Hope (Part 1)

I’m sitting here near the DMZ thinking of Europe in lockdown. Today, the British prime minster, Boris Johnson, announces a second lockdown throughout the UK. In South Korea, by contrast, there is the feeling that things are under control. For now….

Not surprisingly, I’ve been thinking about hope (and hopelessness).

‘WHERE SHALL WE PLACE OUR HOPE?’ The poignant, timeless, question is written across the bottom of a work on paper by the contemporary South African artist William Kentridge under  a drawing of a tree (the Tree of Life?) from which hang other texts such as, ‘FINDING YOUR FATE’, ‘SNARED IN AN EVIL TIME’, and ‘The SILENCE ROARS’. ‘WHERE SHALL WE PLACE OUR HOPE?’ Where, indeed?  Of late, it’s a question we have probably been asking more frequently than usual, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, economic slump, Islamic terrorism, and ecological melt-down. 

Hope has probably accompanied Homo sapiens from the very beginning, or at least since  we developed a mode of consciousness enabling the making of connections between the past, present, and future, and between different experiences and phenomena.  For, as soon as we were able to remember good and bad experiences and imagine them happening again we were also made aware of the unpredictability and uncertainty of life. We discovered death. We became anxious. But as a result, we also developed practical ways to relieve or assuage our newfound anxiety. One of the most effective was to hope.  

Hope is what lets us believe that no matter how dark the world seems today there will be a better tomorrow.It is about creating a state of mind in which we believe we will successfully achieve our consciously pursued goals. Hope allows us to believe in a positive outcome, preferably involving emotions like happiness or joy. These are motivational emotions, or positive-outcome emotions, through which we set goals.  Something in the future that indicates our efforts will succeed arouses hope, while something that suggests our efforts are futile will foster despair. Hope is therefore also closely linked to morality, in that what we hope for is also judged to be ‘good’, ‘just’, ‘righteous’. But is hope a thought or an emotion?  The answer is that it is both, and before hope becomes an emotion it is a cognitive state of mind. The brain has been shaped by natural selection to process information so as to control behaviour and physical condition in order to optimize fitness. Emotions also play their part in this process. They bring benefits, and are patterns of response shaped by natural selection to deal with the challenges posed by the need to adapt to changing circumstances. Hope, in this context, arises from the expectation that a goal will be reached, and positive feelings are the reward. Such conviction about the future provides enormous benefits from the point of view of survival, as it establishes the grounds upon which sacrifice and suffering in the present becomes a necessary preliminary stage on the way towards beneficial,  pleasurable, or happy outcomes.

The goal-directed thinking central to the dynamics of hope responds to feedback at various points, which also serves to locate hope within a wider social and cultural context.  Hope is linked to the deep values of ourculture, and attitudes toward it are organized around norms that specify   the correctness of these attitudes. A society has a vested interest in optimizing feelings of hope. Individuals want it for themselves but also for others, especially for their family, friends, and employers. People will always prefer to live in a society which is hopeful rather than one that is in despair. In this sense, hope is closely connected to social unity. Affiliative interactions bring rewards and are the basis for the formation of social groups which range from the nuclear family to whole nations. Those who wield power find it beneficial to encourage and channel hope, as they know that a lack of it threatens social order. Alongside faith and charity-love the Roman Catholic Church sees hope as one of the three cardinal virtues. A Nazi Party poster for the presidential election in Germany in 1932 declared: ‘Our Last Hope – Hitler.’ Joe Biden, on the campaign trial for the Presidential elections in 2020, told Americans, “I’m going to give you hope.”

Is there a universal core of hoped for goals?  We can probably all agree that humans at all times and in all places eat, sleep, defecate, and procreate. They share an inborn desire for a long and happy  life, to succeed in the struggle against ‘evil spirits’, or  in a secular terms, all the malign agents that threaten us. Ultimately, what all people have always hoped for boils down to this: happiness. But what brings happiness? A good life protected from evil. Longevity and good fortune. We all have an inborn desire for a long and meaningful life, and this in its turn depends on five basic ingredients: health, peace, wealth, status, and fertility.  

But even a small degree of reflection on earthly existence  means we become aware of the pervasiveness of suffering and hardship. A sense of the tragedy of life comes not only from the recognition of the extent and depth of suffering but also from the realization that it will continue. How are we to respond to this sobering recognition?  We certainly prefer to ignore it for as long as possible.

Hope is closely related to meaning. Through a process of self-reflection, we make a specific choice of goals, and the perceived progress in the journey toward these goals is how we constructs meaning in our life.   “What is the nature of meaning?”  asked the neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl in ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, and he answered by first arguing that we all experience an “existential vacuum” in which we sense that thereis no inherent meaning or purpose in the universe. But this awareness  is remedied by the actualizing of“values.” Frankl argued that the resulting investment of  meaning is the result of a decision to bring three major classes of values into our lives: the creative, experiential, and attitudinal. The latter is the stance wetake toward our suffering plights, and it is within this context, one in which we actively need and search for meaning, that hope is central.  Frankl wrote: “Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man­, ­his courage and hope, or lack of them­ ­and the state of immunity of his body will understand that sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect”. Frankl was  a Holocaust survivor, and he referred to the high death rate in Auschwitz over the period of Christmas 1944 to New Year 1945, observing that so many prisoners died because they hoped to be home before Christmas, and when they realized this wouldn’t happen, they lost hope.

Humans have always had  to confront the tragic nature of life, and they have found themselves making essentially three choices:  they  resign themselves to the failure of humanity to affect change and adopt  a fatalistic worldview that squeezes drops of meaning out of hard facts;  they look for  solutions that lie beyond normal  human capacities and adopt some variety of supernaturalism, most likely in the form of  religious belief; The first option – fatalism - undervalues and underestimates the capacity of humanity to affect ameliorative change, while supernaturalism holds up false hopes while also undermining the actual attitudes and processes by which transformations, however piecemeal, can actually occur.  Furthermore, as the American philosopher John Dewey writes: “a world that is finished, ended, would have no traits of suspense and crisis, and would offer no opportunity for resolution. Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment. We envisage with pleasure Nirvana and a uniform heavenly bliss only because they are projected upon the background of our present world of stress and conflict”.  Fatalism rejects hope as a viable tool in the struggle  to make life meaningful in the face of awareness of life’s tragedy, while supernaturalism places too much value on hope. But there is a third way to confront life’s uncertainties: we  can navigate a middle way between fatalism and supernaturalism through forging an ‘art of living’ involving responding to our existential condition, and taking on the burden of making meaning using  critical inquiry and moral imagination, a task in which  it is recognized that people transform themselves and their world by cumulative action grounded in an awareness of the interconnection of individuals, human communities, and the natural environment.