2024 and Hope

One of my watercolours. I gather leaves, twigs, etc. from around where I live and then paint them life-size in trompe l’oeil. This one spells the word UTOPIA.. Which seems fitting for todays’ post.

The news media always seems to welcome the new year by striving to cheer us up with reasons to be hopeful. But they’ve been working harder than usual this year!

In fact, the daily news provides ample and depressing evidence that people will invest their hope in the most bizarre things. QAnon, for example.  The motley followers of QAnon know that hope is fundamental to the meaningful life, and after their own fashion have the expectation of a positive outcome. But like so many hopeful people throughout the length and breadth of history, their expectations were not realized. But also like people in the past it seems that even in the face of disappointment many QAnon supporters have been able to rebound, regroup, re-calibrate, and keep on hoping for the same old mad things.

But unlike our ancestors and too many of our contemporaries, most of the intelligentsia know that hope is all too often founded on delusion, over-confidence, over-simplification, errors of judgment, and moral, practical, personal, and collective failure.  Especially worrying, however is  not so much the fact that the beliefs of QAnon followers and the like are obviously delusional and not founded on the sound and reasoned assessment of the possibility of a positive outcome, but that nowadays it seems to be becoming extremely difficult to feel hopeful through rational appeal to the facts or through a balanced assessment of the situation in the ways that  we in the ‘reality-based’ community consider essential.  

Then again, to borrow a metaphor of the poet Seamus Heaney, hope and history sometimes try to “rhyme”. It is our responsibility to continue to struggle to identify abiding hope-filled ideals robustly capable of carrying us through such uncertain and dangerous times.

Here are 15 dimensions of history and experience that, for better or worse, will bring people hope in 2024:

1. HUMANITY

Hope is primordially rooted in confidence in the efficacy of the human species, our collective capacity to overcome terrible adversity and prosper. In looking at the beginnings of human culture, we can see the origins of hope in fundamental evolutionary prerogatives. Upper-Palaeolithic cave-paintings made as long as 40,000 years ago tells us a great deal about the power to communicate across thousands of years a message of hope through the celebration of humanity’s capacity to exercise influence over events that affect human life.  The cave-paintings in Grotte Chauvet in south-west France, discovered in 1994, are twice as old as the oldest cave paintings known at that time - about 36,000 years old. One of the cavers who made the amazing discovery saw a drawing of a mammoth on the cave wall and spontaneously cried out in excitement: “They were here!”

2. NATURE

As every springtime in particular reminds us, the natural world is a deep source of hope.   In terms of evolution, the powerfully uplifting responses we have to nature are probably closely linked to the fact that for our ancestors the sight of new plant shoots and blossoms, and the migration of animals, signalled the end of a period of dangerous lack. Hope is inextricably linked to notions of the sacredness of nature. The primordial Mother-Goddess, also known to anthropologists as the Great Earth Mother or Earth Mother Goddess, was loving, protecting, and inviting, but she was also fierce, destructive, and terrifying.  Humanity owed her everything.   But it is also an indication that we are part of nature, of the non-human whole. Within the pagan view of the sacred, nature was understood as the source of bounty but also of the devastatingly destructive, and demanded total reverence. Pagan myths remind us that from the moment of birth human existence is a struggle with the begetter of life - the life-giver and life-taker, the regenerator all-in-one, and that hope resides in aligning human life with this process.

3. TRANSCENDENCE

Buddhism teaches the idea that unconditioned hope is  rooted in the transcendence of the ‘illusions’ generated by physical and emotional craving. Hope resides most certainly in our capacity to transcend the perpetual cycle of suffering. The Buddha argued that there is a reliable way to release humanity from suffering, protect other beings, mitigate harm, and build a better world. He claimed there was a ‘threefold’ path to overcome suffering based on a realistic and tangible form of hope.  These ideals also have certain parallels in Greek philosophy, especially as taught by the Stoics, and it is possible that both hope and fear are equally dangerous because they irrationally bind us to external circumstance over which we have little or no control, and as result are both primary sources of anxiety.

4. HEAVEN

Religious faith is historically one of the surest foundations of hope. The Monotheistic religions teach that  it is necessary to believe  that when misfortune strikes  it is through  moral failing. It is because we have transgressed and God  has punished  us. But Christianity is unique amongst world religions in stating that along with faith and charity (or love), hope is one of the three theological virtues.  The realisation of all our hopes, the ultimate goal of securing of eternal life, lie in God’s hands alone. In practice, this often means stealing oneself for a lifetime of sacrifice, the model for which in the Christian  religion is Jesus Christ. In being crucified, Christ showed his immeasurable love through  dying on the cross, thereby sending a message of transhistorical and enduring hope. Both Christianity and Islam guarantee eternal life in heaven to the faithful, making the hereafter the ultimate goal, and insuring the faithful’s life against fearand disillusionment. While the pagan Greeks used the term elpis - ‘hope’ - to refer to a positive attitude to an open-ended future, Christian belief in the Resurrection of Christ transformed hope into something far more powerful: the eschatological hope in Christ’s Second Coming.

5. LOVE

Love of another person can be described as our willingness to prioritize another’s well-being or happiness above our own.  Neurophysiologists describe love as a neurochemical state of being that has probably existed since humans became human, and as such, feelings about love, involving attachment, attraction, and the sex drive, remain more or less the same through time and place.  Love can be   fleeting or involve long term commitment.  Psychologists have classified love according to four kinds, each of which involve hope: attachment or protective love, compassionate love, companionate love, and romantic love. But is love a choice or biologically or culturally programmed?

6. WAR

Although nowadays we prefer to deny it, war is a powerful vehicle for hope, especially when it is considered a righteous way to remove an obstacle.  War is often the result of the clash not only of power groups but of different values, of different conceptions of hope.  It is often said that from the rubble of death and destruction, hope is born. Historically, religious differences often merged with the violent struggle over power. Both sides believe in the justice of their cause and are willing to die for it.  Both sides see violent struggle as a means of achieving deeply hope-infused goals.  The current conflict in Israel/Gaza is rooted in opposing visions of hope.    

7. THE MARKET

In the modern period it has been assumed that the market was naturally self-governing, and that economic intervention was generally unnecessary and usually unproductive. Within this system, hope becomes intimately linked to voluntary exchange and private property.  Following Adam Smith, the great majority of economists believe the market economy works most efficiently when left to regulate itself., and the economic orthodoxy of neoliberalism assumes that central authority and government planning stood in the way of the market economy. But as Karl Marx warned, free markets  can easily be manipulated,   and that is why he advocated  that the state should take away all private ownership of the means of production. As a result, two radically different visions of economically-rooted hope emerged: the socialist and the capitalist.

8.   SCIENCE

The character and goals of our hope have been transformed by the rational, mathematical, and experimental principles of science and scientific discovery. In the seventeenth century in Europe the Scientific Revolution evolved out of the worldliness and secularism of the Renaissance., and hope grounded in super-naturalism was supplanted by hope founded on naturalism. Mysticism and faith were replaced by hope in reason and appeal to the senses. The scientific method involves systematic observation, measurement, experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. Applying objective and rational thought to all aspects of life, the methods of the natural sciences hugely increased human understanding of the world. Reason and empirical research became primary sources of hope, challenging those previously enshrined within traditional religious faiths.  Evolutionary theory transformed our understanding of humanity’s relationship to other living organisms and to the material world in general, and became a powerful a new source of hope by offering a key to the mystery of life. But evolution could also be perceived as a profound threat to traditional belief systems, to the foundations of the meaningful life.

 9. FREEDOM  

The struggle for freedom in the modern age has been fired by hope-driven struggle against injustice. Traditional ideals of duty and sacrifice have been replaced in the West by the pursuit of happiness and the desire to challenge oppressive authority. Humanity is no longer judged to be born in sin, but  instead is compared to a tabula rasa that is free to self-create. In the eighteenth century in Europe, the idea of universal progress, of confidence in human potential through the application of reason, became a dominant value when moral and political philosophy began to see freedom as a universal right. The influence of the French Revolution is especially strong in relation to the development of modern ideas of hope, binding it closely to the rights of citizens and the power of the nation-state. It created a new language of hope based on institutions following the secular values of natural rights, democracy, and republicanism, which during the next two centuries would help direct what kinds of hope was most valued.  Yet the evocations of individual and collective patriotic hope jostled with the revolutionaries’ preoccupations with the very different hopes of the counter-revolutionaries. 

10. SOCIAL EQUALITY

Historically, all societies have been founded on hierarchies of power that are inherently unequal. and oppressive. Although women account for half the human population, for most of history and throughout the world they have been treated as inferior to men and refused a role in business and political life. Slavery, required and condoned by agricultural and then industial societies condemned millions to servitude. The empowerment of women and racial minorities in modern times has been the direct result of the ideas of the Enlightenment, which stressed the universal right of equality for all, and was also bolstered by the growing economic power and independence created as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution.

11. UTOPIA

Utopia means ‘no place’,  and the term dates from the seventeenth century. But the dream of a more perfect society which  the term came to embody has fired many hopes across all of human history.  We explore how modern dreams of collective hope have been embodied in radical political movements, and why they have always ended up causing terrible suffering.  In 1917, visions of hope drove millions towards the realisation of a socialist utopia in Russia, towards what they believed was a society that the people themselves in control. Communism embodies hope in its most directly modern political form, wedding it to belief in scientific and historical inevitability. People often continued to invest their hope in utopian social and political agendas despite their obvious failure in the past. History shows that utopianism always fail disastrously to bring about the avowed goals, and instead leads to civil war, totalitarianism, reigns of terror, show trials, concentration camps, mass starvation, and the violent death of millions.   

12.  NATIONALISM

While one of the most fundamental and perennial hopes of humanity is for a secure existence for oneself and one’s loved ones, people have diverged greatly in ascertaining how to achieve such security. In modern times, security has been sought in broadly two ways: collectivistically and individualistically. Love of one’s nation can go far beyond sentimental patriotism, and in the modern age authoritarian nationalism in the contemporary guise of ‘popularism’ is one of the most significant and divisive sources of hope. . Hitler persuaded his supporters that he was the sole embodiment of true hope for Germany,  perverting the religious vision of the Chosen People and transforming it into the German Volks’ exceptional mission in the world by casting himself as the only solution to a crisis. A Nazi  election poster from 1932 declared: “Last Hope – Hitler!” 

13. TECHNOLOGY

In the modern age people’s hopes have been commonly linked to faith in technological innovation which bring realizable solutions to the ever-changing problems faced by society.  As the website to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development declares: “Science and technology bring hope in times of crisis”.  The Guardian headlined an article from 2013: “Technology is our planet’s last best hope.” Technology has the capacity to reduce the burden of labour and bring humanity closer together. Social media and communication technology using the internet  have hugely contributed to the freer distribution of opportunities and knowledge. As social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo demonstrate, to communicate online can be an unprecedented democratizing force, a channel for hope which disseminates new perspectives, draws attention to ignored problems, and allows for organization in the ‘off-line’ world to solve them. But the Internet is also where different meanings of hope clash.

14.  HEALTH

The desire to protect one’s own, one’s loved ones, and one’s society’s health is a a powerful goal.  Modern medical science has contributed to the increased collective hopefulness of humanity, and has reached such heights of confidence that the perennial dream of human immortality  is being brought realm of possibility.  It is estimated that in the age of Shakespeare 150 out of every 1,000 new-born children died during their first year, and a third of all children were deceased before they reached fifteen. In the twentieth century there was a huge reduction in infant mortality, and in England today, only five out of 1,000 babies die during their first year, and seven out of 1,0000 before the age fifteen. Thanks to the success of medical science we have found ways to prevent deaths from such former infant killers as diphtheria, measles and smallpox, general improvements in hygiene during operations, and the discovery of anaesthetics and antibiotics. One of the most important sources of disease and death is pathogens and parasites, and we fought Covid 19 with advanced medical technologies based on the principle of the vaccine first developed in 1796.. 

15, YOUTH

A recent survey of academics working in diverse disciplines found that the single most frequently cited source of hope for the future is young people.  ‘Generation Z’ - those born from the mid-to-late 1990s to the early 2010s – are statistically more likely to be hopeful than ‘Generation Alpha’ and ‘Millennials,’ and are much more hopeful than the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. Young people are reinventing activism. The potential of younger generations to take on the world’s huge challenges equipped with new ideas, and to be unintimidated by the failures of the hopes of the past, is exemplified by the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

NOTES

I highly recommend this website: https://www.existentialhope.com

Juche Realism and False Optimism

My interest the art of North Korea derives in part from a broader fascination in how the mass media create reality-proof delusions. This is especially interesting right now in relation to the Ukraine-Russia conflict and how the Russian state has sought (quite successfully, so it seems) to control the Russian people’s perceptions of the war. To those outside the deception, it seems hard to believe that people can be so gullible. But as several commentators have pointed out, the alternative to existing within the reality manufactured by the state is too dangerous and harrowing, too radically at odds with the kind of reality in which people can bear to live. People prefer the delusion, which at least offers consolation and security, and allows them to continue to have a sense of self-efficacy and confidence.

The close links between Russia and North Korea in terms of shared ideology have been underlined by Kim Jong-un’s recent congratulatory message on Russia’s Victory Day. But in the case of North Korea, the disconnect between the reality as we on the outside see it and the one ordinary North Koreans perceive through being fed on a mono-diet of ‘Juche’  and racist propaganda is even more extreme. Nevertheless, the same basic psychological mechanisms are surely at work in the North Korean people as innate only other authoritarian regimes, but in democratic societies like the United States, where conspiracy theories are rife..

In this second post on North Korean Juche Realism, I consider just what thoughts and emotions the North Korean people  are buying into, and why.

A young Kim Il-sung contemplates the future. An example of Juche Realist painting.

Another Juche Realist masterpiece.

Juche Realism shares an important social function with religious art. It ensures social cohesion through images that rise above time and chance. It binds together through transforming the unspecifiable, pervasive, and uncontrollable state of existence into a specifiable, identifiable, and controllable state of named fears and offers the promise of protection.

Juche Realism is aesthetic experience manipulated to create a permanent condition of collective dispositional optimism. This is achieved through ritualistically ‘aestheticizing’ life, in the sense of keeping life’s inherent uncertain and fearful dimensions at bay through turning life into something idealized that can be safely viewed from a distance.  Optimism is channeled along four avenues indicated by psychologists. It aestheticizes the optimism that comes with feelings of social coherence by depicting the world as comprehensible. As a result, the North Korean people feel strengthened by being able to make total sense of, manage, understand, and feel masters of adversity. It aestheticizes the optimism of social hardiness by depicting stressful circumstances and re-casting them only as opportunities for certain growth and strengthening. It aestheticizes social preparedness by focusing only on readiness to confront setbacks and successfully take advantage of opportunities. Finally, it aestheticizes the optimism of self-affirmation. For example, many paintings depict the North Korean people as inherently superior, casting historical achievements of the pre-modernized Korean people and of the DPRK and its leaders in a manner that has not historical veracity but fosters a sense of confidence and pride in the present, thereby making decision-making more efficient and collectively directed.

Juche Realism is a ritualized fantasy space in which the three core positive life-goals are satisfied in the present: the desire for survival, the desire for attachment, and the desire for mastery. By depicting imagery of encounters with and management and self-regulation of fearful and potential despair-inducing situations, Juche Realism encodes collective feelings of trust, calm, safety, protection, and successful survival.

Through images of trust and openness, and total love of the leader, it encodes the confirmation of ‘sociopolitical’ bonds and attachments. Through signs of absolute efficacy, power, and control, it encodes ‘sociopolitical’ security and mastery, and implicit within this is the wish-fulfilling certainty of the DPRK’s triumph over time. Especially through faith in the skill, wisdom, and power of the leader, the North Korean people can adapt to circumstances in the present and to display a remarkable degree of social cohesion.  The regime uses three basic defences against the encroachments of a reality that would inevitably presents challenges to this positive illusion. It uses externalizing explanations by placing the blame for bad or failed outcomes on factors outside the DPRK, such as the United States, The Republic of Korea, or Japan. It uses variable explanations by casting setbacks or problems as temporary rather than endemic and likely to continue in the future. Thirdly, it uses specific explanations, in that it describes failure as occurring in only one context rather than as systemic.

***

The brutality of the Japanese colonial era and the horrors of the Korean War set the stage in the DPRK for the emergence of a nation obsessed with national myths of persecution, suffering, and endurance. The state’s dogmatic intransigence demanded in the cultural sphere the rote reiteration of fantastical narratives. Juche Realism is a form of ideologically tailored visual illusion that breeds dependency and instils over-confidence in the level of control the Kim regime has over the past, present, and, above all, the future. It creates a ritualized virtual reality in which the world appears better than it is. In this sense, Juche Realism serves to artificially bolster self-esteem in a situation in which the people have actually lost all individual agency, all genuine social value. In the dystopic reality of the DPRK the ‘sociopolitical’ self is the happy hostage of the state’s absolute power.  All action is determined by externalized forms of interaction coordinated by the state. Juche Realism forces the North Korean people into supine and dependent roles which to those beyond its zone of hegemonic influence are reminiscent of the submissiveness of a child to a parent.  The Kim leadership is cast as all-powerful parent, capable of granting the wishes of the children who please them. But behind the façade of optimism constructed by Juche Realism lies the reality of a brutal totalitarian regime, and the North Korean people also know that any deviation from the allotted ‘sociopolitical’ role within the state ideology of delusional optimism will be ruthlessly punished by the all-powerful father. The marriage of art and power which obliges North Korean artists to work within the absurd and demeaning constraints of Juche Realism’s simplistic messages of optimistic edification places what is produced, however technically accomplished and expressive, at the antipodes of genuinely ‘real’ or ‘truthful’ art. Its ‘realism’ cannot be discovered beyond the works themselves. It cannot be described in terms that are not blatantly at odds with what anyone outside the DPRK knows about the world. Because the ‘truths’ of Juche Realism are not susceptible to present inquiry, any desire to have genuine knowledge about the outside world must be crushed. There can be no progress, because the regime would be incapable of surviving any change that progress brought. But, when a gust of contradictory reality somehow does finally find its way past the facade, and it becomes clear how greatly the leadership has failed to match its grandiose claims, the disappointment and disillusionment of the North Korean people will be rapid and devastating.

Kim, Father and son, do a bit of sailing.

NOTE: The images in today’s post are reproduced from (top to bottom) 1. Min-Kyung Yoon, ‘North Korean Art Works’, Korean Histories, 3.1, 2012; 2. and 3. Min-Kyung Yoon, “Reading North Korea through Art’, Border Crossings. North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection, ex. cat., Hatje Kantz/Kunstmuseum Bern, 2021, 72 – 95.

Shallow Pessimism

Laurence Olivier as Hamlet.

In my post from March 16th, I ended by asking the question why is it we – by which I mean intellectual progressives - seem to enjoy ruthlessly deconstructing everything and finding our society “rotten to the core – that it is racist, sexist, imperialist society, one which can’t be trusted an inch”, to quote again the philosopher Richard Rorty. In this post I’ll explore a possible answer.

Yes. Western culture and society is very far from perfect. But around the time Rorty wrote his essay – the 1980s – the west lost confidence in its humanistic belief that the future will necessarily be better than the past and the present. It lost a special kind of social hope. But this loss of faith was already well under way by the second half of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche declared: “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” Albert Camus’ concept of the ‘absurd’ perfectly capturing the Zeitgeist of the 1940s and 1950s. The absurd is an experience so visceral Camus said it can hit anybody in the face at any time. The ‘sweet indifference’ of nature, as he calls it at the end of ‘The Outsider’ - challenged both religious faith in  divine purpose and humanist faith in the inevitable melioration of humanity guided by the light of reason that aimed to replace it.

The process of disillusionment speeded up at the end of the Cold War, which pretty much definitively put paid to the Marxist utopian dream of a ‘classless society’, a social hope that had sustained many radicals for most of the twentieth century. But there was also an increasingly pervasive loss of confidence in the liberal democratic dream of the welfare state, as well.  Both ideals, which are traceable to the eighteenth century Enlightenment, were now judged to be deformed birth, because, as Nietzsche had already announced over one hundred years earlier,  the Enlightenment itself  - the whole basis of modernity - was a sham.  One only needed to look around to see that the  so-called democratic ‘system’ was permanently rigged to let a tiny percentage of greedy and insecure people accumulate a huge amount of wealth and power, and that there was profound crisis of meaning, a slide toward nihilism.

In the past two decades, the recognition of existential meaninglessness and of failure to bring about social justice has  been joined by the disaster of climate change. This situation now means that, quite literally, there will be no better future. The future we are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren will almost certainly be worse than this present one is. Just how much worse its going to be depends on the amount of residual faith you can muster in a narrative of social hope that still attempts to build a rickety bridge - using alternative sources of energy, probably - to a less than terrible future.

But why aren’t we as a society genuinely responding to these awful truths? Why are we going to war and binge viewing shows of Netflix? Because mainstream society, the status quo, is based on keeping it all at arm’s length through incessant optimistic messaging, designed to shield people from the truth.  It disguises the loss of the hopeful dream of a better future by replacing it by shallow optimism. Western society hasn’t imploded. Instead, in genuine hope’s it place there was installed a shallow kind of optimism. What’s the difference?  As I noted in a previous post, optimism implies wish-fulfillment with the aim of pacifying the present, while hope involves imaginative responses to reality and faces up to the real and potentially cataclysmic challenges the uncertain world inevitably presents. This shallow optimism is generated mostly through the mass media, which throughout the twentieth century become more and more efficient and skillful in cranking out the kinds of positive messages that serve to distract people from a tragic reality. Hollwood is called the “Dream Machine’, and has played an especially significant role. But the emergence of the consumer society with its fetishization of consumer products, it’s subliminal message that to shop is the way to give life purpose (As Barbara Kruger has it in one of her artworks, ‘I SHOP, THEREFORE I AM’), its assumption that it’s alright to be selfish and to horde, to strive for happiness without caring about anyone else, meant that shallow optimism in the form of countless distractions and pointless goals managed to paper over the fact that we have lost faith in a better future for everyone. The value in the short term of optimism for society is that it brings a sense of social coherence by making everything seem comprehensible and controllable. As a result,  people feel strengthened through being able to make sense of, manage, understand, and feel masters of adversity. Optimism encourages  the idea of hardiness, making a stressful circumstance seem an opportunity for growth and strengthening. It helps ensure preparedness by encouraging readiness to confront setbacks and successfully take advantage of opportunities. It also brings self-affirmation  making decision-making in the present more efficient and collectively directed.

But all this comes at a high price. The façade of optimism has permitted the west to  maintain its global supremacy and sense of self-efficacy and self-assurance while it has been rapidly collapsing from within. Optimism is a debased and less challenging substitute for the genuine hope that is almost no longer within reach. For, as Terry Eagleton writes in his excellent book Hope Without Optimism (2015): “the most authentic kind of hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees from a general dissolution. It represents an irreducible residue that refuses to give way, plucking its resilience from an openness to the possibility of unmitigated disaster. It is thus as remote from optimism as could be imagined.”

Which leads me back to the problem with the progressive’s default attitude of perpetual social critique.

Isn’t it simply the flip side of the west’s shallow optimism? Isn’t it shallow pessimism?  For it surely can’t be genuine pessimism. After all, some of the most audible advocates of cultural critique - the tenured professors at prestigious universities - occupy extremely comfortable niches within society, and carry on their day-to-day lives pretty much like everyone else – like all the dumb optimists, in fact.

Just as shallow optimism is a way of shielding oneself from failure and misfortune, so too is shallow pessimism. It simply embraces the failure, disillusion, and disappointment in advance so as to forestall the risk involved in having one’s hopes dashed.

Image Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ6ec4V6AJ4

Hope (Part II)

As I waited with baited breathe for the outcome of the American election, I  thought of Thomas Kincade.  This is a painting by the man who is probably the most well-known artist in the United States today (he died in 2012).  It is entitled ‘Garden of Hope’. Here is what the artist himself says about it on his Thomas Kincade Studios website:

‘Hope is the great gift of a loving God. In ‘The Garden of Hope’, second in my Gardens of Light collection, I celebrate the bountiful blessing that is a hopeful spirit. Radiance bathes a garden in the woods, pouring down in a flood of light upon an ancient stone urn that is a vessel of hope.

The deeply mysterious relationship between hope and sacrifice is expressed in the symbolism of the urn. Central is the Roman cross, bearing the visages of Mary and Jesus. A magnificent spray of flowers bursts forth from the urn. Surely, ‘The Garden of Hope’ is a garden lavish with new beginnings.’[1]

 Why am I thinking about a mediocre American artist when the fate of not just the United States but the whole world hangs in the balance? Because his paintings open a window onto the subjectivity (or lack of it) of the millions who voted Republican. 

I don’t think it’s enough to focus on the anger and resentment factors when seeking to understand how so many people can behave in what to me – and to you -  seem incomprehensibly stupid ways.  No. We need to look to other dimensions of the human psyche,  especially, I think, to the nature of the hope these people nurture.  Trump and the Republicans mirror these hopes just as much as they give substance to their supporters’ fear, anger, and resentment. As I said in the last post, hope is two-edged. It can be a real catalyst for action and change, but it can also delude and foster false beliefs and aspirations, impossible or irrational goals. But one way or another, we all harbor hopes for the future.  Looking at a Kincade painting is like looking at the soul of a Republican. And what we see is the visual image of their hopefulness.

In the 1990s  the dissident Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid set out to learn what  a real "people's" art  looked like. In other words, informed by their experience of the Socialist Realist propaganda art of the Soviet Union, they were interested to know what people everywhere really wanted to see in a picture. They began with the United States, their adopted country, and conducted a survey through a professional marketing firm in order to paint America's ‘Most Wanted’ and also America’s ‘Least Wanted’ paintings. They didn’t ask a question like: ‘What does a hopeful picture look like?’ Instead, their questions were more straightforwardly visual, such as ‘What’s your favorite colour?’,  ‘Do you prefer paintings with sharp angles or soft curves?’, and  content-based, like, ‘Would you rather look at a painting with figures that are nude or fully clothed? Should the people in the painting be at leisure or working? Should they be indoors or outside, and if the latter, in what kind of landscape? This painting is the one they painted as a result of the questionnaire – America’s ‘Most Wanted’:

Yes. That’s George Washington in the middle foreground (I suppose we can up-date it to an image of Trump).  In the end, Komar and Melamid polled 14 countries, and discovered, for example, that Russia’s most-wanted painting was remarkably similar to the United States’ - minus Washington, but still with children playing  beside a lake, and a predominantly blue colouration. In fact, they discovered that in every country they polled— from China and Kenya to Iceland and Ukraine, but with the curious exception of Holland— people seemed to want more or less the same picture.And what was the  various people’s “Least Wanted’ picture? You have probably already guessed. Modern art. Especially, abstract art of the monochromatic, geometric and textured variety. 

Komar and Melamid’s project shows that a secure, that is to say, socially uncontroversial,  message of hope is what most people want to have communicated through pictures. But this is simply because that image expresses the kind of hope they nurture within themselves. In this sense, art’s has a practical function , which is essentially therapeutic, preventative and prophylactic.  But we would be wrong to blame ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ culture for this phenomenon.  A look at  art history confirms that this kind of picture has always been what is ‘most wanted’.  Most images have been made to communicate unproblematically optimistic or hopeful states of mind or messages based on the presentation of familiarly affirmative content  and the use of an aesthetically pleasing style   that serve  to consolidate people’s need for a positive outcome,  personal and collective. So, it should come as no surprise that Komar and Melamid’s painting looks remarkably similar to Thomas Kincade’s oeuvre.

So the Russian artists’ project tells us a good deal about the troubled and troubling relationship  not only between hope and art, but also between hope that is truly empowering and hope that is emasculating. It certainly helps to explain why so many people find modern art to be very far from being  images of hope, even when the artists themselves and their apologists expressly declared that it was. But it also goes a long way towards explaining Trumpism and the way the Republican Party has evolved.

America’s ‘Most Wanted’ painting and Kincade’s ‘Garden of Hope’ are both facile and banal images of hope. They serve the purpose of saving people the trouble of truly imagining hope for themselves. The  genuine expression of feeling, the communication of complex values and ideas, is evidently not what the majority of people want from looking at pictures. They prefer images that reduce experience to amenable clichés, to the conventional and manageable.  Once an image is so familiar and lacking in originality it is indeed  ‘evil’, in a sense, because it acts as an obstacle to the communication of authentic thoughts and feelings.  

In the 1940s, George Orwell referred to what he termed a ‘huge dump of worn-out metaphors’. These are verbal images ‘which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ When an image is so totally familiar, it is possible to be almost unconscious when employing them, and as a result, we will be lulled into a ‘reduced state of consciousness’ which, wrote Orwell,  ‘if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.’ 

 Kincade is pandering to a very large audience, and as Komar and Melamid affirmed, he is only giving people what they want. This is what an image of ‘hope’ looks like to millions of people, and  it is, therefore, what ‘hope’ is for them.  If we are going to take the political ramifications of hope seriously it is definitely necessary to acknowledge the trivializing sentimentality so often associated with its ostensible expression within images, most especially in popular culture. 

[1]  https://thomaskinkade.com/shop/limited-edition-art/gardens/garden-of-hope-the-limited-edition-art/  

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.