28 Thursday January 13 2022 | the times
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to overthink. That’s what I choose
to believe.Danes love drama
B
orgen is returning after nine
years and I’d bet no one is more
pleased than the Danish prime
minister Mette Frederiksen, the
second woman to hold the post. Back
in 2012 I was sent to interview the
first, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who
apparently inspired Borgen’s heroine
Birgitte Nyborg. The trouble was
I’d been warned by the
intermediary who secured the
interview that under no
circumstances must I
mention Borgen. It was
disrespectful to
Denmark to question its
country’s leader about a
TV drama. Quite right,
not a word, I promised.
I was sitting in a corridor
of the real Statsministeriet,
guiltily enjoying its close
resemblance to the set
where Birgitte swept
through, eyes blazing,
during a crisis, when the
PM’s aide came to
collect me. He
gestured around
excitedly. “Isn’t it just
like Borgen!” he cried.
Frederiksen may find a
sudden new interest in
Danish coalition politics.Travel by film
T
he country I’d most love to visit
is Iran. Yet international
politics and tight restrictions on
journalists (even as tourists) suggest
I never will. So I watch the films of
Asghar Farhadi as a portal into a
forbidden world.
His 2011 Oscar-winning
A Separation apparently
softened Washington’s
view of a putative enemy
since it showed not a
backward theocracy
but streets full of Fiats
and a family wrestling
with universal issues
such as marital discord
and dementia.
Farhadi’s latest, A
Hero, concerns a prisoner
on release from debtors’
jail who comes across a
stash of gold coins. His
dilemma has both
mythic and Dickensian
resonances, yet his worst
fear is utterly modern:
online shame.Drinking hole
D
iary of dry
January:
Day 1: [bleak
New Year hangover]
My body is a
suppurating sack ofW
ordle didn’t take long
to curdle. I like to
think I’m immune to
crazes but when I
completed my first
one in three guesses, I was hooked.
I may suck at Sudoku but at this I
was clearly a genius.
The sweet thing about Wordle
is that there is just one puzzle a day:
a pure moment when your mind
addresses a simple, satisfying
challenge. Alas, just as Scrabble is
ruined whenever you play with
some pro who has memorised all
the weird two-letter words like “ig”
and “xe”, Wordle has thrown up
experts with tips, cheats and
optimal first words like “audio”,
“adieu” and “soare”.
Now there are online league
tables, hard-nosed competitors
crow about their scores and,
worst of all, my own family regularly
beat me. Maybe a large vocabulary
is a disadvantage, since it leads you
Pessimists are not immune to positive thinking
Optimism is an illusion: a bleaker outlook makes you more appreciative of the good and the beautiful
strategy for life is not forging away
idealistically at one chosen path
but proceeding with care and
selecting the least bad option
at each fork in the road. Only
the supremely talented or the
supremely privileged can afford
to act otherwise.
This is why whenever I’m asked
for my advice on becoming a writer I
say: advance slowly. Shore up your
position now by getting a stable job
and write in the evenings. This way
you will write more of what you
want and you’ll get to keep writing it
for longer. Only throw yourself and
your handful of sonnets directly on
to the mercy of the world if you’re
convinced you’re a commercially
viable genius. Or your parents are
paying the rent.
But pessimism is not merely a
good strategy of self-advancement. It
is humane. Almost by definition, the
optimist must believe him or herself
to be an exception to the
surrounding misery. Pessimism
connects us intimately with the
prospect of our own disasters and
thus makes us more sympathetic
with the tragedies of others — we
have considered closely how easily
they might be our own.
And pessimism does not
necessarily mean immunity to
positive thinking. If the optimist can
afford to be complacent about
happiness, the pessimist greets the
appearance of beauty or good
fortune with bewildered gratitude.
A gratitude sharpened and
sweetened by the knowledge of
the terrible fragility of happiness —
for very soon everything will go
wrong again.raised to imagine, out of iron
inevitabilities but of fragile
contingencies, each one as brittle as
balsa wood.
That experience reminds me of
something the journalist Will Storr
says in his book about narrative, The
Science of Storytelling: that almost
all great tragedies involve the
collision of the protagonist’s
misguided world view with reality.
To be an optimist in the 21st century
is to volunteer to be repeatedly
traumatised in this manner.
Pessimism means vigilance. As
many American journalists now
insist, US democracy may only be
saved if the bleakest interpretation of
what Trump might attempt at the
2024 election encourages the
country’s citizens to act before it is
too late.
Personal pessimism (not always
the corollary of political pessimism,
though I suffer from both) has a
similar utility. Though most self-help
books tend to favour a tone of
lobotomised optimism, I have always
found pessimism motivational.
I view my life as a race through one
of those Indiana Jones-style
collapsing temples. To sit still is to
practically ask to be crushed by a
crumbling pillar.
Optimism is a form of solipsism.
From any one person’s perspective
there are an almost infinite number
of ways things can go wrong and
only a tiny handful of ways (perhaps
only one way) things can go right. To
expect things to go your way in the
face of those statistics suggests an
irrational view of your importance
relative to a chaotic universe. The
pessimist knows that the bestI
refuse to keep a diary out of a
superstitious aversion to the idea
of an empty book which will one
day contain all the appalling
calamities that are waiting for me
out in the unknowable future. As a
convinced pessimist, I am in the
habit of expecting the imminent
implosion of my life, career and
personal finances.
Until recently, one of the
consolations of pessimism was the
chance to sophisticatedly despise
“positive thinking” as self-help drivel.
But in bad news for pessimists (and
there always is bad news) positive
thinking has acquired the
imprimatur of science.
Scientists have even measured
something called “zest for life”, “a
highly positive attitude to life, even
when hit by disaster and hardship”
(ie the opposite to my “attitude to
life”) that predicts lower rates of
dementia and longer, healthier
old age.
It is time, I think, for somebody to
advance the case for the benefits of a
negative life attitude. For optimism,
it hardly needs saying, bears very
little relation to reality. It’s useful
only for describing the lives of a
handful of people in a handful of
corners of the world at a handful of
times — it is the privilege of a
minority who have benefited from
extraordinary accidents of history
and geography. For most of human
history (though perhaps not for
our distant hunter-gatherer
ancestors) life almost inevitably
entailed misery.
The historian Christopher Hill
once observed, “we believe in a law-
abiding universe because acts of God
are rarer than in the 17th century”.
Magic, prophecy and the devil
seemed more plausible in an age
without a social safety net, in which
famine, fire or sickness could quite
casually and quite meaninglessly
obliterate your life.
Our present (perhaps faltering)
belief in technological and moral
progress is a myth as historicallyparochial as the 17th-century belief
in magic. It may accurately describe
a few decades of our own era
but not many others. It’s not a
coincidence that the most convinced
optimists of our age, such as the
psychologist turned historian of
human betterment Steven Pinker,
grew up in the postwar era of
prosperity and relative peace, that
golden island in the storm-driven
seas of history.
I lost the last vestiges of my
political optimism sitting on the floor
of my ex-girlfriend’s bedroom in a
Dublin university hall of residence
watching the election of Donald
Trump on my phone. Our political
system was not built, as I had beenIt is time for somebody
to advance the case for
a negative life attitude
toxins. Two years of lockdown
drinking — because how the hell else
can you mark the end of another
nothing day without a glass of wine
— stops right now. You kept going
right through February in 2018,
remember, and lost 7lb.
Days 2 to 5: Sleeping like a
teenager! Behold my clear skin, bright
eyes. Maybe I’ll quit booze for good.
Day 6: [obnoxiously refusing
champagne for a family toast] No,
sorry, I’m being really strict this year
[clinks water glass].
Day 8: Is that the Christmas red?
The nice Italian one? Go on, if you’re
having a glass. It’s the weekend. I’ll
be dry in the week.
Day 10: Yes, I know it’s Monday,
but it’s cold and raining, Omicron is
raging, and white wine doesn’t count.Beach spreading
M
y friend in Sydney, where
beach communities are
reeling from Covid-19 for the
first time, is besieged by wellness
nitwits, the most maddening type of
antivaxer. One woman began telling
her that vitamin D and other
supplements could ward off infection.
“But if you get a little tickle in your
throat where it might be starting,” she
said, “just get your hairdryer and
point it into your mouth for five
minutes. All the virus will be burnt
off.” Truly the pandemic has taken
Darwinism to a new level.Janice Turner Notebook
Competitive
types always
manage to
ruin the fun
Professor’s views
on racist language
are bewildering
Jawad Iqbal
I
t is simply absurd to suggest that
the word “eloquent” can be
racist. Yet this is the strange and
divisive argument made by
Priyamvada Gopal, a professor of
postcolonial studies at the University
of Cambridge, against an academic
colleague, David Abulafia. She
accused him of being dismissive of
writers of colour after he used the
word in reference to David Olusoga,
the black history professor and
broadcaster. It is a line of attack that
twists everyday language and must
not go unchallenged.
The row erupted after Abulafia
published an article about the trial of
activists who toppled the statue of
Edward Colston in Bristol, at which
Olusoga testified. Gopal attacked her
colleague’s work on Twitter: “Calling
writers/scholars/intellectuals of colour
‘eloquent’ or ‘articulate’ — eg Abulafia
on Olusoga — can quite often be a
little sleight of hand dismissal.”
Really? To describe someone as
eloquent — speaking fluently and
persuasively — is surely a
compliment. Where is the racism?
What should the accused professor
have said instead?
Abulafia was spot-on in his response
to Gopal’s tweets, saying: “I have never
heard the use of the word eloquent
being linked to racism.” Indeed. What
would Gopal make of the frequent
references in the past to the
eloquence of the black American civil
rights leader Martin Luther King?
Gopal seems to relish controversy.
She led a recently disbanded group
set up to examine Winston
Churchill’s views on race and empire
— at the Cambridge college that
bears his name and where she
teaches. She is vocal on Twitter
about race: she was widely criticised
for tweeting that “white lives don’t
matter. As white lives.” She said her
tweet had been taken out of context.
Another of her tweets, “abolish
whiteness”, caused outrage.
She appears quick to accuse others
of racism but seems oblivious to her
own capacity for offence. And she is
quick to judge and find wanting views
opposed to her own — hardly ideal
when it comes to teaching students
about the merits of critical thinking.
The possibility that Twitter isn’t
necessarily the best place to conduct
a nuanced academic debate about
language and race is rather lost on her.
It is foolish of Gopal to insist on
seeing racist insult and offence
everywhere. Throwing out cheap and
unfounded accusations of racism
advances the cause of racial
harmony and justice not one jot.
Reputations and careers can be
destroyed by the merest suggestion
of racism.
Gopal’s flawed argument would
mean that any positive term applied
to a person of colour is potentially
racist or patronising or
condescending. On her say-so alone.Jawad Iqbal is a freelance writerJames
Marriott@j_amesmarriott