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On Rational Optimism

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ON RATIONAL OPTIMISM

“We got stick for questions like, ‘Who came second in the last war?’” he recalled. “But the contestants weren’t always the brightest tickets — some of their IQs didn’t reach room temperature. Once I accidentally read out the question and the answer: ‘Where was President Kennedy assassinated, in Dallas?’ And the contestant still answered ‘Chicago’.”

  • Jim Bowen, the host of the British TV show Bullseye, who died on March 14, 2018.

Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party is perhaps his most celebrated play. In a shabby seaside boarding-house, Stanley Webber, a retired pianist, is visited by two disquieting strangers, Goldberg and McCann. The Birthday Party introduced a generation of theatre-goers to the Pinteresque pause, to Pinteresque word play, to the ‘comedy of menace’ and ‘the theatre of the absurd’. There is an anecdote about the play that Pinter himself frequently retold. Having seen a recent production, a woman wrote to the playwright and asked,

Dear Sir, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your play The Birthday Party. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are the two men ? 2. Where did Stanley come from ? 3. Were they all supposed to be normal ? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your play.

Pinter’s response:

Dear Madam, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your letter. These are the points which I do not understand. 1. Who are you ? 2. Where do you come from ? 3. Are you supposed to be normal ? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your letter.

Touché.

In his best-selling book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari asks what it is about the human species Homo Sapiens that caused it to win out against all its competitor species during man’s prehistory. One of his answers (spoiler alert) is that the ability of Homo Sapiens to cooperate in large numbers arose from our unique ability to believe in things that exist solely in the imagination, such as gods, countries, and money. Human beings, he argues, have a distinctive cognitive capacity for fiction.

Our aptitude for the largely imaginary also leaves us with a perverse requirement for certainty where certainty cannot exist. (Nobody, other than economists, ever said that human beings were either consistent, or rational.) A good example is financial market commentary provided by traditional media. Why did the market perform the way it did yesterday ? Traditional media will tell us. Whether there is any fundamental ‘reality’ or substance to their account is debatable.

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