“a spirit of radical optimism”

I've been enjoying this biography of the legendary Bloomsbury philosopher & economist John Maynard Keynes. (Thanks for the recommendation, KSR.)

JMK was at heart a meliorist, entirely compatible with any truly radical form of optimism. The roots of our condition are well summarized in the last two sentences:

"This is a dark time for democracy—a statement that would have been unthinkable to U.S. and European leaders only a few short years ago. It took decades of mismanagement and unlearning to manufacture this global crisis, and it cannot be undone with a few new laws or elections. But all over the world, people are acting as if even this frightening global slide into authoritarianism might be reversed through the mechanisms John Maynard Keynes proposed three-quarters of a century ago. They are organizing, planning, and voting as if they really can improve society for themselves and their children by changing the economic arrangements that currently divert so much of the world's wealth into the hands of so few. In the United States, activists and politicians are promoting a Green New Deal, reviving the legacy of FDR to combat climate change through public investment. Mainstream economists now speak openly of moving "beyond neoliberalism," and there is talk in academic circles of a new Bretton Woods conference that might replace the global order erected in the 1990s with a new harmony of international economic interests. These optimists may succeed, and they may fail. But they are pursuing a vision that sustained Keynes through three world crises and demonstrated beyond any doubt that a better world was possible on the other side. Keynesianism in this purest, simplest form is not so much a school of economic thought as a spirit of radical optimism, unjustified by most of human history and extremely difficult to conjure up precisely when it is most needed: during the depths of a depression or amid the fevers of war. Yet such optimism is a vital and necessary element of everyday life. It is the spirit that propels us to go on living in the face of unavoidable suffering, that compels us to fall in love when our hearts have been broken, and that gives us the courage to bring children into the world, believing that even in times such as these we are surrounded by enough beauty to fill lifetime after lifetime. "Down with those who declare we are dumped and damned," the twenty-one-year-old Keynes cried in 1903. "Away with all schemes of redemption and retaliation!" A better future was not beyond our control if the different peoples of the world worked together, leading one another to prosperity. Twenty-seven years later, Keynes had reconsidered the economic strategies of his youth, but not his bet on tomorrow. We would build for the future not through Victorian self-denial or by waiting for deliverance but by taking action today. "Were the Seven Wonders of the world built by Thrift?" he asked readers of A Treatise on Money. "I deem it doubtful." And so it is today. Despite everything, we find ourselves back with Keynes—not merely because deficits can enable sustained growth, or because the rate of interest is determined by liquidity preference, but because we are here, now, with nowhere to go but the future. In the long run, we are all dead. But in the long run, almost anything is possible."

— The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter-conclusion
https://a.co/0JdW2eh