Beer Goggles vs. Rose-Colored Glasses: Optimism

“Despondent as I am at the prospect of Trump’s second term, I take hope in the long view offered by Georg Hegel’s dialectic. Since 3200 BC, the start of recorded history, every new idea or regime has been greeted by its Doppelgänger or antithesis. This holds sway for a while, but soon the opposition forms a synthesis or compromise. This then is the basis of a new regime which is met by its Doppelgänger, ad infinitum.”—Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Dr. Skip Eisiminger (aka The Wordspinner)

I. “At age ten and living in Manhattan, I foraged through the gift wrap and empty boxes looking for the Shetland pony Santa had promised me. ‘Perhaps next year,’ I thought.”—Carol Singer

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Hubris)—January/February 2025—According to Mark Kurlansky, author of Milk! if I’d been breast-fed for a year instead of three days, I’d likely be two to three inches taller and more optimistic. I had a difficult time at 6’ 4” and 210 pounds getting my students to speak; imagine if I’d been 6’ 7”. As for my optimism, I’ve always been an Apollonian sort of fellow; indeed, when teaching four sections of English 101, it’s a vocational requirement. Ironically, the shadow I cast affirmed my sunny temperament.

Many years ago, when a dear friend sank into depression, I wrote her: “Dear Kate, From what Hans [her husband] tells me, it sounds as if you’re suffering from ‘the pale cast of thought.’ This is troubling because I’ve always known you as one who took skillet and spatula on every fishing trip. Your optimism impressed me because Hans is no more an angler than I am. So, unpack that skillet and return to your embroidery and the people you love . . . .” Controlling as this sounds, optimism and humor on both sides of the equation are necessary for a lasting friendship. That’s why cynics are most comfortable with cynics.

Prone to optimism that I am, I was, nevertheless, apprehensive upon reading the history of cataract surgery before my wife went to have her eyes restored. I try to make it a rule not to indulge in this sort of reading because it always leads to insomnia. I blanched when I read that hardened cataracts were once removed with a “small hammer and chisel.” (The size of the surgeon’s tools did nothing to ease my fears.) After the “surgery” was complete, the patient (as recently as the 1930s) was sent to bed with sandbags to hold the head stationary for two to three weeks. Even though my wife had opted for a laser procedure, I had a hard time silencing that surgical hammer. The noise returned a year later when I had the same procedure. If only someone had told me that on the ten-point pain scale, the worst sensation would be a one or two. If only I’d had the courage to ask, that knowledge would have done wonders for my confidence.

Without the medical progress of the last half century, both my wife and I would be dead or severely incapacitated by now. She of breast cancer and a ruptured disc, and I with a quadricep tendon repair, four hernia patch-jobs, and a thrice-reamed prostate. But the success of all ten operations and the tolerable pain associated with my eight has only increased my optimism. Whoever said, “Eat well, stay fit, and die anyway,” overlooked the long-term quality of life that diet, medicine, and exercise provide. Yes, death is real, but most of us, at least within the sound of my voice, enjoy more good years than bad before death uncreates us. For many and perhaps most, this too is a blessing.

II. “The last one out of the tunnel should replace any burned-out bulbs.”—The Wordspinner

No one knows the identity of the optimist who first saw “the light at the end of the tunnel,” but the American poet Robert Lowell is usually credited with the off-hand yet disturbing observation, “The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.” “Just” an oncoming train? Had Lowell not seen the unforgiving margins in a railway tunnel? There are no boardwalks there.

Since Lowell, people have imagined God’s face coming toward them in the tunnel, or a vendor selling batteries, or a birthing room, or an emergency room, or the lights of Hoboken, or the light in an empty refrigerator at two in the morning, or death. Evidently, there’s a lot of wiggle room between a pitch-black tunnel and a clean, well-lighted one that I share with Hemingway.

Another popular meme is the water glass that is partially filled: is it half full, half empty, waiting for a shot of vodka, or a watery grave for a careless bug? Is the water sparkling, mineral, or tap? Is there a coaster protecting the table? As with the tunnel, is there a light or reflection at the bottom of the glass? Do we study this glass with rose or blue-tinted glasses? Are these glasses bifocal or progressive? Has the observer had cataract surgery? Can rose-colored glasses turn morose? (The odds are good if they are rosé-colored.) Is the glass just too large for its contents, half the size it should be? Is the observer overlooking the oxygen and nitrogen in the top half of the glass—both as vital to life as water? Shouldn’t we consider the fact that many in the world cannot afford a glass, and the fact that about two million humans (mostly children) die a year from unclean water and the diarrhea it causes?

After this ramble, I think you’ll agree the measure taken of the glass and the tunnel’s light is complicated.

III. “Equilibrium/has greater appeal/as new phones become/another ordeal.”—The Wordspinner

Even though the melanoma clinic is on the sunny side of the street as cartoonist Roz Chast has mapped for us, forty percent of us will develop cancer, and millions will die of it. Sadly, recent studies show that optimism does not prolong the lives of cancer’s victims. Eden lies behind us, the pessimists say, not ahead. When someone urged an aging pessimist to smell a vase full of roses, he said, “What, and inhale a bee?”

That’s a chance I’m willing to take. I’ve never inhaled a bee in my 82 years because I take one simple precaution—I smell the roses with my eyes open.

IV. “The future is under no obligation to continue the arc of historical progress, but it will, I believe, for the momentum created by four million years of progress is irresistible.” —The Wordspinner

No one needs to take my word for it that there are good reasons to be optimistic even midway in the “Trump Era.” Here are a few of them:

• Before chickens were domesticated about 5000 BC, hens laid an egg every month. Today, they lay one a day.
• Likewise milk production.
• In 2018, every day, about 300,000 humans gained access to electricity,
• 300,000 gained access to clean water,
• and 620,000 gained access to the internet. (Nicholas Kristoff, 2019)
• Despite Thomas Malthus’s dire predictions, and the world’s eight-fold growth in population since his death in 1834, the world has not run out of a single metal or mineral. The reason is efficiency. In 1958, an aluminum can weighed about three ounces; in 2023, it weighed less than half an ounce.
• Between 2000 and 2012, the number of children without schooling fell from 100 million to 58 million. (Steven Pinker, 2018)
• In 1818, 12 percent of the world could read and write; in 2018 was 85 percent. (Steven Pinker, 2018)
• Thanks to AI, everyone with a smart phone will soon have access to a public library and his/her personal tutor at places like the free Khan Academy. (Various sources)
• In 2000, 2 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa slept under mosquito nets; in 2015 it was 55 percent. (Harper’s, Feb. 2016)
• In 2015, a new car traveling at 65 MPH emitted less pollution than any parked car did in 1970. (EPA)
• Rinderpest and smallpox have been officially eradicated. Diphtheria, Guinea worm disease, tetanus, yellow fever, whooping cough, polio, measles, and others have all been brought under some measure of control. (Various sources)
• Between January 2012 and December 2014, China made more cement and concrete than the US did in the 20^th C.
• The number of our brothers and sisters living in “extreme poverty” (living on less than $1.90 a day) has fallen by 217,000 every day for the last 25 years. (Nicholas Kristoff, 2018)
• Life expectancy across the globe has risen to 73.2. In the developed world, it’s 81, almost double, Covid-19 notwithstanding, what it was a century ago. (Our World in Data)
• “Conservatives today are more socially liberal than liberals were in the 1950s.” (Michael Shermer, 2018)

V. “Black as it darkles,/a star will sparkle.”—The Wordspinner

Life is a river of incalculable length, width, depth, and direction. Like the Biblical Jordan, which rises in the Syrian hills before crossing the Sea of Galilee, life ultimately dribbles into the Dead Sea, which has no outlet, being the lowest point on Earth. Eventually, the ripples flatten out and rise in a cloud of steam to seed the rains that make the desert bloom. As the steam of anger and disappointment rises following Trump’s win in 2024, I suggest we adjust our sails, recalculate our way home, and cultivate our garden, à la Monsieur Candide.

I take hope wherever I can find or manufacture it. As Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, wrote, “I invent reasons to hope.”

Despondent as I am at the prospect of Trump’s second term, I take hope in the long view offered by Georg Hegel’s dialectic. Since 3200 BC, the start of recorded history, every new idea or regime has been greeted by its Doppelgänger or antithesis. This holds sway for a while, but soon the opposition forms a synthesis or compromise. This then is the basis of a new regime which is met by its Doppelgänger, ad infinitum.

Gratitude for the Creation and my eight-decade-long ride on “the Blue Planet” has always seemed an obligation: a binding contract, if you will, between me and the blind and sighted forces that propel us. When I consider the overwhelming odds that I beat to get here, one in four hundred trillion by some calculations, I realize I did win the lottery. We all did. And though the atoms that comprise me are essentially immortal, I don’t expect that they will ever reassemble in their present form. Given those odds and the apparent indifference of nature, human love is our primary source of light and warmth, for if nature is not love, humans must be. I’ve been a recipient for so long, I’m obliged to return the favor.

To order copies of Skip Eisiminger’s Letters to the Grandchildren (Clemson University Digital Press), click on the book cover below or contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522. For Wordspinner: Mind-Boggling Games for Word Lovers, click on the book cover.