'We Have Reasons to Be Cheerful'

David Byrne has launched an online magazine titled, in defiance of the Zeitgeist, Reasons to be Cheerful. We should applaud him. There’s something admirably courageous or foolhardy about the effort. The magazine’s content focuses almost exclusively on problems and solutions that might be called social or political (though nonpartisan) – nuclear energy, urban traffic congestion, solar energy. I confess to not having read any of the stories to their conclusion, but that’s beside the point. I wouldn’t read such stories in any publication. What I have read in the magazine contains no whining, the lingua franca of our age. The obvious emphasis is on practical, evidence-based, non-ideologically-dependent solutions, an approach familiar to me because I work with engineers. Byrne deserves respect, if not always agreement. Rolling Stone quotes him as saying:

“Nothing changes when you’re numb. So, as a kind of remedy, and possibly as a kind of therapy, I started collecting good news. Not schmaltzy, feel-good news, but stuff that reminded me, ‘Hey, there’s positive stuff going on! People are solving problems and it’s making a difference!’ I began telling others about what I’d found.”

Cheerful has a range of meanings in English. The OED, which dates the word’s earliest appearance to the fifteenth century, gives four:    

1.       “Conducive to happiness, contentment, or good spirits; cheering, comforting, uplifting; spec. (of colours, surroundings, etc.) bright and pleasant.”

2.      “Full of or expressing good spirits; light-hearted, happy, merry, glad. In later use frequently: spec. jovial or lively in appearance or behaviour.”

3.      “Of an event, period of time, etc.: characterized by happiness or good spirits.”

4.      “Ready, willing; ungrudging. Also: unapologetic, unabashed.”

At first, Byrne’s usage seemed closest to the first, most familiar definition. Now I think the fourth, with its spirit of can-do pragmatism, is closer. After all, Byrne and his bandmates made the apocalypse sound cheerful in “Nothing but Flowers”: “This was a Pizza Hut / Now it’s all covered with daisies.”

Cheerfulness isn’t necessarily the opposite of dwelling in the slough of despond. As Theodore Dalrymple reminds us: “I can inhabit gloom and live in joy.” Guy Davenport often closed his letters with “Cheers!” and Boswell recounts the time Dr. Johnson reunited with an old acquaintance, Oliver Edwards, who told him: “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” The title of Byrne’s magazine is the same as the headline on a column Theodore Dalrymple published in the Spectator in 2003: “Reasons to be cheerful.” In it, Dalrymple writes:

“So long as the world is inexhaustibly interesting, we have reason to be cheerful.”