This post continues my comments on Rosling’s book Factfulness. See part 1 for some comments on ignorance.

Second, optimism. Rosling doesn’t think of himself as an optimist. He even vehemently rejects the term: 

“People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naïve. I’m a very serious ‘possibilist’. […] As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are.” (2018: 69)

This is surprising. Seeing possibilities or chances where others don’t see them is an important part of optimism as many understand it. Of course, there is no universally agreed on definition of optimism, but a common theme is that optimists and pessimists put a different spin on the same facts. For example,

• I love my mom. Why else would I call her every week? / My son is so distant! He only calls me once every week!
• After a paper has been rejected four times: This paper only needs some minor revisions to get published. / This paper isn’t worth the time and effort. 
• Our junior football team is too dumb to set up a decent offside trap. / Our junior football team is still learning how to set up a decent offside trap. 

Why does Rosling dislike being called an optimist then? Presumably because he sees his book as telling us objective, descriptive facts, not subjective (“naïve”), debatable interpretations of facts. His report on the world is supposed to be “clear and reasonable”. That’s the common lament that “I’m neither a pessimist nor an optimist, I’m a realist!”. 

This reply – assuming that this is what Rosling has in mind – underestimates how much choice and weighing is going on when reporting the facts about the world. Rosling presents facts about education, vaccination, population growth and so on, but not about incarceration rates, freedom of the press, numbers of refugees and so on. Obviously, there is a selection process involved here. Of course, there are reasons for reporting these and not those facts, but the idea that there is a list of objectively noteworthy facts is a myth. A recurrent theme in my work on optimism is the question of whether there are two or three stances here: Is it optimism vs. pessimism? Or optimism vs. realism vs. pessimism? If there are three stances, both optimism and pessimism are illusionary answers on the question at hand (whether our world is a good place to live in, whether the paper will get published) whereas realism is getting the answer right. If there are two stances, realism is taking no stand whatsoever on an evaluative question while optimism and pessimism are proper stances. I think the second view is correct. So-called “realism” usually amounts to avoiding the crucial question (what should we do about global issues? what should I do with my paper?), not to answering it objectively and impartially. It’s more like avoiding the crucial question by listing uninterpreted facts. Insofar as Rosling’s possibilism doesn’t merely list but interprets the facts (there has been progress and with a little help from us it will continue), it clearly is a form of optimism. (Note that I am not defending Rosling’s view here, I am only arguing that his view is a form of optimism, not of realism/possibilism.) 

Again, there is no universally agreed on conception of optimism and Rosling may be right that he isn’t an optimist on other conceptions of optimism. Yet the conceptual questions are neither arbitrary nor irrelevant. Depending on one’s conception of optimism it’s a foregone conclusion that optimists are irrational and naïve. I prefer a conception of optimism according to which it’s an interesting, open question whether and when being optimistic is defensible.