Missplaced Pessimism

Be pessimistic about nature not people

It’s cool to be pessimistic about people. If you hold Unabomber-style views that civilization and the industrial revolution have been a disaster for the human race, you’ll be held in high regard. Pessimism about people is fashionable—people often hold it without having any good arguments in its favor. Such is true of many luxury beliefs.

In contrast, pessimism about nature is much less fashionable. Even though there are very strong arguments for such pessimism, almost no one adopts it. Certainly no one would describe the view as fashionable.

Pessimism is often seen as cool and fashionable, but only of certain sorts. If you declare “it’s all meaningless, man,” while high, you’re seen as cool and deep. But that’s really a very boring form of pessimism. It’s not even clear that it’s pessimistic. A world with no good or evil is neither good nor bad—whether finding out that nothing matters is good news will depend on whether you previously expected things to be good or bad. Compare: learning that there’s now going to be water in my cup will either be a disappointment or cause for celebration, depending on what else I expected there to be.

So why are only the stupid kinds of pessimism fashionable? Why is it fashionable to be pessimistic about civilization, but deeply unfashionable to be pessimistic about nature?

Certainly some people have a general bias towards pessimism. Being pessimistic makes you seem realistic—willing to acknowledge the harsh truths about reality. That’s why people adopt almost incomprehensibly stupid views like psychological egoism so long as they sound cynical. Cynicism is seen as clear-minded, even if the cynical view is supported by bad arguments.

Confusingly, people do sometimes express cynical views about nature, but simply ignore the obvious consequences of them. When responding to vegans, people will often note that nature is a horrifying and violent place, with the air of someone delivering forbidden knowledge. Now, this is an obvious non sequitur, a bit like responding to the charge that you should stop beating your wife by pointing out that there are other people who also beat their wives. But at least they’re willing to acknowledge that nature is brutal and hellish.

But then, after acknowledging that nature is brutal and hellish, they refuse to consider the possibility that this might have implications anywhere outside of owning the vegans with banal and irrelevant platitudes. Normally if you declare something brutal and hellish, you at the very least stop advocating for there to be more of it. But these people don’t. They act as if the fact that nature sucks for almost everyone in it couldn’t possibly have any remotely important implications for how we ought to treat nature.

The reason, in my judgment, that people don’t take seriously pessimism about nature is that they’re biased not to.

One bias people have is that we have trouble being mad at some blind, impersonal force. We get mad at people—ignoring foes without faces. Anticapitalists blame the horrors of capitalism on a few rich, greedy businessmen, because it’s easier than blaming an abstract system of incentives. We’re much more concerned about terrorism than disease, even though disease kills more people. Hell, we’re more concerned about terrorism than about basically everything else, because terrorists, though they kill few people, have faces.

Politics is polarized because there are real people on the other side. No one spends time fulminating against abstractions like hunger—instead, they prefer to blame particular people.

But nature is not a person. It has no face, no physical form. It is a system of Darwinian processes, playing out according to impersonal incentives. It’s hard to hate nature, because it is not a person that you can be angry at. You’re seen as wise and cynical if you blame bad people, but if you blame a force, well, that’s just sad!

Nature also has the disadvantage of being beautiful. It’s hard, psychologically, to prefer a drab and gray world of parking lots to the beauty of the grand Canyon. Humans have an obvious bias for that which is physically beautiful—it distorts our assessment of nature. Just as lots of people find it hard to hate Mangione because of his hotness, it’s hard to hate beautiful nature.

In addition, humans have a very dumb tendency to assume that whatever is natural must be good. It’s common to reply to veganism by noting that eating meat is natural—though it’s considerably less common for people to refuse medication on the grounds that dying without antibiotics is natural. Lions do it after all.

Because of this foolish tendency, it can be hard to come to grips with the depressing reality: nature is a genuine horror show. It’s full of pain and misery. It contains way more suffering than well-being. It is a nightmare wrapped in a beautiful garb. A universe filled with mostly nature will be arbitrarily horrible, depending on how much nature there is. Now, fortunately, as a theist, I think this is only a small part of the true tale of existence, and that the ultimate tale is much grander. But certainly atheists should find the state of the world to be quite depressing—at best neither good nor bad, on the grounds that infinity breaks axiology.

Ironically, this deep pessimism about nature gives reason to be optimistic about humans. Humanity has dramatically reduced the number of wild animals. Humans are arguably the best thing that ever happened to nature! Wild animal suffering is a problem many orders of magnitude bigger than poverty or war and we’ve made it substantially less bad. Pessimism about the ultimate structure of the world gives rise to higher order optimism about our activities.

Perhaps that’s part of the reason why pessimism about nature is uncommon. There’s something attractive, in the pessimists psyche, about having a negative attitude towards fellow humans. Acknowledging that the average human might just be a truly excellent thing, on account of drastically reducing suffering, may be more than the average pessimist could bear.