Chris Smaje:
I begin, again, with a dark-age framing: the question is not how, in an ideal world, you’d prefer to fashion human relationships. It’s how, in the far from ideal, dark and challenging world that’s now upon us, you’re likely to fashion them as best you can in practice with the cultural institutions to hand.
Richard John Neuhaus, in the 1998 foreword to Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World, originally published in German in 1950:
With respect to the human prospect, Guardini may be viewed as a pessimist, but I think that is to miss the point. Optimism and pessimism are the wrong categories altogether. Optimism is finally just a matter of optics, of seeing what we want to see and not seeing what we don’t want to see; and pessimism is its twin. Guardini’s view of the future is admittedly bleak at times, and little that has happened in the years since he wrote these pages would likely change that. But his is a disposition toward a hope that is unblinking in the face of all the reasons for despair. His hero—the kind of man he intended to be and invites his reader to be—is not unlike Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith.” The question is not whether the glass is half full or half empty, but what do you do when you know it’s empty.