Hope or Optimism?
North Korean ‘Juche Realism’. Hopeful or optimistic art? This painting is entitled ‘At the Site of the Bumper Pumpkin Crop’, and shows the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea walking around a pumpkin farm. A commentary on the work declares: “At the Site of the Bumper Pumpkin Crop, movingly transmits the Great Leader’s high communist virtues by capturing the Great Leader showing his kindness to a group of farmers during his visit to a pumpkin farm…… With a broad smile on his face, the Great Leader is locked arm in arm with an elderly farmer dressed in working clothes and holding his farmer’s hat respectfully, paying his respect to the Great Leader. Speaking freely with the farmers and asking about the number of pumpkins and their weights, and the amount of pumpkins required for feeding livestock, the Great Leader is actively developing a solution for providing sufficient feed for livestock. The Great Leader also recognizes the peoples’ loyalty, which is pure and clean as crystal, and is encouraging the hard efforts of the farmers. The painting glorifies the Great Leader’s noble communist virtues through his benevolent image. It reminds the viewers that the Great Leader is always one with the people and receives immense gratification from the happy lives of the people—the bliss and happiness increasing day by day.“
Recently, I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about ‘hope’, with the intention of eventually writing a book on the subject, but in the short terms because I am writing an essay on North Korean art of the 1970s and 1980s (called Juche Realism) and the way it encodes optimism rather than hope, compared to the abstract art produced in South Korea during this period, known as Dansaekhwa, which i suggest encodes a kind of ‘radical hope.’ Here, I will simply make a few comments about what I think is different between hope and optimism.
Hope involves the enhancement of agency, while optimism is directed toward the enhancement or maintenance of self-esteem. As a result, hope is about attuning to uncertainty while optimism is about grasping hold of certainty. Optimism is a rigid mental predisposition set within a binary whose opposing pole is pessimism, while hope is not in so much in a binary relationship with despair, but inherently non-binary, because it incorporates the reality of tragedy. “An optimist is…someone who is bullish about life simply because he is an optimist”, writes Terry Eagleton in his pointedly entitled study Hope Without Optimism (2017) An optimist “anticipates congenial conclusions because this is the way it is with him. As such, he fails to take the point that one must have reasons to be happy.”
As the philosopher Michael Milona summarizes, two general forms of optimism can be identified ‘dispositional’ and ‘positive illusion’ optimism. The former involves a general predisposition to expect things will improve, while the latter involves irrational beliefs about how much control one has over achieving goals, and is a distortion of reality so things appear better than they really are. In both forms of optimism, the goal is to approach every situation having already made a decision to shield oneself from the possibility of danger, failure, and loss. Optimists tend to explain events in ways that permit them to distance and limit their failures, and make various kinds of mental excuse to lessen the impact of failure – in the present and potentially in the future. This puts the optimist at a distancefrom the very real chance of a negative outcome, and as such, an optimist is more likely to fail to recognize that one will inevitably face major crises in life, and is usually less capable than the hopeful of overcoming obstacles when they inevitably appear.
The psychologist Lisa Bortolotti argues that optimism works along four avenues. It communicates a sense of coherence, hardiness, preparedness, and self-affirmation. But as C.R. Synder emphasises in The Psychology of Hope (1996) these positive emotional states all come at a high price: “optimists have a style of explaining events so they distance and circumscribe their failures. In other words, optimists make excuses to lessen the impact of current and potential failures.” As Jonathan Lear puts it: “It is a hallmark of the wishful that the world will be magically transformed – into conformity with how one would like it to be – without having to take any realistic practical steps to bring it about….Symbolic rituals take over life or in the group activities of culture – and they become a way of avoiding the real-life demands that confront one in the everyday.”
Effective hope, by contrast, arises from a realistic assessment of how much volatility and uncertainty can be handle before making a risky investment in a future outcome. It is the ability to trust that nature is somehow on one’s side, despite all the evidence suggestion the contrary. If goals are chosen intelligently, and the interest of the community and of nature are borne in mind, hopefulness makes it possible to find meaning in the present moment, no matter how troubled that moment may be. Unlike the essentially wish-fulfilling focus of optimism, genuine hopefulness is about coming to terms with the uncertainties of life, its inevitable obstacles and failures, through the willingness to actively confront them.
Metaphors for optimism and hope often overlap, and can include a correlation with something valuable, fragile, beautiful, or brightly coloured that can be searched for, given, lost, stolen, and retrieved. They can be described as luminous and warm, as fire, gas, or liquid. They can be conceived as containers in which we are located, or that are located within us, such as in the soul, heart, or eyes. Hope and optimism are described as a cloud with a ‘silver lining’, which draws on the familiar experience of observing changing weather. They can be described as food that is nourishing, a remedy or prescription, a protected area, a bridge – in the sense of a means, an intention that involves focused attention, a performance, and also a deception or illusion. People often describe optimism and hope as a movement - as something rising upwards, defying or working with gravity and elevating them above the baseline of the everyday. Writing in the nineteenth century, the American poet Emily Dickinson described hope in zoomorphic terms as “the thing with feathers – / That perches in the soul - / And sings the tune without the words - And never stops – at all -”. Hope is a beautiful and persistent songbird. But Dickinson could also be describing optimism. Hope and optimism can be anthropomorphized, as when we say, ‘hope betrayed us’, hope or optimism is ‘mad’ or ‘crazy’, negative associations that remind us that both can be delusional and/or easily dashed. Summarizing current research. But hope metaphors differs from those of optimism in that they are often described in terms of a journey involving confrontation with recognized obstacles that may prove unsurmountable. Therefore, hope metaphors also acknowledge that hopes can be dashed. A primary optimism metaphor in English is that of a glass half-full (as opposed to a pessimism metaphor, which sees it as half-empty). This metamorphizes optimism as a way of assessing the amount of liquid filling a container, indicating its dispositional character. Hope cannot be described in such broad terms.
In my next post I’ll talk about North Korean Juche Realism.
Notes
Lisa Bortolotti, ‘Optimism, Agency, Success’, Ethical Theory Moral Practice, 21 (5), 2018, 521-535.
Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017)
Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope. Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation ( Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2006)
Michael Milona, ‘Hope and Optimism’, John Templeton Foundation White Paper, October 2020, 4-18.
C.R. Synder, The Psychology of Hope (New York: The Free Press, 1996)