ENEMIES OF HOPE

Simon Morley, Carl Jung, ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)’, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 46x38cm. Private Collection. This is one of my ‘Book-Paintings’ - monochrome copies of book covers.

I mentioned in my previous post (‘Hope in a Cold Climate’,January 3rd) that I’m working on a book about art and hope. In the that post I looked on the bright side. In this one, I focus on the many ways in which things are not looking good as far as being hopeful goes.

Today, people often display much greater egotism than before. They dwell on their own subjective states rather than the realities of the external world and the needs of their community, and perceive the society in which they live as a fundamental obstacle in the way of their own personal development. This makes hope an increasingly private and atomized concern.

This privatization of hope  is unfolding within an information rich society where people have unprecedented amounts of data at their disposal. But the tsunami of information has the effect of drowning people in data, paralyzing them so they can no longer act decisively. The  ‘information explosion’ has led to a crippling loss of moral innocence. In the past, life was relatively simple, but today, people are faced with many situations that seem so complex on an ethical level that they find it increasingly difficult to make decisions and choices concerning what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. This has led to a debilitating knowledge of the dark and contradictory sources of our own moods and behaviour, and those of different cultures and social groups.

The  information to which we most readily have access is tainted by algorithms programmed to capture and monetize attention rather than enlighten us. Furthermore, much of the information that grabs our attention is ‘bad’, extreme, or controversial news and views, which cast a unrealistic, pessimistic, even nihilistic cloud over human affairs.

Adopting a sophisticated ‘modern’ perspective on life often means equating society with the repressive play of power, and the ‘real’ with the dark side of life. Many modern thinkers see hope as mostly directed towards selfish, short duration, hedonistic goals. Hope is seen as a coping strategy that is conducive to maintaining the oppressive status quo of the haves and have-nots.

Part of the problem is that hope is neither just a cognitive nor an emotional trait; it’s an ambiguous amalgam of both, which makes it difficult to study scientifically. This is especially problematic, because in the developed world we live in a society that has become increasingly (and perhaps fatally) reliant on the belief that through technological, scientific, and economic prowess we have capacity to exert determining control over the future.

The newest manifestation of this confidence is AI. But as many commentators warn, AI is more than just a useful tool making for greater efficiency. As Yuval Noah Harari puts it, ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is really more like an “alien intelligence” that we don’t really understand, and can potentially become uncontrollable and even enslave or annihilate us. [1]

But the sense of existential crisis is being exacerbated by the growing recognition that modernity’s promise of technologically and industrially driven economic progress to spread wealth throughout the world and increase people’s share of happiness has not been kept. Instead, there exists a tragic imbalance in which a tiny percentage of the world’s population have become exceedingly wealthy while the vast majority exist in unrelenting poverty.

Today, writes the Brazilian sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the super-rich can entertain the delusional fantasy of “fearless hope”, while the poor are crippled by “hopeless fear.” As de Sousa Santos observes, this “is a world where uncertainties, both downward and upward, tend to become abysmal ones which, for the poor and powerless, ultimately translate into unjust fate and, for the rich and powerful, a mission to appropriate the world.”[2]  The dialectical relationship between hope and fear/despair is in danger of collapsing. 

Simon Morley, ‘Found Utopia: The Picture Goer’s Annual, 1948’ (2025), acrylic on canvas, 120 x 80cm. From my new ‘Found Utopia’ Series. Collection of the artist.

Taking a deep historical perspective on the present reveals something fundamental:  It turns out that all humanity’s hopes, from the time of the agrarian turn in the Neolithic and onwards into the post-agrarian epoch, have been premised on the stable climatic and biosphere conditions that characterise what is termed the Holocene.

These premises - assumptions of seasonality, meteorological limits, the assurance of renewal, possibilities of permanence and hence of settlement,  faith in providence and hence of religion; inductive continuity and hence confidence in science – are no longer the unmovable foundations upon which human ‘civilization’ can be founded.  But the the old anthropocentric yardstick of meaning and value that once were the axis of civilization has now, in the twenty-first century, demonstrably come into question. A whole new horizon of meaning and value is presently coming into view. From having been taken for granted as nothing but the backdrop to human affairs, the planet itself is now stepping forward as the primary protagonist. 

All these factors, which constitute the radically new conditions of the present, have contributed to a profound epistemological crisis, which at a root is a crisis of truth. Open societies are experiencing a pervasive loss of faith in the once authoritative statements that served as key foundation stones. Above all, the legitimacy of science, the domain of ‘is’, the facts of life, has been undermined. There is no longer a consensus view of ‘reality’.  This has had the positive effect of widening the horizon of possibilities; we can retrain the imagination in response to such a fast-changing world.  But all too often this mental freedom devolves into delusional fantasy, into free-floating, more or less conscious projections of our minds.

Going forward, our hopes will have to be measured in significantly new ways. We need a paradigm shift in order to forge new models of hope. The task will be to imagine a shift in the focus of hope that prizes it apart from the global -  that is, from its inherent and until now unacknowledged anthropocentrism - and instead forges a mythopoetic or religion of the planetary.

What will this shift towards a ‘non-anthropocentric hope’ or a ‘Gaia-centric’ hope entail? What will it look like? Whatever the case, unless new ideals of being and behaviour are envisioned and placed before our eyes as credible goals, we will never know what we and our society can become. We won’t know how to adopt a positive posture in relation to the future, and will lack the motivation to take the next step.

NOTES

[1] Yuval Noha Harari, Nexus (2025)

[2] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Uncertainty, between Fear and Hope’ THE CLR James Journal, 23:1–2, Fall 2017,  5–11, p.6.  doi: 10.5840/clrjames2017121951

HOPE IN A COLD CLIMATE

Here’s the view from near my house, looking towards North Korea, photographed on New Year’s Day. Today, January 3rd, at 10.00am,, it’s currently -6 degrees. Chilly!

I’m currently working on a book for Thames & Hudson called How Art Can Give You Hope. It’s picture-led and intended for a wide readership. More on this project later, but now, as we begin 2026, I want to share some thoughts on hope, and will focus on some positive - hopeful - signs.

The special varieties of hope we now need to nurture are those that focus our attention not just on providing a new and more prosperous future but that also rescue what is still valuable from the old world - from the past. This implies forms of hope that rather than being uniquely directed towards opening up new uncharted spaces through science and technology also focus our attention on ensuring that good things are passed down to posterity, to future generations. 

But due to human activities, the stable climatic and biosphere conditions that have served as the unmovable and seemingly eternal foundations upon which human hopes have been founded can no longer be taken for granted. Scientists say that we have exited the Holocene geological epoch, beginning around 11,700 years ago, and entered the Anthropocene, an epoch in which humanity’s impact on the environment is determining not just its own fate but also that of every living thing on Planet Earth.

The Holocene provided several vital key constants: meteorological limits, seasonality, ecological renewal, the possibility of permanent abiding and hence the establishment of settlements, faith in providence and therefore the creation of religious cosmology, and, more recently, faith in the potential of reason and scientific research to understand and the control of natural resources to furnish a better future. But in the Holocene what has been taken for granted as the permanent backdrop to human affairs is now in the foreground, the primary agent, the primary protagonist. This means the environmental constants shared by pre-agrarian, agrarian, and industrial societies and are not any longer the unmoving foundations upon which a viable assessment of future possibilities can be founded. The old yardsticks of meaning and value that produced civilizations in the past are now actually proving environmentally malign, threatening not just human but also planetary extinction. so, we need varieties of hope that locate us within a continuum that constructs a prosperous future on the bedrock of our past, and thereby helps us re-connect lovingly with the world.

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In many ways, we are actually better prepared than ever to respond to the existential threats this unprecedented situation present. In the global north people live in information rich societies in which they have at their disposal unprecedented amounts of data. Until very recently, all human societies were information poor, and so their hopes were narrowly conceived, nurtured, and pursued within the context of such paucity. The kinds of things in which people placed their hope were firmly rooted in local conditions and thought to be immutable and binding. Now, within a world linked via complex networks, people increasingly recognize that their hopes are fundamentally like those of other humans, but are also determined by specific social and historical conditions.  Our unprecedented awareness of the vast field of hopeful goals, both past and present, can make us better prepared for the obstacles we face. Meanwhile, the advent of AI, which provides detailed examination of impersonal datasets, marshaling facts and rapidly processes them, can help us find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. AI algorithms deliver unprecedentedly accurate assessments of future probabilities, thereby significantly changing how we relate to the uncertain openness of the future.  AI can aid us in making rational choices about where to place our hope. 

Developing in the present a positive relationship to the future will depend on our moral sensitivity, and despite all the obvious signs of brutal inhumanity focused on by the mass media, which leads to our endless ‘doom scrolling’, in the West there has in been very real progress towards a general heightening of moral sensibility. This has occurred both inwardly and outwardly. More people are aware of their own ‘interiority’, of their own self-reflexive identity and responsibility as moral agents. The open societies in which they live display higher levels of civility, and people recognize the need to alleviate poverty, and they wish for the flourishing of others. For the first time in history there is widespread recognition that cruelty is unacceptable, and in the name of justice people increasingly oppose oppression, discrimination, and violence. Significantly, the heightening of people’s moral sensibility, at least in the wealthy global north, has led to the expanding of concern for the non-human world after a period characterized primarily by an anthropocentrism that has treated the non-human as an exploitable resource. More people today show concern for animal welfare and recognize the vital importance of developing a sustainable relationship with the environment.

OK. These are some positive possibilities. In my next blog, I consider the ‘negative’ side of our present condition, and how it’s making it increasingly difficult to know in what to place our hope today.

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.“

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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)

A small ray of North Korean hope

Some photographs presented on the BBC’s news website documenting the recent mass spectacle in Pyongyang have compelled me anew to comment on the utter madness of the North Korean state, which, I hasten to add, begins just a few miles north of where I write these words.

I suppose living so close to possibly the most dysfunctionally functional state in the world is a sobering experience. Basically, it helps me remember that humanity is far weirder than I can imagine.

One picture especially caught my eye. The picture above. And now look at this detail::

I wonder if this is an ‘emperor’s new clothes’ picture. Note the little girl staring at the camera. What is she thinking? is it too much to hope that she is seeing through the madness of the adults? Probably. After all, the system starts the process of mind control very early. But even so. This seems unscripted. I couldn’t help feeling that the little girl is shattering the surface of the collective delusion. And does that mean that the photographer is colluding? Even though this is an official picture aimed at consolidating the official narrative, can we see here a subtly resistant action? Doubtful. Because that would be much too dangerous. But nevertheless……

I was also given adequate evidence that the BBC and the system it serves, and within which I live, is also pretty damn nutty. Look at this:

A stupid advertisement lodged between stupid images. Perhaps we are just as mad in our way as these North Koreans…….