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Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of figures and tables -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Environmental Decline -- 2. Moral Decline: Warfare, Human Rights and the Crime Explosion -- 3. Intellectual Decline: Science and Art -- 4. Political Decline: The 'New' Capitalism -- 5. Cultural Pessimism -- Bibliography -- Index

What are the functions of optimism in modern societies? How is hope culturally transmitted? What values and attitudes does it reflect? This book explores how and why powerful institutions propagate 'cultures of optimism' in different domains, such as politics, work, the family, religion and psychotherapy.

In the context of widespread intellectual pessimism, this book explores how individuals and societies sustain hope. It focuses, in particular, on the active role played by powerful institutions in the propagation of optimism. The cultures they promote offer visions of the future, which nurture hope and meaning, and exercise strong influences on how people act in the present. Yet these processes often go unobserved. In this sequel to his acclaimed book on cultural pessimism, Oliver Bennett examines the institutional promotion of optimism in five different domains: democratic politics; work; the family; religion; and psychotherapy. In doing so, Bennett addresses a number of questions: what are the functions of optimism in modern societies? How and why do institutions promote it? What values and attitudes are involved? Drawing on a range of disciplines, including social and evolutionary psychology, intellectual history and organisational behaviour, this book throws new light on an important but neglected aspect of modern culture.

Drawing on material from a broad range of fields, this article identifies an 'optimism of everyday life' and proposes that it performs significant psychological, social and cultural functions. These functions are briefly reviewed, with particular reference to psychological and physical health, family and social relationships and the achievement of goals in different contexts. It is argued that the necessity of optimism has given rise to a complex of optimism promoters, which function as agents of implicit cultural policy. The family, religious institutions, the medical profession, psychotherapists and counsellors, businesses and political leaders are, amongst others, all seen to be part of this complex, deeply engaged in the reproduction of cultures of optimism. Whilst a multiplicity of values is reflected in individual expressions of optimism, a kind of meta-value is expressed in its common, cognitive form: of energy over entropy, of living over dying.