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29 December 2024
In MSL, the "spiritual calculus" says that a bad "position" is not as bad as a bad "velocity" (or "acceleration", "second acceleration", etc.). How disturbed should we be that things are bad? Somewhat. But what is more disturbing is when things aren't getting better, or they can't begin to get better, when things have settled and hardened on a status quo that does not will to become as good as it needs to.
"Dark optimism" is the view that the "position" of us is significantly bad, especially in the world of free will (we do not make the best choices, whether out of bad intentions or not, and could choose to make better ones). If our free will is mismanaged, it makes us bad people to a greater or lesser extent, a dark thing to look at. That's the "dark" part of "dark optimism".
But the "optimistic" part is that, because the world of free will is so bad, it can just change. Truly free will has the potential to either continue doing the right thing, or to cease doing the wrong thing. There is an inherent optimism in seeing people as sinners. Not to see them as sinners in the Augustinian way where they are stuck being sinners, where it is human nature which is corrupt, but to see them in a kind of Pelagian way, where what is corrupt are human choices, at discrete moments and ongoing. The choice to be a sinner is something you inflict on your nature and can always (by definition of what sin really is) choose to withdraw from your nature (though your nature may lag and need something other than your will to bring it in tune with God).
If people can just cease sinning, this should make the world better in temporal ways (at least, in general it would). So this is another part of the optimism.
The very perception that things are dark, and yet free, opens up the way to optimism. Perhaps those who are opposed to seeing things as dark do not believe in freedom, or are committed to a kind of pessimism and/or despair.
If you are really a sinner, as opposed to someone enslaved to sinful habits, you can just stop being a sinner. Becoming aware that you are a sinner is "dark", but if you focus on how to repent, and just do repent, then that darkness does not have to have a claim on you.