THE problem with optimism is that it tends to be accompanied by one dashed hope after another: and with those dashed hopes comes one disappointment after another.

Pessimism, on the other hand, rarely gives you surprises, dashed hopes or disappointments. That’s because pessimism is based on the expectation that if something can go wrong, then it will go wrong.

Sometimes, particularly when it comes to politics, I find myself wondering what exactly the optimists have been smoking or inhaling that makes them so upbeat and so utterly blind to the problems all around them.

But something happened to me a couple of weeks ago.

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I was reading a profile of Bryan Stevenson, the death row lawyer who has spent his life fighting racial discrimination in the US justice system.

He was relentlessly upbeat about the challenges he faced; so upbeat, in fact, that the writer profiling him (Edward Luce, the Financial Times’ US national editor) noted: “It strikes me that he cannot afford the luxury of pessimism. He tells everyone, black or white, innocent or guilty, that they are worth more than the worst thing they have ever done.”

Can pessimism ever be a luxury, though? I thought long and hard about that........

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