Optimism Is Not Delusion

People hear the word optimism and assume I have not looked closely at the numbers.

I have looked at the numbers.

I was nineteen when I first felt something unsteady underneath the phrase Africa Rising. It was everywhere in those years, on conference banners and magazine covers and the kind of panel discussions where everyone nods at the same time. The years between 2000 and 2010 are sometimes called Africa's Decade of Growth. Six of the world's ten fastest growing economies during that decade were African. Foreign direct investment into the continent roughly tripled. Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Mali sustained growth above five percent a year.¹

Read only that paragraph, and the optimism writes itself.

Here is the same decade, read differently. Most African nations were living through power outages of twelve hours or more, most days. Road networks reached only about a third of rural areas. In fourteen countries, raw materials made up more than eighty percent of exports, which means the growth was mostly extracted wealth, not built wealth. The Second Congo War, fought across nine countries between 1998 and 2003, killed an estimated 5.4 million people.² Zimbabwe's hyperinflation peaked at 79.6 billion percent.³ The Darfur conflict displaced roughly 2.5 million people.⁴ By 2010, thirty eight percent of college educated Africans were living abroad.⁵

Both of those paragraphs describe the same ten years, on the same continent. Both are accurate. I cannot pick the cheerful one and quietly drop the other, and neither can anyone who wants to talk about Africa honestly.

This is usually where pragmatic optimism gets misread. People assume it means choosing the first paragraph and looking away from the second. It does not. It means refusing to let either paragraph have the final word on its own, and asking a third question instead of the usual two. Not is the glass half full. Not is the glass half empty. What can we actually do with the water that is in it.

I think about Mo Ibrahim a lot in this context. In 1998 he saw an obvious unmet need: only three thousand working phone lines for fifty five million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo.⁶ He went looking for investment, and almost every investor he approached saw the same three things: war, poverty, instability. Not one of them was lying about what they saw. The war was real. The poverty was real. What they missed was that those facts did not settle the question of whether a phone network could work. Mo built one anyway, designed around how people there actually earned and spent money, and by 2005 it had over twenty four million customers across thirteen countries and sold for 3.4 billion dollars.⁶

The investors who said no were not being pessimists in any rigorous sense. They were treating one accurate fact, war exists here, as if it answered a completely different question, can a viable business be built here. That substitution, mistaking a true observation for a complete forecast, is the actual failure I am trying to avoid. It happens in both directions. The Africa Rising crowd in the 2000s made the same mistake with growth statistics that the war fixated investors made with conflict statistics. Both took one true thing and let it answer a question it was never equipped to answer.

So when people call pragmatic optimism naive, I want to know which fact they think I am hiding from. I am not hiding from the brain drain numbers.⁵ I wrote a whole piece about why people leave without flinching from the numbers behind it. I am not hiding from the Congo war or the hyperinflation or the twelve hour blackouts. Pragmatic optimism is not a forecast that says all of this will work out. It is not a prediction at all. It is a method for deciding what to do today, given everything that is true, including the parts that are hard to sit with.

The opposite failure, the one people give less scrutiny to, is treating despair as the more serious or more honest stance. It is not automatically more honest. It is just easier. Cynicism asks nothing of you. You can sit inside it indefinitely and never be required to attempt anything that might fail. Optimism, the pragmatic kind, asks you to keep both paragraphs in your head, all of the damage and all of the actual material available, and still decide to pour the water you have into something.

I do not know if that is the more correct stance, philosophically. I only know it is the one that has let me keep working instead of stopping.