How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

by Alan Jacobs

Here we might recall the “unscrupulousness,” the headlong rush forward, of the optimists Roger Scruton critiques. When you believe that the brokenness of this world can be not just ameliorated but fixed, once and for all, then people who don’t share your optimism, or who do share it but invest it in a different system, are adversaries of Utopia. (An “adversary” is literally one who has turned against you, one who blocks your path.) Whole classes of people can by this logic become expendable—indeed, it can become the optimist’s perceived duty to eliminate the adversaries. As a nineteenth-century pope notoriously commented, “Error has no rights.” Caught up by the momentum of his or her cause, the Optimist can easily forget the vital addendum to the papal statement made by Orestes Brownson: “Error has no rights, but the man who errs has equal rights with him who errs not.”*4