Dismissing past political optimism as folly is itself a kind of quietism.

Evidence

It is doubtful, for example, that something called ‘the West’ was, in the summer of 1967, ‘in the clutches of optimism’; that was the year the Vietnamese finally began concentrating their forces for what became the Tet offensive, and at least a part of ‘the West’ – American imperialism, for example – was not at all ‘optimistic’. It is equally doubtful that ‘optimism’ – the idea that ‘the future still exists’, the hope that we ‘would overcome some day’, the conviction that there is a ‘world to change’ – is as such a ‘disease’ (a ‘microscopic, invisible bacillus’, we are playfully told). To be amused, in retrospect, at the youthfulness of one’s own youth is one thing; but to learn from maturity that a visionary relation with reality is itself folly, that literature is an antidote to such follies, is to participate, perhaps unwittingly, in precisely the kind of quietism which Rushdie himself seems formally to reject in other parts of this brief essay and in many other writings. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 266

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s standing interest in how rhetorical moves smuggle in political positions — the quietism critique parallels arguments in Communication as Culture about evasion of present participation. — connects to: Postmodern ironic distance from visionary engagement can secretly reproduce political quietism. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 609

Related

• Postmodern ironic distance from visionary engagement can secretly reproduce political quietism. (similarity 0.89)
• Rushdie’s ironic satiric tone smuggles in the metropolis’s own cliches unexamined. (similarity 0.80)