'What is the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?' asks the joker. His answer: 'An optimist has not seen all the facts yet!'
There is a profound sense of pessimism in our contemporary world. With social breakdown which even the best politicians find insoluble, with science which now seems to create more problems than it solves, with the worries of redundancy, divorce and death, people seem to have lost the vision of a bright future.
In his book Culture and the Crowd, secularist Derek Regin expresses that sense of pessimism: 'We must resign ourselves to the fact that the age of anxiety, as anticipated by Kierkegaard, has come to fruition as inexorably as the violence endorsed by the thinking of Marx and Nietzche.' Gloom! The 'feel good factor' is missing.
