Disillusion gives birth to demoralization, and a demoralized public is a potentially disaffected one. This is one reason why almost every English novel before Thomas Hardy ends on an affirmative note, even if this runs counter to what it has actually shown about the world. Art must edify as well as entertain. It must raise our spirits as well as feed our curiosity about our fellow humans, show things as they are but also as they might be in some more just, compassionate parallel universe. Fiction makes up for the deficiencies of reality.

Even so, it’s important that optimism isn’t overdone. This is partly because people are quick enough to see through hollow promises and bogus superlatives. But it’s also because, while our rulers may be idealistic, prating of a new Golden Age of peace and prosperity, the populace is spontaneously materialistic, more interested in the price of eggs than the advent of Utopia. The bankers and CEOs are materialists as well, though they’re aware that one needs the odd burst of piety and patriotic rhetoric to mask the naked self-interest of their actual activities. Ruling classes are not always fooled by their own ideology. This is why it’s a futile pursuit to speak truth to power, since power usually knows the truth anyway. Power understands that one occasionally needs to invoke God, the greatness of the nation and the spirit of selflessness without allowing it to interrupt the daily business of screwing one’s competitors. As the wit remarked, it’s when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it’s time to give it up.

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The orgy of collective self-congratulation and sham religiosity which was Trump’s inauguration showed all this well enough. The man himself was in Messianic mode, sent by God to save the nation: as though the Almighty’s first attempt at this task, by sending a close family member, hadn’t quite come off. Looking around the world, one feels bound to agree. Trump was in a performative mood as well, which may require some explaining. For philosophers of language, performative statements are the kind of utterance that gets something done. Promising, cursing, blessing, welcoming, instructing, forgiving, forbidding: these are examples of language as action, doing something by saying something, not describing the world but bringing some new state of affairs into existence through the power of the word.

It was in this spirit that Trump decreed on being elected that there were now only two genders in the United States. It was as though all other genders vanished into thin air as the words were spoken, which is to say that performative language is a kind of magic. You can transform the world with a movement of the lips. You can even conjure new geographical features into existence, such as Mount McKinley or the Gulf of America. The same goes for Trump’s declaration that “The Golden Age of America begins right now”, which is less an observation like “What a fine library!” than a creative act like “I declare this library open”. Idealism in the sense of a positive vision of the world begins to merge into idealism in its more philosophical sense, meaning the power of the mind to create reality in its own image. If the truth is inconvenient, you can replace it by legislating an alternative truth into being.

This is all the more acceptable if you live in a world in which everything is in flux. Change and fluidity are hallmarks of postmodern culture, which means that no statement about reality can be definitive. It all depends on who says it, for what reason, at what place and time. There is no single truth about anything. The world exists in a whole spectrum of different ways at any given time, so that almost any description of it is likely to be true from some standpoint or other. Being true to the way things are means acknowledging that things are in no way particular. Hence the emergence of post-truth civilization, in which Trump is a wronged innocent. Since you can’t make an objective judgment between this and the belief that he is a crook and a liar, reason becomes pointless and the two opinions simply have to fight it out. Post-truth leads to violence.

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The mental power that transforms the world is traditionally known as the will, and in American culture the will is infinite. Madonna attributed her recovery from a serious illness to the fact that she “didn’t believe in limitations”. She may be in for a nasty surprise in 20 or 30 years time. What obstructs the will is the flesh, with all of its flaws and constraints, so that the only true freedom would be to de-materialize yourself, escaping from the body altogether. It’s this, not just a prudishness about sexuality, which lies at the root of the Puritan hatred of the body. To be a body is to be finite, and to be finite is to be plunged into permanent conflict with one’s true self, which is the infinite power of God within you. If you were to shuck off the body entirely, however, you would be nothing, so that the ultimate freedom is pure negativity. To act is to shape the world according to your wishes; but it is also to be a prisoner of what you create, since whatever you create is fated to be finite, and finitude is a scandal to the infinity which is the life of God in his creatures.

This is why there can never be an American utopia. The nation is doomed to remain divided — not just between George Clooney and the Proud Boys, but between the flesh and the spirit, which is to say between its actual achievements and the eternally unappeased desire which will always find them lacking. There is always more wilderness to tame, more territories to be colonized, more attempts to plant the Stars and Stripes on Alpha Centauri as well as Mars. All one’s ideals succeed in doing is showing how far reality has fallen short of them. You can call this state of affairs permanent progress or chronic unhappiness. Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that it was both. The only future it can’t deal with is the one we are all forced to confront: death.

Because of their different history, the British are nothing like as idealist as the Americans. A prime minister who claimed that God saved his life, so that he could save the country, would probably be ridiculed rather than applauded. A long heritage of empiricism means that the contemporary British believe in what they can touch and taste, whatever the imperial fantasizes of their ancestors and the chauvinism of the far-Right. Rather than stamping your identity on the world, you allow the world to shape your identity. The past is to be broken with in some respects, but conformed to in others. Gratitude for God’s special interest in the nation is largely confined to the last night of the Proms. Pessimism rather than bright-eyed enterprise sets the cultural tone. Alexis de Tocqueville remarks in his Democracy in America that Americans discourage negative comments about the weather. In Britain, they are well-nigh compulsory.

Optimism and pessimism, however, are for the most part mere temperamental affairs, without much moral substance. It’s no credit to smile at adversity if this comes to you as naturally as sneezing. This is where optimism differs from hope. Trump’s vision of a prosperous United States, supreme among the nations, may sound like hope but is actually just small-boy bragging. Much of what he says about America is really about himself. Genuine hope has to be based on realism rather than fantasy. The frail, tentative hope that sometimes emerges as the final note of a tragic drama is worth attending to because it has been dearly bought. Optimism, by contrast, is for the most part hope bought on the cheap. In the end, the only positive vision that counts is one that has faced the worst: yet still manages to affirm. Donald Trump gives the impression of a man who has never faced anything worse than an overdone cheeseburger.

Performative declarations don’t really work when it comes to culture. You can pardon a convict with a stroke of the pen, but most cultural change moves more like a glacier than a mountain stream. Culture in the sense of everyday customs and allegiances has its roots in a whole complex history. It represents what one might call the collective unconscious, and tends to resist being engineered into or out of existence. It is the stuff of which identities are made, which means that it’s a lot harder to change than your shoes or even your accent. Dismissing certain genders as null and void is like trying to will your hair to change color. The narcissist insists that the world must be pliant to his touch, raging like an infant when it resists his desires. He would rather destroy material reality than allow it to frustrate his schemes. And Trump has his finger on the nuclear button.

Even amid rising case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths from Covid-19, it’s possible if you look closely to see the first chapters of a new story about Britain and its prospects in 2021 being written. It’s a story of a new Roaring Twenties, a time of national cheer, celebration and even indulgence.

It’s also a story that I find more than a little unnerving.

Ever since the first effective vaccine to the virus was confirmed, optimism about 2021 and beyond has been rising, with financial markets the epicentre of the outbreak. In the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that the closer a person is to the City and financial services, the more likely they are to be looking forward to 2021 as a year when the champagne starts to flow again and the fun resumes.

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That’s a generalisation based on anecdotes, but it’s also borne out by wider evidence from the markets and their related industries. Depending on how you measure it, share prices are now as high as they’ve ever been and the gap between those prices and the actual earnings of the companies concerned as wide as at any point in history.

A lot of that comes down to the most important public policy that almost no politician talks about these days: central banks pouring cheap money into economies to keep businesses and households afloat. All that money has to go somewhere, which means higher share prices, more mergers and takeovers (private equity deals are now at their highest levels since 2007 ). A lot of City types will tell you, in terms, that There Really Is No Alternative to putting money into things like companies and property.

All this will inevitably mean more pay and bonuses for the people involved, money that will, in part and unevenly, cascade out through the economy: UK house prices are up almost 10% in 2020, and London estate agents are full of excitement about next year.

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Economic exuberance isn’t wholly irrational. After all, as long as mass vaccination programmes go OK, there’s every chance of a return to some sort of normal economic life starting in the second or third quarter of 2021. Companies that have survived the long winter and make it to Easter may find a good number of optimistic customers with cash on hand and a desire to spend it.

Household finances are another thread in the story of optimism and hedonism in 2021. For some people, 2020 has been annoying and inconvenient but also quite financially advantageous: if you have the sort of job that involves sitting at a keyboard and talking to people on Zoom and you’ve kept that job through the pandemic, you’re probably better off than you were a year ago, because your costs have fallen. No more commuting, no more Pret sandwiches, no more drinks after work.

Andy Haldane at the Bank of England reckons that adds up to £100 billion in extra savings piled up, money that could start to flow in 2021 as the Zooming class starts to spend at least some of their week back in the office and start feeling confident enough to go out to dinner, buy a new car, take a holiday.

That’s the economics. The politics of the New Roaring Twenties are more obvious still, and start at the very top.

Boris Johnson is a booster. The Prime Minister thrives on, trades on, optimism. His life and career have been built on telling people — voters, colleagues, friends — stories of how things will be better, if they only just let him have his way. Throughout the pandemic, he has been visibly desperate to tell another story of the sunlit uplands that await us when the darkness finally passes.

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So it is no insight to say that the PM will want to tell a story of a new “golden age” for Britain, with Brexit “done” and the pandemic fading in the rear-view mirror. His legacy, his possible re-election and his personality — a war between depression and exuberance — demand that 2021 is a year of celebration that buries the memory of 2020.

My suspicion is that a lot of voters will want to buy what Johnson will be selling next year. As I wrote here before Christmas, a fair chunk of the electorate has given him and his Government the benefit of the doubt during a bad year for Britain. Imagine what his ratings could look like in the summer if growth is rebounding, consumer spending is booking and the sun is indeed shining again.

The other significant players in the narrative of national happiness are found in the media. Fleet Street isn’t what it used to be, but it still matters, and some of its players are itching to tell their readers a tale about a new era of jubilation and consumer spending on stuff their advertisers sell.

So what am I worried about? What’s the problem with a national mood of optimism and good cheer? Well, to be very clear, I’m not making a political point here: I’m a tiresome, equivocating centrist who really doesn’t take sides in contests between parties. I have no view on whether the sun should shine on Boris Johnson rather than Keir Starmer. Nor am I a professional doom-monger, though I accept it’s rarely difficult to distinguish between me and a ray of sunshine.

No, what worries me is that the national story of the New Roaring Twenties won’t actually be a national story. It will exclude and overlook a significant number of people, and in so doing store up more trouble to come.

Simply, the fact that people who read upmarket newspapers, write for newspapers and get written about in newspapers will spend the second half of 2021 going out to dinner in restaurants again isn’t the same thing as a roaring recovery from an economic shock. Yes, it will make those people happy and make them feel like things are getting back to normal. Yes, it will be good for some people who lost their low-wage jobs in hospitality this year, who will find some of those jobs come back into existence. It is in no way a bad thing. But it will be far from enough to address the economic and social harms done by the pandemic and its consequences.

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Those harms include unemployment, some of it structural, thus requiring people to move sectors and places to work again. That means scarring: the older someone is, the greater the lasting damage done to them by unemployment. Women who worked part-time in retail and hospitality, sometimes because they’d secured shift patterns that fitted around children and caring, may face some of the biggest challenges in the new UK labour market.

Low-income households won’t be adding to the release of “pent up demand” next year either. National aggregates for saving conceal big variations: the Zoom classes may have piled up cash, but people at the bottom of the wage ladder ate into their modest savings just to get by.

Poor children won’t see 2021 as a golden year either, even if ministers do the sensible thing and maintain the £20 a week uplift in their parents Universal Credit. Those kids’ educational prospects took a heavy blow during the first lockdown, meaning some will fall further behind better-off peers and never catch up. Some children took physical blows and worse too: some social workers and child protection officials fear abuse and neglect rose largely undetected during 2020.

The importance of place will only grow in an uneven return to “normal”. The experience of previous economic shocks is that bigger, more prosperous places tend to bounce back more quickly than smaller ones with fewer connections and fewer high-skill, high-wage jobs. It’s a statement of the obvious that the pandemic makes those nice-sounding promises to “level up” Britain’s lop-sided economic geography all the more relevant. That also means the cost of failing to deliver on those promises will be all the higher.

Sadly, there is little confidence among officials and expert veterans of regional and industrial policy that this Government has a plan to deliver the rebalancing that has eluded previous administrations. And while it’s perfectly possible that this expert establishment view is wrong, even the PM’s most optimistic fans should concede that his plans are unlikely to smooth out decades of uneven development in a few months, let alone months that fall immediately after the biggest economic shock in peacetime history.

There are all sorts of economic worries that will persist next year and beyond, including some I haven’t even mentioned yet: epic public debt; corporate debt that holds back investment; dismal and uneven underlying productivity; the ongoing search for a post-EU economic model.

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But in the end, my fears about the new Roaring Twenties are social and political, about the way we talk and feel as a nation.

A 2021 where champagne flows in the more expensive bits of London and the PM talks about a new golden age will be a bitter year for a lot of people who feel far, far away from the exuberance of the better-off and better-connected.

In the past few years, such feelings of distance and disenchantment delivered economic and political disruption and outright rupture: Brexit; Corbyn; Trump. Those things, blended with the poison of social media, have created divided and divisive conversations, where both media and political voices take sides and damn those on the other side of the line.

Even from this distance, I find it all too easy to see a post-pandemic Britain where one side cheers and orders another round while scorning the gloomsters who talk Britain down. And between the two imposters of outright triumph and utter disaster, a country that feels less and less like one nation.

Forget the fact that we now use over three times as many antidepressants as we did when Tony Blair first came to power in 1997[1.  ‘Record number of antidepressants prescribed…‘, The Guardian, 29 June, 2017], there are still those who are humming along to that tired old D:ream anthem that heralded Blair’s victory: ‘Things can only get better’. And look how that turned out.

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Test article

By Oliver Kamm

Oliver Kamm’s ‘optimism’ is political, of course. In his head, science, liberalism, capitalism and progress form an unassailable pact, driving the human race inexorably onwards from ignorance and poverty towards knowledge and wealth. It is the dream of the 18th century Enlightenment, but it is also one that borrows heavily – though usually without acknowledgement – from religious ideas about history having some sort of in-built direction. Here, for instance, is a hymn that we often sing in church:

God is working his purpose out,
as year succeeds to year,
God is working his purpose out,
and the time is drawing near;
nearer and nearer draws the time,
the time that shall surely be,
when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God
as the waters cover the sea[2. ‘God is working his purpose out’, Arthur Campbell Ainger, 1894].

Neo-liberal optimism is a secularised version of precisely this philosophy of history. And, as an underlying assumption, it allows neo-liberals to depict those who oppose their philosophy as not just disagreeing with them, but also of standing in the way of history itself – as though such people are involved in a conspiracy against the very nature of things.

It is no coincidence that those most associated with this ideology of progress are also those who were among the loudest cheerleaders of the Iraq war, for instance. For if the project of continual progress is to keep on advancing, then those who stand in its way must be destroyed. That is why Islam is often depicted by neo-liberals as ‘medieval’. To those who believe in constant progress, ‘living in the past’ almost constitutes some sort of moral objection, and certainly as something to be overcome. And here is the source of the real danger of this philosophy of history.

The 20th century was littered with the corpses of those who were deemed to oppose progress. For both Communism and Nazism were influenced by this hideous Enlightenment d:ream, employing pseudo-scientific rationalism as justification for their brutality.

In 2010, the American author and socialist Barbara Ehrenreich published ‘Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking fooled America and the World’. She explains that the book was a reaction to the ideology of positive thinking that was being applied to people who were “downsized from the corporate world”, those who were told that being sacked wasn’t bad; that it was a “growth opportunity”; that they will come out of it stronger if only they had the right attitude.

This is where the oppressive nature of ‘smile or die’ optimism kicks in. Its message is basically this: “Put on a smiley face and don’t complain”. In other words, if you don’t find a job – indeed, if you don’t become a millionaire, says the American d:ream – it’s really your fault because you have set yourself against the very nature of things.

In 1952, Norman Vincent Peale published his book ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’. It was 186 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and sold five million copies. And it was to the Marble Collegiate church on Fifth Avenue, where the Reverend Norman Peale was the Lead Pastor, that the Trump family went for Sunday worship and spiritual guidance. Norman Peale’s “believe in yourself” philosophy found the perfect student in young Donald.

Rule one, writes Peale: “Formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself succeeding” and keep this picture before your mind’s eye “no matter how badly things seem to be going”. In other words, just tell yourself things are going well, even if they are not. At the very least, here is a philosophy of optimistic self-deception that is terrifying as the basis of a world-view for the President of the United States of America[3.  ‘The Power of Donald Trump’s Positive Thinking‘, Politico, 13 October, 2017]. Not just narcissistic but, worse: delusional.

Under the aegis of metaphysical optimism and positive thinking, we can convince ourselves that the climate is doing absolutely fine and nuclear weapons are just for keeping the peace. From this perspective, it matters not that robots have started to take our jobs and that weapons will soon have a mind of their own. Stay positive. Things can only get better.

Instead of listening for the wisdom in these words, and indeed the opportunity in them, the vanguard forces of the Enlightenment d:ream look on death as just another problem to be solved. And the deus ex machina of technology will one day address even this central feature of the human predicament, they predict. One day we will be able to upload our consciousness into software – or something like that. We will become trans-human, better than human, almost mini-gods.

Pah. All is vanity. And striving after wind.