I may be an optimist, but I'm hardly naive. I believe optimism is the only tenable attitude toward life: pessimism is naive and unfounded; cynicism is apathetic bordering on cowardly. Being optimistic isn't seeing the world through the proverbial rose coloured glasses, but it is a correction to the myopia and hidden privilege that comes in, for example, forms of privilege via post-modernism and the naivety of cultural relativism.
I've seen more of the world than most people, and when it was at its worst. I've seen nature's disasters, but more human crafted ones. I've seen great human cruelty, but I've also seen great human courage (which rarely looks like we expect it to look). Once, upon returning from the madness that was the ethnic cleansing, murder, and abysmal acts of human cruelty that was the former-Yugoslavia (c. 1993) my father--a former fire-rescue fire fighter--asked me how I could retain my 'positive' outlook. My response, an epiphany even to me, was simply: "In the worst of human suffering you will see the best of the human spirit."
And, many years later, I still hold to this as a truth.
As I said, I'm not naive. I know things are horrible in the world, but one of the things I've realized in studying history and, more importantly, from actually being to these places, is that the world is better off now even for the worst off of us, than it was for many of the best off several hundred years ago (and much, much better than 500+ years ago).
History clearly indicates this, but now statistics does too. This video, from BBC Four, titled "200 Countries, 200 Years, In Four Minutes," drives this point home.
As a final note, this isn't suggesting there isn't great wrongs to be righted, injustices to be fought, nor improvements to be made--in fact, saying such things is really a kinda of "No shit, Sherlock" moment than a meaningful or insightful point.
This video simply highlights that pessimism, cynicism, and such are, as I said, as untenable as they are unhelpful.
