Yeah, OK, Stanford, very funny. Ask the guy who writes cynical humor pieces to review a book called Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. He’ll read the impressive arguments of Jamil Zaki, professor of psychology and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Labde, and have an epiphany in which he embraces hope, and then write a book review that will win whatever lame prizes are given to alumni magazines. See that, Stanford? You failed.
Except Zaki did something I didn’t expect. The character he follows through the book—as he weaves in personal stories, psych studies, statistics, and anecdotes about hopeful people—is Emile Bruneau, ’94, the neuroscientist who went to war zones to use science to promote peace before dying at 47 of brain cancer. And the handsome, kind, mellow, giant-calved rugby player and resident assistant in Branner the year I lived there as a writing tutor.
Where preemptive strikes bring out the worst in others, leaps of faith bring out their best.
So, I was primed for Zaki’s advocacy of “hopeful skepticism,” which he first got attention for when his TEDMonterey talk, “How to Escape the Cynicism Trap,” was watched more than 3 million times by people who aren’t me. And I was indeed convinced. Much of his argument aligned with what I’d written in my book In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better than You and You Are Better than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book. The belief that people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest masquerades as wisdom but is actually a false nihilism that serves as justification to act badly. Cynicism, Zaki writes, “is a tool of the status quo.”
Zaki presents a conversion narrative in which he—disheartened about climate change, wealth inequality, racial justice, and democracy—tries to trust people’s ability to work for the common good. And he does, partly by proving that what has made humans the most successful species since the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event is our ability to cooperate. “There is no tidy separation between self and other,” he writes.
He ends the book by giving smart advice on how we can each become less cynical, though he doesn’t specifically instruct the reader on how to do this and also keep his job as a humor writer. But the real solution, as he writes throughout the book, isn’t in the 11 tips in Appendix A, “A Practical Guide to Hopeful Skepticism.” It’s what he quotes Emile saying at the end of the book about our innate potential for peace: “This force is in us and communal. It’s not owned. And the best way to activate a communal force is to be a community.”
I wish I hadn’t spent most of my conversations with Emile making fun of his Incredible Hulk calf muscles. Maybe if I’d read this book first, I wouldn’t have.
Joel Stein, ’93, MA ’94, is a writer in Los Angeles. Email him at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
