Antinatalist and genuinely pessimistic views don’t get a lot of play in the larger culture, given that most of our larger cultural production is organized around getting people to buy stuff they don’t need, and bleak worldview of, say, Giacomo Leopardi isn’t really the thing to get people to go to the mall. There was an HBO production of Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited in 2011 the did some deeply pessimistic themes, but that was a production so unusual as to strike me as sui generis.

So I was a bit surprised to see the following scene in the first episode of the recent HBO series True Detective. Two Louisiana State Police CID detectives are driving in the gathering dark of a late winter afternoon, having recently left the scene of a bizarrely-staged murder. Detective Marty Hart (played by Woody Harrelson) tries to get to know his strange partner, Detective Rustin Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey).

int. — the detective’s car — day

Hart drives and converses with Cohle.

cohle

People out here, it’s like they don’t even know the outside world exists. Might as well be living on the fucking moon.

hart

All kinds of ghettos in the world.

cohle

It’s all one ghetto, man. Giant gutter in outer space.

hart

Today, that scene, that is the most fucked up thing I ever caught. Can I ask you something? You’re a Christian, yeah?

cohle

No.

hart

Well, whaddya got the cross for in your apartment?

cohle

It’s a form of meditation.

hart

How’s that?

cohle

I contemplate the moment in the garden, the idea of allowing your own crucifixion.

hart

But you’re not a Christian, so what do you believe?

cohle

I believe people shouldn’t talk about this type of shit at work.

hart

Hold on, hold on. Three months we’ve been together I get nothing from you. Today, what we’re into, now. Do me a courtesy, okay? I’m not trying to convert you.

cohle

Okay, I’d consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms I’m what called a pessimist.

hart

Uh, okay, what’s that mean?

cohle

It means I’m bad at parties.

hart

(chuckles)

Let me tell you. You ain’t that good outside of parties either.

cohle

(lengthy pause)

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures should not exist by natural law.

hart

Well, that sounds God-fucking-awful, Rust.

cohle

We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.

hart

I wouldn’t go around spouting that shit if I was you. People around here don’t think that way. I don’t think that way.

cohle

I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

hart

So, what’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning?

cohle

I tell myself I bear witness. but the real answer is it’s obviously my programming, and I lack the constitution for suicide.

hart

My luck I picked today to get to know you. What…three months I don’t hear a word from you and…

cohle

You asked.

hart

Yeah. And now I’m begging you to shut the fuck up.

(Can’t help but note that “begging you to shut the fuck up” is one of the politer things you can expect to hear if you are so unwise as to air pessimistic views to unprepared ears. Though I’ll confess that at least that’s a more respectful response than “I’ll pray for you.”)

True Detective has occasioned an interesting article on pessimism by Professor David Cartwright. It’s an interesting overview and worth your attention. I would quibble with some of it. Professor Cartwright attributes the philosophy behind True Detective to Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer unquestionably stands in the deep intellectual background of the show, but on my viewing its more immediate progenitor would have been Thomas Ligotti, so much so that there’s an active controversy about the extent to which True Detective writer Nic Pizzolatto plagiarized that contemporary master of weird fiction.

Professor Cartwright suggests that a pessimist could be understood as someone who maintains that

1. existence is a mistake;
2. there is no meaning or purpose to human existence;
3. the best thing for humans is not to exist;
4. he next best is to obtain a state of being in which the world becomes nothing;
5. life is essentially suffering and suffering is evil, and;
6. this is the worst of all possible worlds.

And I would quibble a bit with some of these. Take (1). It sounds like something important is being said here, but the problem is that at lest in the contemporary world most pessimists are also atheists, and the concept of a mistake seems to suggest that there is a someone behind the mistake, someone with intentions or least with interests that can be well-served by some course of action and ill-served by others. With respect to the whether the universe we now know is a “mistake,” who could take a course of action with respect that universe as a whole exists or not, save for the God that pessimists don’t think exists? (5) would have to be amended by many pessimists who are also metaethical error theorists and for whom therefore the category of “evil” (at least in the sense of “objective evil”) is an empty one. Also, it might be too strong a claim to say that life is “essentially” suffering, whatever that means. It’s enough to count as a pessimist if you think that life is on balance suffering and that there is no reasonable prospect of its ever being any other way. (6) is what Schopenhauer himself believed and he offered a couple of not terribly convincing arguments for it, but it isn’t a necessary component of pessimism. It seems like an overly-strong claim — surely it’s enough to claim that this world is really bad, even if even worse worlds are possible (or, for a modal realist, actually exist).

Quibble, quibble. Professor Cartwright’s article nonetheless also entertains as it instructs. His observations about how sexual desire ruins us are particularly apropos:

Sex confuses even the greatest minds, and it interferes with humans’ most serious occupations, disrupting the activities of politicians and intruding in the investigations of scholars. Under the power of sexual love, humans engage in fights with their friends and family, breaking the ties of the strongest and most valuable relations. Sexual love can cause the fall of the upright and honorable, and it can make traitors of those who were once loyal and faithful. To satisfy their sexual urges people will sacrifice their wealth, health, social position, and sometimes even their lives.

And take a sufficiently bright twenty-six year-old German and thwart his desire to fuck pretty actresses, and you get The World as Will and Representation.

Though sadly in the end True Detective does find a way to disappoint. Spoilers of a very general kind ahead.

After seventeen years (and many travails) Hart and Cohle catch their serial killer, both being gravely wounded in the process. In a near-death stupor before recovery Cohle has an experience that leads him to a redemption of sorts from pessimism. How much better it would have been if Hart had woken up in his hospital bed and asked “what about Cohle?” only to be told, after a pained pause and an exchange of glances among his interlocutors “We’re sorry Marty. Rust didn’t make it.” That would have left the character of Cohle with some real integrity. And watching Hart deal with the loss of his partner in the balance of the final episode of the series would have ended the story on a note of magnificent darkness.

But it wouldn’t have been possible on television, even on HBO. If you work on TV you need to respect Thomas Ligotti’s maxim: if you can’t say something positive, at least say something equivocal.