Notes on Hope
This has been a very difficult year, difficult enough to shake the spirits of even the sunniest of optimists. For those who care deeply about the state of humanity and the state of our natural world, the fronts that we are struggling on can seem too numerous to count. So how do we maintain hope against a backdrop of crisis and loss?
Thinking back over history to a time when we seemed to be teetering on the brink of collapse calls to mind the Great Depression. This was a decade where (in America) a quarter of the labor market were out of work and more than half of the nations banks were closed and in Europe, tensions were building and eventually erupted in the second World War. The American President FDR, speaking candidly in one of his famous fireside chats, stated that “only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment”.
The remarkable thing about Roosevelt was his capacity to buoy the spirits of a nation that was on its knees. His program of “relief, recovery and reform” was a long and windy process, not all social and economic interventions were effective. But Roosevelt, having battled a paralytic illness early on in his political career, was not one to be defeated and resigned in the face of overwhelming difficulty and desperation. His steady leadership domestically and abroad amidst catastrophe gave many Americans hope.
In the darkness of the present moment, we too want to look to our leaders for a balance of realism and hope. We want the opportunity to grieve collectively — for losses big and small — and to feel assured that this will pass. I have found that where leadership is lacking in guiding us through not only the pandemic but through all the challenges of our time, philosophers and writers who bear witness to human suffering and resilience have wisdom to share.
Rebecca Solnit, through her study of dark moments in human history, has a lot to say about hope. As a writer who has been a witness to natural disasters and as an activist in human rights and environmental justice movements, she has seen a lot of tragedy and failing. But she reflects that amidst the destruction, there are possibilities for transformation and recovery that we must not lose sight of. Her definition of hope seems to sit somewhere in the middle of narratives that “everything will be ok” and “nothing will be ok”, defying both sunny optimism and doomsday pessimism.
“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists”, writes Solnit. Uncertainty features heavily in her perspective on hope, as she reminds us that important social and environmental movements may not have achieved the ends we anticipated and wished for, but may nevertheless be impactful and consequential. She goes on to say that hope “is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand”. If we are certain of a positive outcome, we might be disinclined to take up the issue because there is no need. But if we are certain of a negative outcome (something I hear often from people in the fight for action on climate change) we risk being disillusioned and all too ready to throw up our heads in defeat.
In struggles that many of us take on in our lives — for environmental protection, for human rights, for social justice — it is hope in change (in all its uncertainty) that spurs us on. It is not foolish optimism or the guarantee of accomplishment but the mere possibility of a better existence for all of us that keeps us going. If we look across time at important historical social change, we notice that very few positive outcomes have been achieved overnight. And the outcomes we do see eventually could certainly not have been predicted. We may long for a sudden uprising or revolution, but realistically we may be engaged in decades long “movements” or in “resistance”, forced to oppose what is in the hope that it might one day lead to a foundational shift.
In the current pandemic, we are confronted with the reality that life holds uncertainty and may find ourselves equally disillusioned. Dare we hope for an end date to all of this, can we imagine a time in which we are not fearful of disease spread, job loss and restrictions of our freedom? As we wait out the pandemic and try to adjust to a new “normal”, Solnit’s version of hope proposes that we try to acknowledge the uncertainty of this moment, and remember that even when the outlook is bleak we don’t yet know how this will end. We cannot know the ultimate impacts this event will have on our society and the ways we live.
Existential philosopher Victor Frankl calls his version of hope “tragic optimism”. As a holocaust survivor, Frankl knows better than most that human existence is beset by tragedy and uncertainty. His “tragic triad” includes pain, the knowledge that life is finite and death is inevitable and the guilt we feel because we are free to make choices and are therefore responsible for the impact of choice we make in life.
Though we must all confront these tragedies, the human capacity to derive meaning under any conditions (however difficult) offers us a way forward. We must find meaning in the midst of tragedy or risk falling into nihilism. He writes: “man can endure any how if only he has a why”, reminding us that in desperate and hopeless times we can locate the will to live if we can find a reason to live. We know from our survival of threats over time that humans have not only the capacity to endure but also the potential to transform something negative into something constructive.
Many people I’ve been in conversation with have been thoughtful and creative about the ways that they can be of service (using their skills and resources) in the midst of this crisis and others. Critical social, political and environmental moments in history should engage us in thinking about the future we want to imagine for ourselves and each other, and what role we want to play. We must give up the illusion of certainty because however comforting, it is ultimately a trap to believe that we know how things will play out. But this doesn’t mean giving up on searching for the light at the end of the tunnel. It is in groping in the darkness and trying to find a light to guide us that we become alive to the call to action and responsibility. For me, this is where hope resides.
