The classic definition of the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that the optimist looking at a glass of water will see it as half-full, while a pessimist will see it as half-empty. My mother had a horrible little jingle that she used to recite to us:
The difference between the optimist
And pessimist is droll;
The optimist sees the doughnut,
And the pessimist sees the hole.
Both of those definitions are saying that the pessimist sees only the bad things in life, while the optimist sees what life has to offer. The implication is, I think, that being an optimist is better; or perhaps I only perceive it that way, as I tend to put a value on looking on the bright side of the present -- finding, to be trite, the bluebird of happiness in my own back yard. It may be that others with a different attitude will approve more of the pessimist's point of view, seeing a more realistic attitude in perceiving the half-emptiness of the glass of water, or the hole rather than the doughnut. I suspect that the middle ground of seeing both is the truly realistic attitude.
A more abstract definition of the difference between the optimist and pessimist is that the op-timist expects things to turn out all right, and a pessimist looks for the worst to happen. This must be a different sort of optimist or pessimist really, because an optimist by the first definition may be a pessimist by the second, and vice versa. I think of my father who really believed that socially and politically the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, looked back on the good old days with nostalgia (except for certain kinds of scientific technology -- he loved computers) and yet never felt that anything bad could possibly happen to him. When it did he felt betrayed. It's an interestingly mixed world-view. He saw evils all around him, but never expected them to touch him. I suspect that his pessimistic view was his intellectual approach, while the optimistic one came from his inborn personality set.
One of the first questions that theology building courses ask is how you perceive the universe. Is it basically kindly, providing for your needs; is it basically inimical, to be endured or conquered before your needs can be satisfied; or is it just indifferent to you? Our answers to that question will come partly from our innate personality orientation and partly from our experience. Whatever its sources, the way we answer it has an important bearing on the way we live our lives.
There is a rather attractive phrase that some writers have used: being "seized by God". Well, attractive to me - I like it better than the one I had always used to describe myself, which was being a religion freak. Those who are seized by God seem to get an extreme sort of world-view regarding joy or suffering. They tend to go one way or the other. Ecclesiastes, from the Judaic tradition, and the Buddha were two who, seized by God, became complete pessimists. They became aware of the suffering in the world and came to the conclusion that living isn't really worth the pain.
Of all the major religious figures of the world, the Buddha has always been the most attractive to me. He started his new religion because of the compassion he felt for all the suffering he saw in the world. I'm sure you all know the story, how as a young prince he had had all that his heart could desire and was protected even from the knowledge that others were less fortunate. One day while out hunting he saw a man begging. The man's clothes were in rags and he was actually hungry. Another day he saw a man who was ill, but the last straw was when he saw for the first time one who was dead. At this final horror the suffering of the world overcame him, and he left his palace, his wife, his servants, his fine clothes and horses, and went to seek some answer to it -- some universal relief from it. He first tried asceticism, the answer of his Hindu culture, eating less and less each day until he got his intake down to three grains of rice a day. Then, as he was sitting meditating beneath a bo tree, his soul left his body, joining the great soul, and he attained nirvana and all knowledge. He knew the answer for the cessation of suffering. He could have stayed in the perfect peace and joy of emptiness and non-being, but because of his infinite compassion, his soul returned to his body so that he could spend the rest of his life teaching others the way to the same achievement. That was not the asceticism he had been practicing, but the eight-fold path to non-attachment. Suffering, he said, was the natural state of humankind, and the only way to overcome it and to attain nirvana is to achieve perfect non-attachment to the things of this world like wealth, power, success, family, etc. To the Buddha as well as Eccle-siastes, "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity."
I think the reason that story holds such power for me and for many others who are not Buddhists is that our theology, too, had its beginning in an awareness of suffering. With an equal awareness of the beauties and glories of life, I could not conclude that all was vanity, but I did become aware that the universe is utterly impartial. It sends good and evil in most unequal amounts to everyone. Some people, through no virtue of their own, seem to live in permanent sunshine, others, through no fault, in perpetual rain. I am not sure from the evidence I see that the power of good is such that the end is necessarily happy. There are those who seem to think that all change is necessarily for the better and that all evolution, both of life and society must always be toward improvement. I fear that is a statement of faith rather than grounded firmly in evidence.
Nevertheless, at least in that way I am definitely an optimist. I think that things in general in the world that we know are getting better. There is more compassion, more justice in the world. Even nations have to justify their actions to at least seem to be morally rather than self-interestedly motivated. As people become more civilized, though our capacity for destructiveness increases with an increase in technology, we actually do it less universally and much less personally. We can no longer, for instance, find bull or bear-baiting the charming entertainment our ancestors did. The torture chambers which were once so common in political and religious institutions are no longer acceptable to most people, though our leaders seem to wish to reinstitute it. Though racism still exists, we are no longer able to get away with public racial slurs. When we do evil we do it on a grand scale, but there is, it seems to me, an increasing revulsion against evil, a struggle for the good.
There is another response that people have who are seized by God. The answer that they have to the pessimism of Ecclesiastes and the Buddha is their joy in the beauty and love that they see around them. Instead of their attachment to those lovely things keeping them from the unity the Buddha called nirvana, they consider it a part of that unity. Matthew Fox's creation spirituality is the popular present-day expression of this attitude. They argue that the universe is truly all-beneficent and we would all find it so if we were properly attuned to it. Others, maintaining belief in its impartiality still say that the good side does exist, if not absolute good, the process toward it. The joys of life do exist as well as the pain, and to be attached to those joys is to be attached to what is good in the universe. To deny or refuse the good things that life offers, as the Buddha taught, is not merely to endure the suffering that comes impartially, but ungratefully to choose to suffer. To so choose is to be the pessimist of the half-empty glass or the hole in the doughnut on the cosmic level.
You would presume that the view of the universe that an individual holds would direct his or her expectations in everyday life, but I'm not entirely sure that that is true. I am not even sure that cosmic optimism or pessimism is tied into one's immediate ability to see half-full or half-empty, doughnut or hole, and perhaps such a complete integration of world-view is not necessary. I mentioned before my father's incorrigible personal optimism which was tied in with an immediate pessimistic world-view and what I would think of as cosmic realism. He believed in the indifference of the cosmos, the unmitigated downward trend of humanity, culture and day-to-day life, and yet was absolutely certain that there would be another gas station before he ran out of gas. Quite often, on a personal level, he was justified. I've seen him more than once run out of gas at the top of a hill and coast down to a gas station at the bottom, but sometimes he would be wrong. Nevertheless, his confidence never decreased. There are others whose expectations are always low. They fill up at a quarter of a tank, even if they've got a car that holds 20 gallons and goes 35 miles to each one of them. If there is a gas station up there it will probably be closed. These are the people for whom Murphy's Law was invented: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. I like its first corollary, myself: Of several things that can go wrong, the one that does will be the hardest and most expensive to fix. Murphy's Law people not only prepare for the worst, they expect it. They are never disappointed. They may occasionally be happily surprised, but never disappointed. That has a practical value in avoiding the pain of betrayal of expectations, but the time spent in anticipation of disappointment is rather wearing on the nerves. I'm not going to say which sort I am, but I've never run out of gas in my life.
I suspect that the only relationship to a world-view that that sort of pessimism has is that of superstition rather than real belief in a maleficent universe. There is a part of us that may accept some truth in the myths of the jealousy of the gods when things were going too well. There have been tribes, which, being uncivilized, have far preferred to have boy than girl babies, so when a boy was born they would give him a girl's name to keep the gods from destroying him. How far away from that are we? How many of you have ever knocked on wood when you said something optimistic? That goes back to a magic way of keeping the gods from malignant inter-ference when things were looking too cheerful.
I don't think that that sort of pessimism is really harmful, unless you arrange things to conform to your expectations, and may even have the value of preventing disappointment, though it substitutes fear of the future, but I think the other kind, the water and doughnut sort, which has both its cosmic and immediate aspects, can be harmful. Cosmic pessimism may lead to despair, the most tragic and useless of emotions. If the universe is maleficent, there's not much point in trying to improve the human situation or increase human happiness. It may produce resignation instead, which is less painful, but also useless. Those who see the inimical aspects of the cosmos as a challenge to be fought are not pessimists. They believe that pain can be overcome.
The immediate attitude of seeing only lacks and flaws in life, the hole instead of the doughnut can be even more negative. It may be based on the same superstition as those who expect the worst. If we really luxuriate in the doughnut the gods may become jealous and take it away, so to keep ourselves from becoming too happy we take note of all possible flaws. There are those who note flaws in hopes of doing something about them, but those are not true pessimists. They are realists. To be a true pessimist, not through superstition, but simply because that is what you see, I think may be truly destructive. To be unappreciative of the beauties of life and the value of other people because of a focus on flaws and evils diminishes what is good.
I have said that I believe that in many ways things are getting better. To say that is to convict myself of a cosmic optimism. There are so many things we see to put against that - so many that despair may seem the more realistic response. We see our own country starting aggressive wars and our own leaders justifying torture. We see the increase of dangerous religious beliefs which give rise to terror and violence. We fear the effects of global warming and doubt our ability to make a difference. Why not despair? We used to talk about the progress of humankind upward and onward forever, and today those words seem a cruel hoax. Yet we have no other option. We cannot sit back with our hands folded, but must continue, whether we hope for it or not to believe in and work for a better world. It is good to see reality as it is, but it is better to see only the doughnut than only to see the hole.