Sorry if I've misunderstood you, I tend to treat sentences beginning with "the prevalent attitude seems to be..." as more or less equivalent to "the human race as a whole does/thinks X", though maybe some people have different definitions etc. A lot of arguments seem to boil down to word definitions after all. But, if you "despair of the human race" even sometimes, how can you be optimistic about individuals? Unless you just mean individuals who haven't pissed you off yet ;)