The writer of Ecclesiastes had seen enough of the world. Wealth, wisdom, labor, pleasure – he’d tried them all and arrived at the same conclusion: Vanity. A breath. A chasing after wind.

No one seems to talk about Ecclesiastes anymore. Not even in Christian circles. Scholars and early Jewish rabbis have argued for centuries over whether the book should be considered canonical. Its apparent pessimism is a stumbling block for some. I submit that this is because we generally want our beliefs and politics to be hopeful. But the words in Ecclesiastes 1:18 have aged better than most of our optimism: “Because in much wisdom there is much grief; and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain.”

I don’t see that as despair. I don’t see that as nihilism. I see it as the honesty that follows an investigation into the inner workings of the world.

The Degeneration of Modern Life

I’ve previously written about the virtue of disengagement – about how we’ve interpreted access to information as an obligation to have opinions on all of it. That instinct came from the same place: a suspicion that the world is running ahead of our ability to process it, and that the healthiest response might be stillness, rather than acceleration.

But there’s a deeper point to be made. Not just that we shouldn’t comment on everything, but that we should stop being surprised when things go wrong. This is the spirit of true pessimism – realism without the flattery.

Like the anonymous author of Ecclesiastes, H. L. Mencken is another thinker who saw our situation clearly. Writing a century ago, he tracked the trajectory of democratic civilization and arrived at a conclusion that reads less like prophecy and more like weather forecasting: “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Keeping Mencken’s biting remark in mind, consider David Foster Wallace’s surreal vision of America that features in his opus, “Infinite Jest,” in which Johnny Gentle was the first U.S. president to swing the microphone around by the cord during his inauguration.

It goes without saying that we’re closer to this kind of funhouse politics than we were during Mencken’s time.

The secular pessimists drew from the same well as the writer of Ecclesiastes, even if they didn’t know it. Emil Cioran – the Romanian philosopher who spent his life cataloguing the absurdity of human persistence – put it simply: “Man starts over again every day, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.” There’s something almost theological in that line, The Fall re-enacted each morning. The same mistakes, the same distractions, the same misplaced hope.

Albert Camus reached a similar impasse. His absurd rendering of Sisyphus must roll the proverbial boulder up the hill, knowing it will come back down, only to repeat the process without end. The question Camus asked wasn’t how to stop the boulder. It was about living without pretending that things would somehow get better.

Aspiring to Live Quietly

What strikes me about all four thinkers – the author of Ecclesiastes, Mencken, Cioran, and Camus – is that none of them went mad. The pessimist’s reputation is one of paralysis, but the opposite is usually true. Once you stop being shocked by human folly, you free up an enormous amount of energy. You become harder to manipulate. Outrage merchants, selling their rage bait, lose their grip on you. The news cycle, which runs on the fuel of perpetual surprise, suddenly has less to offer.

This is likely what the apostle Paul was getting at in 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12 when he urged his readers to aspire to live quietly, mind their own affairs, and work with their hands. Paul wasn’t recommending passivity, but proportion. In the throes of our daily lives, we have mistaken global issues for personal ones. We absorb distant catastrophes as if they’re happening in our own backyard. And then we wonder why we feel perpetually depleted.

This isn’t a fashionable position. It doesn’t generate clicks. It won’t land you on a panel.

But look around. We’ve spent decades being surprised by things that, on reflection, were entirely predictable. We’ve burned through enormous reserves of collective outrage, and what do we have to show for it? The boulder is back at the bottom of the hill.

Maybe Ecclesiastes was right all along. Not as a counsel of despair, but as an invitation to sanity – to see clearly, to bring our expectations into proportion, and put our energy where it belongs.

The world has always run amok. The wise person is simply the one who stops being shocked by it.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

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