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While the accomplishments of (and the existing problems with) 20th century ingenuity are clear, their implications for the future are highly contested as techno-optimists clash with critics of technical advances. In this context, it is useful to remember that even the most destructive technical advances were not responsible for most of the man-made deaths during the 20th century. There is nothing inevitable about the long-term survival of civilization based on technical ingenuity and high energy consumption: openness and uncertainty best describe our prospects.

This chapter is about a second “great divide” in attitudes about government and appropriate crime policy. The focus is not on the well-known ideological battle between left and right about crime policy, but on a more subtle contrast between optimism and pessimism about the effectiveness of governmental policies to control crime. Crime-control optimists are persons who think that what they regard as appropriate government efforts can dramatically reduce crime. A pessimist thinks that even the best tools available to government will have a minor impact on crime rates. The chapter considers the factors that influence how strongly experts, as well as citizens, believe that governmental actions can significantly influence crime rates. The main thesis is that a long period of declining crime provides an environment where those concerned about crime policy tend to believe that this year's actions by government can have substantial impact on next year's crime rate. Sustained eras of good or bad news push moods about effectiveness further than the facts warrant— what tends to happen is an overreaction rather than merely an empirically based set of changed perceptions.

The relationship between poetry and the visual arts is seldom close and never simple. But special difficulties attend the study of it in the eighth century BC in Greece, when evidence is not only in excessively short supply but, when it does come, is almost by definition ambiguous. On the whole, regarding the question of the interpretation of late geometric vase-paintings and other eighth-century art there are well-established opposing positions: each new discovery finds a different interpretation on the part of what may be called the optimists — those who seek for correspondences between Homer's epics and the visual arts — and of the sceptics, who habitually argue that there is no evidence for anything of the kind. Each party appears to have found an outlet for the promulgation of its view, inasmuch as many general or semi-popular accounts of geometric and other early Greek art present it as having a major mythological content derived from epic poetry.

This chapter discusses teaching Eudora Welty’s novel The Optimist’s Daughter in a course on deathways in southern literature. Deathways are the social and cultural practices surrounding the human experience of death. Welty’s novel challenges the notion of a good death and illustrates the customs and rituals of grief, burial, the funeral industry, and memory in the mid-century South. Students in the course described in the chapter compared Welty’s depiction of death to the works of several other southern writers and addressed complicated issues of burdensome memory, death symbolism, and social construction of death.

This chapter reviews P. F. Strawson's aim to adjudicate and reconcile the debate between a gloomy incompatibilist about moral responsibility and determinism, whom he calls “the pessimist,” and a consequentialist compatibilist, whom he calls “the optimist.” It explains the optimist's argument that the practices of holding one another responsible are justified by their good consequences, whether or not determinism is true. It points out that by engaging in such practices, people secure important social goods. The chapter analyzes why the pessimist finds the attempted justification of optimists on the practices of holding one another responsible as appalling. It addresses the justification of practices of blaming and punishing through the appeal of their good consequences.

This chapter presents an interview with filmmakers Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy. Over the last four years Molloy and Lawlor have been working on a project called Civic Life, which involves local community groups in the production of nine high-quality short films for the cinema. In 2004, their film Who Killed Brown Owl won the award for Best British Short Film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. In January 2008 their latest short film Joy won the Prix UIP Rotterdam at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Helen (2008), the first feature of the duo, who work under the title of Desperate Optimists, marks the culmination of the Civic Life series. The interview covered topics such as how Desperate Optimists and their initial work in community theatre and experimental performance began; the benefits of working with community groups; and how they found the transition from shorter pieces to feature-length work.

This chapter focuses on the writer Eudora Welty, and how she published very little between 1955 and 1970, a period that coincides with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement as the dominant political and social thought in the United States. The only manuscript Welty produced within the period, which was also a trying time in her life, was a brief children’s story called The Shoe Bird. Welty could not focus on her writing because of her demanding mother, who drove away the homecare nurses that Welty hired, and it was only when Welty was able to free herself from her familial duties that she was able to get back to writing. When she did, she produced her two finest novels: Losing Battles and The Optimist’s Daughter.

This chapter challenges the reining views of Sturges as an ambivalent figure torn between art and commerce, especially as promulgated in popular writings by James Agee; instead, the chapter proposes new descriptive clusters or patterns that cut across every aspect of the filmmaker’s life: creator, businessman, wordsmith, skeptic, and optimist. These terms provide a good sense of the personality, vitality, and talents that made Sturges such a compelling figure, with the first three speaking to his aptitudes and endeavours, and the latter two characterizing his attitudes and worldview. Rather than set these terms in opposition, the chapter puts them in conversation to illustrate the complexities of Sturges’s remarkable life and to shed light on why he was, and continues to be, such a pivotal figure in Hollywood cinema and American culture.

No general assessment of space activities, actual and prospective, exists. Space thinking falls into three broad competing programs: military, habitat, and planetary security expansionisms. Habitat expansionism is most ambitious, with cosmic scope, but largely unrealized. Military and planetary security approaches are opposites, each partially realized, and focused (so far) on near-Earth space. Space-political questions are entangled in seven great debates about contemporary Planetary Earth. Will accelerating technology produce utopia or oblivion? Should world government replace international anarchy? Can new frontiers escape closure, or must a steady state emerge? Who will control global information systems? Are freedom, democracy, and capitalism still viable? Will humanity be replaced by superhumans or advanced computers? Which understanding of the relations between technology, politics, and humanity is superior? What happens in space will decisively shape outcomes of these debates. Space arguments rely heavily on claims about geography, geopolitics, and geohistory, which provide a focus for comprehensive and even-handed assessment. An ancient story about the astronomer Thales captures the overall argument.

This chapter examines the demise of Norman Vincent Peale’s tribal politics during the period 1955–1985. Peale viewed politics, like religion, as a very personal matter. His strong commitment to the Prohibition struggle emanated in large part from a sense of tribal loyalty. The chapter first considers Peale’s ties to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) before discussing his personal politics and his involvement in local politics. It then analyzes Peale’s participation in efforts to prevent the nomination of the Roman Catholic Senator John F. Kennedy as presidential candidate in 1960, his friendship with Richard Nixon, and the controversy sparked by the so-called Peale group, which issued a statement indicting the politics of the Roman Catholic Church following a press conference in Washington. It also recounts Peale’s dispute with John Bennett, dean of Union Seminary’s faculty at the time, and concludes with an assessment of his book “The Tough-Minded Optimist.”