Lovecraft's Mythos Denies Humanity Rather than Upholds It

The weird realism that runs through his writings undermines any belief system—religious or humanist—in which the human mind is the center of the universe. There is a tendency nowadays to think of the world in which we live as an artefact of mind or language: a human construction. For Lovecraft, human beings are too feeble to shape a coherent view of the universe. Our minds are specks tossed about in the cosmic melee; though we look for secure foundations, we live in perpetual free fall. W...

 Pessimism in Predictions and the False Sense of Insecurity

You would think that the disappearance of the gravest threat in the history of humanity would bring a sigh of relief among commentators on world affairs. Contrary to expert predictions, there was no invasion of Western Europe by Soviet tanks, no escalation of a crisis in Cuba or Berlin or the Middle East to a nuclear holocaust.1 The cities of the world were not vaporized; the atmosphere was not poisoned by radioactive fallout or choked with debris that blacked out the sun and sent Homo sapien...

 Pessimism VS Optimism in Science

By and large, literary intellectuals tend to be a gloomy lot, with little but scorn for science and technology as engines of human happiness. By contrast, science is impossible without hope; it is inherently forward-looking. As Ian McEwan says: "You can't be curious and depressed." So the two cultures are not based so much on the academic disciplines themselves as on basic temperaments, says Ferry. One is either an optimist or a pessimist about the direction of human civilization; science an...