The Pessimist Mystique

I really enjoyed "French Club" tonight. A friend of mine invited me to a group of friends and friends of friends that gets together bimonthly to speak French. We talked about things that would have been interesting anyway, and speaking French felt kind of surreal-- I kept thinking, "where's the catch? it can't be this easy. I neglect it, do nothing about it for ages, and it just comes back when I need it." And then I remember how much time and energy I spent acquiring French and don't feel so bad, but also think, the likelihood of my spending nearly as much time improving on any other language is minimal.

Anyway, back to "we talked about things that would have been interesting anyway." We talked about wine, travel, whether the attorney general would last, and what to make of what some are calling the new cold war. One person discussed an article she'd read that described Russian political cycles, which I will not describe in detail because I have to get up in less than six hours and I still have a few pages to finish in The Places in Between. Did I mention that Rory Stewart is my new celebrity crush? Sorry, I get even more ADD when I've had a few glasses, but more on ADD later (i.e. in another post).

Someone then said invoked the general consensus that Russians were a pessimistic people. I disagreed. I think Westerners get a certain satisfaction out of considering Russians pessimistic, there's a certain exotica around it, and the desire to believe it reinforces itself. I think there's a silly bias that no anthropologist would tolerate: not enough scrutiny is placed on indicators. Example? Russians don't generally smile-- we just don't. To us, Americans walking down the street with big, goofy grins look like morons. It's not our resting facial posture. Yet, I'm sure it's one of the signs that we're pessimistic.

On pessimism, I remember learning as an undergrad psych major that pessimists are actually right, but being right isn't the same as being healthy, and people tend to find ways of hoping against the data to get by and keep going. I mean, it's a f*ed up world, and statistically the average Russian is more likely to experience many aspects of that than the average American. I'm talking in averages; I'm not suggesting there aren't deviations. A study recently came out about how veterans are twice as likely to attempt suicide than other Americans, yet you don't see people writing that off as a function of military culture. I read in I want to say the April issue of Vogue (could have been May) an article about the new generation of runway models. A Russian model described the Eastern European dilemma: sure she could have gone to school, perhaps even gotten a medical degree, a law degree, etc.-- chances are she'd have ended up, even with that degree, driving cabs and selling fruit, and getting paid for that once every few months if that. I'm just saying, even if you didn't lose any or most of your family in a war, in political violence, in political purges, in a mining accident-- even if you're educated, what have you, your options are not what they could be. I just think that needs to be a factor in diagnosing perceptions of Russian pessimism.

I said all this. My friend, the host, somewhat agreed. Two of the others, Americans, were surprised. The fifth participant, a German woman, nodded in agreement, from the moment I said, "I think Americans like to think Russians are pessimists."