Karl Popper on optimism and the 'vale of tears' by Alex Naraniecki

"Popper emphatically argued that there are no grounds to be pessimistic about humanity. We must constantly envisage a better world, a more hospitable human ecology as this is in accordance with the way our mind operates: we search and we do so adventurously. By better valuing and understanding nature and the culture enveloping us, Popper believed that we could dispel any doubt concerning the meaningfulness of the world, notwithstanding the gravity of the sufferings that humans are inflicted with. Life has improved its environment for millions of years to our advantage (Das Leben verbessert die Umwelt für das Leben).14 If we just do what we have evolved to do, that is actively search out errors – we will have no cause to be pessimistic. Perhaps this was even the grounds for a philosophy of happiness by which Popper lived. The way this happiness grounded in an evolutionary anthropology can be related to a speculative philosophy of personhood may be worth exploring. Popper’s evolutionary inspired optimism is derived from an understanding that we cannot know if there is an ultimate grounded nature for humans. Even if there is such a thing as human nature we cannot assume that by using this term we are referring to an essence that is unchangeable and that is by nature crooked. In this way Popper’s scientific realism can be used to respond to the Dostoyevskian theological pessimism associated with Bishop Rowan Williams’s insistence that we still have “no way of making sense of the most deeply threatening elements in our environment” and the experience of cruelty, harm or suffering at the level of individual persons.15 However, for Williams the humane sensibility provides us with an “awareness that the roots of motivation” and the awareness that such roots may not be exhausted by an impulse to improve our ecological habitat as Popper held. Indeed, life may be understood to arise out of error, but this may not be the whole story. Popper’s optimism provides a response to this problem of pessimism associated with the Christian tradition. Popper’s optimism in the face of the ‘vale of tears’ was an insight that he gleaned via the discovery of a world of moral demands, a realm of thought more sublime and beautiful than any artistic expression or scientific discovery. The emergence of the world of moral demands was the light that resplendently shone though in night of the Parmenidean reality discussed in the previous chapter. It was in The Open Society that Popper presents this glorious idea:
Man has created new worlds-of language, of music, of poetry, of science; and the most important of these is the world of the moral demands, for equality, for freedom, and for helping the weak." From pages 157-158 from "Returning to Karl Popper" 2014