Joint Landscape (15-9-1546) | Shen Zhou / Public Domain
If you or someone you know is experiencing symptoms of a negative outlook on humanity, then David E. Cooper’s Pessimism, Quietism, and Nature as Refuge (Agenda Publishing, 2024) might be just the book for you.
Cooper’s “negative judgement on the moral and spiritual failings of humankind” focuses readers’ attention on our species’ fundamental and inalienable propensity for envy, anger, egoism, insatiable greed, and deceit.
Classical Buddhist thought, he claims, offers the most “detailed and penetrating account of the moral and human failings of humankind.” Also worth considering, however, are the supporting arguments of Christian theologians like Luther and Calvin, ancient Greek scholars like Plato, Daoist sages like Liezi and Zhuangzhi, and transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. By drawing on these epochs, Cooper encourages the reader to reject the idea that society is getting better—or indeed that it ever could:
A society marked by selfishness, avarice, and obsession with status and material gain does not have the moral resources to reform itself. After all, if the misanthrope is right, the bad condition humankind finds itself in is not the result of passing and correctable circumstances … but of entrenched human failings. Our sorry condition is down to how we are.
To many activists, the credo with which they might respond to this negative verdict is that the human condition can be radically improved through concerted, committed, collective effort. If we’re suffering as the result of socially constructed evils, then surely we can solve the problem by changing the constitution of society. Not so, argues Cooper:
The tendency to scapegoat flows from the optimistic illusion that it is not the human condition as such that is awful, but only certain conditions under which human beings live … it is shallow and deluded to fix the blame on … these especially adverse conditions.
Cooper also applies this framework to activist movements, which, he says, betray a misplaced confidence in human capacities. The idea that activism could ever provide an antidote to the human condition is, to him, yet another illusion.
The reader, at this point, is intended to ask, “How then should I adjust, shape, and conduct my life in the light of this negative appraisal of the human condition?”
Notice first that the question is framed entirely in the first person. This is because, as far as Cooper is concerned, there is no sense in what he deems to be the unrealistic aims of collective action. If you asked Cooper what he thought about the Green New Deal, for instance, he might take a line from his book and say: “Perhaps these are sensible answers … [but] … What bearing on my life has the proposal radically to reduce consumption when I know that this won’t happen?” Broad, sweeping proposals like these are just distractions and evasions, he says—away from the only important question one should be asking: “What can I do to change myself?”
Cooper thus suggests that each of us direct our focus inwards. In so doing, he argues, we can systematically respond to the all-too-human vices and failings that misanthropy identifies and combat them constructively. Only by taking quiet refuge in nature, far removed from the discontents and disquiet of society, can one find the necessary environment to cultivate virtue.
This is necessary for Cooper in large part because of a widespread Christian, Daoist, Buddhist, Stoic, and Epicurean consensus that to live a good and just life, one must free oneself from the illusions, biases, prejudices, and self-deceptions that obscure the senses of understanding, perception, and judgement that steer us towards virtue.
But what are the real-life ramifications of detaching oneself from civilization to practice a quietist life on large-scale issues like war, oppression, climate change, inequality, and political violence? Won’t such collective evils continue unabated without any activists left to challenge them?
Can the quietism of spiritually oriented introspective individuals live up to its promise to offer a life free of suffering, greed, and hatred for all its practitioners?
Though Cooper’s answer to this question invites skepticism, his book does a good job of forcing the reader to question what it means to try to live justly in a fundamentally unjust society—and whether it is even possible to do so.
