the human world afforded by natural environments. Why this focus? Why exclude other types of possible refuge? One answer is that it doesn't exclude these others for, as we’ll see, it is partly through their association or adjacence with nature that other places are often sought as refuges. Another answer is that, from page one, human relationships with nature have been an important theme of this book. It was with a walker's depression at the devastation of a landscape that the book began, and “eco-misanthropy” was a prominent topic in the first few chapters. Exploring the prospect of a quietist's refuge in nature is a continuation of the theme.

A further answer is that natural environments are the refuges that figure by far the most saliently in the literature of refuge. The rhetoric of refuge in nature is unparalleled by one of refuge in anything else. We’ve already encountered examples of it, for instance in Wordsworth's lament that we have become “out of tune” with nature. A few decades after Wordsworth's poem, Thoreau wrote of the “sweet and tender … innocent and encouraging society” to be found in nature, even for a “poor misanthrope” like himself. A century later, another American misanthrope, the environmentalist and anarchist, Edward Abbey, proposed that, since “the world of men is … ugly, cruel, trivial [and] unjust”, the only thing for an “honest man” is to withdraw and “cultivate your own garden [or] look to the mountains”. Characters in a book by W. G. Sebald, tired of existence in the “so-called real world”, resolve to spend their lives out of doors, with “plants and animals” as their “companions”.

The idea of nature as refuge is also pervasive in Asian quietist traditions. It is commonplace, for example, among the Tang poets. When Wang Wei becomes sick of “the affairs of the world”, it is to his “old forest home” that he goes. The Daoist monasteries to which poets often repaired were typically situated in remote natural environments.

Two “noble truths”

The dark reckoning of the human condition by the man we encountered in the Prologue had several sources – first-hand experience, documentaries and newspaper reports, but also works of philosophy and religion. Experience and the documentaries confirmed claims he had studied in these works, while they in turn helped him to articulate what he saw on his travels or watched on his computer screen. No work had done this more effectively than the recorded teachings of a man who lived two and a half millennia earlier – Siddhattha Gotama, familiarly known as the Buddha.

Not only did the Buddha express a deeply negative judgement on humankind, but he provided what perhaps remains the most detailed and penetrating account of its moral and spiritual failings. This book, incidentally, is not intended to be a study of Buddhism, and I do not write as a card-carrying Buddhist, but at several points I draw upon the insights to be found in the discourses of the Buddha. In the Prologue I briefly described the line of thought that this book will follow, and it is no accident if, at some stages, this line coincides with the path taught by the Buddha.

In his first discourse after the night of his enlightenment, the Buddha formulated the four famous “noble truths”. The first two are “the truth of suffering” and “the truth of the origin of suffering”. When unpacked, these terse pronouncements articulate the Buddha's dark vision of humankind. Suffering (dukkha) should be understood in a broad way: it comprises not only the physical pains of illness, injury and approaching death but failure to get the things we most want and encounters with those to which we are most averse. Indeed, suffering is the lot of any creatures, like ourselves, that are “aggregates” of body, feeling, perception, desire and consciousness. Frustration at failure, anxiety concerning the future, envy of those who get what they want, addiction and remorse – these, too, are forms of suffering. Even in the case of illness and approaching death, the Buddha's focus is less on physical pain than on the fear, resentment, anxiety, or disappointments that these invite.

A label

So far, I have considered three strategies for coping with the disquiet occasioned by a pessimistic and misanthropic perception of humankind. None of them succeed as ways to accommodate this perception in one's life. Amnesia is, in effect, an evasion of it, while nihilism and activism, in addition to their lack of realism, give rein to many of the failings that invited a negative verdict on the human condition.

I now turn to another way – or set of ways – of responding to pessimism and misanthropy and managing the disquiet that accompanies them. I call it “quietism”. In Chapter 5, we’ll encounter a variety of quietist ways, or strategies, of living. Before that, however, we need to identify the aspirations that are common to quietists, whichever ways they then take to realize aims in their lives. We need to have an understanding of quietism sufficiently general to fit its several forms – a description of what it is to live in a quietist key.

We’ll arrive at this understanding through looking at a number of traditions or approaches in politics, religion and philosophy that have been labelled “quietist”. The quietism that I’ll be characterizing is not identical with any of these traditions, but it includes elements and aspirations found in all of them.

Let's begin with the label “political quietist”, sometimes applied to people who eschew not only socio-political activism, but almost all involvement in political affairs. Typically, the label is applied pejoratively, by those critical of such political abstinence. For these critics, quietism is irresponsible and guilty of apathy and indifference. There is, for example, a lot of discussion in the Islamic world of political quietism. Inspired by such texts as “Obey those in authority among you” (Q 4.59), some thinkers, Sunnis and Shiites alike, have taught avoidance of political participation. In doing so, they have invited the “political quietist” label from their opponents, who accuse them of encouraging either apathy or blind obedience.

Taking stock

This is a short book, but it has covered a lot of ground. It will be helpful briefly to go over some of this ground in order to provide a setting for the reflections in this final chapter.

In the Prologue, a disturbing experience of environmental devastation – though it could as well have been one of “man's inhumanity to man” – prompted a dark perception of the human condition. This perception helped to endorse the judgements on the human condition, discussed in Chapter 1, that are made by pessimists and misanthropists. The state of humankind as it has developed is, the pessimist recognizes, saturated by suffering, anxiety, unsatisfied desires or satiated boredom, fear of death, and much else that makes human life “unsatisfactory”. Nor is it realistic to expect any radical change in this condition. The negative assessment is compounded by a misanthropic judgement on the human condition as marked by deep, general and entrenched failings and vices. Indeed, that's one reason why no radical melioration of our condition can be envisaged. Pessimism and misanthropy, as we saw, typically reinforce one another.

Pessimism and misanthropy are judgements on the human condition, not mere feelings, but if they are judgements that are genuinely embraced or endorsed, they must be accompanied by a negative mood. I named this “disquiet” – a term that can cover more particular moods like despair, disgust and anxiety. The question addressed in the chapters following was how a person should live in the light of the pessimistic, misanthropic verdict. How should a person accommodate disquiet? This, it was emphasized, is indeed a personal question. The issue is not how “We” – human beings at large, “society” – should respond to pessimism and misanthropy. No such response – a global moral revolution, say – will occur, and that it won't is part of the context in which an individual person should reflect on how to live.

Meliorism and “concerted effort”

For amnesiacs, the way to be rid of disquiet is to blot the condition of humankind out of one's thoughts; for the nihilist the way is to be rid of humankind, the source of the disquiet. Both strategies give up too soon, according to the champions of the response to pessimism and misanthropy that I shall consider in this chapter. According to them, disquiet is to be overcome, or at least managed, not by forgetting or bringing to an end the human condition, but by working towards its betterment. We should not ignore, but on the contrary be alert to this condition and, instead of despairing at it, undertake to improve it.

This activist, meliorist response is the most common one found among people who are nevertheless receptive to a dark vision of the human condition. Among them are those who march, demonstrate, protest and otherwise visibly display their support for movements dedicated to ways that, they believe, will lead to the melioration of humankind. These people include, among many others, radical environmentalists, anti-racists, pacifists, religious evangelists, nationalistic populists, and enforcers of “woke” cultural policies.

It might be thought that activism and meliorism are ruled out by pessimism. But pessimism comprises two judgements: a recognition that the human condition is a bad one, in which suffering predominates, and a prediction that this situation will not radically alter. People who confine themselves to the first judgement may well hope that suffering and moral failings can be significantly reduced through movements like those mentioned. There is no inconsistency in the title of a recent blog entitled “The world is awful … The world can be much better”. But these are not the words, of course, of someone who accepts the full pessimist package.

It is, moreover, theoretically possible to accept the whole pessimist package and still advocate activist intervention for the betterment of humankind. This is because a negative prospect of future improvement can come in different degrees of gloom. Rousseau, for instance, thought it was possible to “banish” some – but only some – vices. William James thought there was a reasonable, though not guaranteed, prospect of betterment, and hence described himself as standing between optimism and pessimism.