Meliorism and the Refusal of Despair

Meliorism is the belief that the world can be improved through intelligent human effort without requiring certainty about what 'better' looks like or guarantees that improvement will succeed. Bernstein identified it as pragmatism's defining emotional stance—distinguished from optimism (prediction things will get better) and pessimism (prediction they won't) by being a commitment to trying rather than a forecast of outcomes. In his final interview (December 2021), Bernstein said: "Meliorism means that no matter how bad things are, the task is to try and think how you can ameliorate the worse and make things better." For the AI moment, meliorism is the antidote to both triumphalist overconfidence and elegist despair: building dams knowing they'll need rebuilding, writing books knowing they'll need revising, making arguments knowing they'll need amending, acting not despite uncertainty but because uncertainty is the permanent condition of all human action.