What's happiness got to do with it?

Someone styling herself (or for all I know himself) 'Arabella', has written :' Why is Peter Hitchens so unhappy? I do agree with everything he writes and says (apart from the god stuff of course, which I am with his brother on) but I feel depressed at his anger and loathing of the world. CHEER UP!

Such postings occasionally turn up here and I usually ignore them , but this time I feel moved to explain why I think they are irritating and thought-free.

1.Why do people associate reasonable pessimism about public affairs (or anything else) with personal unhappiness? On the contrary, the pessimist is seldom disappointed, sometimes pleasantly surprised and usually well-equipped for the world as it is. He or she also opens another bottle of wine, or buys his round, earlier than the 'optimist' who thinks the glass is 'always half-full' . Of course it's always half-empty, unless something is actually being poured into it at the time. Think about it . Would you rather have your journey to an unknown destination planned by a pessimist or an optimist? I have no doubt which I would choose.

2.So far as I know I have never met this 'Arabella'. She (or he) almost certainly knows nothing about me or my private life or my state of mind. I don't tend to write or speak about these things. If I have reasons to be happy or unhappy, cheerful or miserable, these have little or nothing to do with my views on the state of my country. Like most people of my class, education and advantages I can, for the moment, live most of the time at some distance from the problems I observe. But I still observe them, and believe I have a duty to try to put them right if I can. Discontent with wrongdoing or public squalor is not, in my experience, a feeling that leads to personal misery, or has anything much in common with it. In fact. a person who is not angry at injustice and wrong has something severely wrong with him.

Loathing of injustice, corruption, cheating and dishonesty is not loathing 'of the world'. On the contrary.

Finally, I beg leave to doubt that this 'Arabella' , as he or she says, 'agrees with everything I write'. I can't see how this squares with the frankly rather silly and unperceptive view that I am personally miserable because I dislike the current political and cultural order, and that I 'loathe the world'. And since my most fundamental disagreement with my Marxist brother is on the subject of God, and all his and my differences on other subjects flow directly from this disagreement, it's hard to see how 'Arabella' can have this one disagreement with me about the deity, while agreeing with me about crime and punishment, foreign policy, marriage, personal morality, etc etc. If I am wrong, I'd be very interested if 'Arabella' could explain.

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