I'm an optimist. Hand me an empty glass, and I'll assure you there's water to fill it. Show me a dark cloud, and I'll find three silver linings. Heck, I even believe that newspapers have a bright future!

I may have a little Pollyanna in me, but I'm really a lot more Joe "Just The Facts, Ma'am" Friday: By almost every important measure -- the spread of wealth, equality and freedom, declining mortality rates, the incidence of war -- the world is a better place than it was 25, 50 or 100 years ago.

Nowadays, my smile doesn't provide much of an umbrella. Where I see sunny skies, many Americans think that we ought to start building arks. Doom, Debacle, Depression and Despair have become the Four Nouns of the Apocalypse invoked by politicians, pundits and the people whose perceptions seem inspired by the Book of Revelation.

Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for America's most optimistic president, Ronald Reagan, addressed this pessimism in a Wall Street Journal column exploring the visceral emotions defining this year's presidential campaign.

"I wonder if we follow the election so passionately because we're afraid," she wrote. "We're afraid a lot of our national problems are intractable, and the future too full of challenge. We cannot tolerate feeling this way. So we make believe the election can change everything. And we follow it passionately to convince ourselves its outcome will be decisive and make everything better. ... Some part of me thinks we are all making believe this is a life-changing election because we know it's not a life-changing election. "

Noonan's words suggest more than just the natural anxiety aroused by frightening events -- a crippled Wall Street, high gas prices, the housing crisis, global warming and the war on terrorism. In theory, at least, those problems can be addressed through wiser policies.

Our pessimism runs deeper. It springs from spiritual hunger, the breakdown of community and a sense of moral exhaustion that has run through Western culture since the two world wars. In addition, our Puritan heritage makes us mistrustful of the boom times we've enjoyed for so long. Even as we revel in our big houses, big cars and the fact we can buy seven types of organic lettuce at our local market, we feel a twinge of moral guilt about this gluttonous consumerism. We fear that someday -- maybe today -- the bill will come due for these sinful indulgences.

Still, the chief cause of this malaise is not political, moral or spiritual. It is intellectual. At bottom, we fear that we lack the capacity to comprehend and thereby direct the major forces shaping our world.

To explain, I'll start with a psychological fact: People need a sense of control. We abhor uncertainty and cling to understanding in any form. Early pagans, for example, worshipped a host of deities because the idea of gods in command of thunder, rain and healing helped them believe there was order in the universe.

Our modern world, by contrast, is inscrutably complex. Even people of faith do not believe that God is directing the global forces of commerce and politics. Those dynamics are our creations. And as the Wall Street bailout made clear, even the so-called experts barely comprehend them.

With slack-jawed confusion, average Americans watch the value of their homes fall while gas and food rise. We lose our jobs with only the faintest sense of how come. Like autumn leaves we are buffeted by powerful, invisible forces that whisk away a sense of control over our lives. Impotence breeds pessimism.

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