DISCUSS: Pessimism About The Future?

Michael Brendan Dougherty has written a piece for National Review entitled No Hope for a NASA Revival with the deck, “It’s not just red tape holding back government-funded exploration and innovation. It’s a new cultural pessimism about the future.”

He argues that the reason space initiatives are in the doldrums is that Americans have become pessimistic about the future. This is in contrast to NASA’s golden years that culminated in the moon landing, when America was confident, forward-looking, and excited about new technology. But it wasn’t just technology and space travel. We had high hopes about the government, education, and society as a whole. We were excited about what the future will bring.

I remember that feeling well. Today, though, our new technology–read, AI–is more likely to fill us with dread. Today, we have much of what we thought back then that the future will bring. And more: no one in the 1960s anticipated such wonders as personal computers, the internet, streaming television, or (my favorite) global positioning devices. And yet, we are dismayed, depressed, and cynical.

And are even progressives optimistic about government, education, society?

Do you share that “cultural pessimism about the future”? Is there a sense, though, in which pessimism about the future is better than excessive optimism about the future?