Hope is Complicated

Given the reality of a likely doomsday scenario, what role does hope play?

It’s complicated, says McLaren. Hope as we tend to think of and use it has a danger: “Hope is fed to those who are being slaughtered so they won’t fight what is coming.” (72). “The opiate offered by religion is the hope of a pain-free heaven. By dealing this drug of hope – many today call it ‘hope-ium’ – religion offers palliative care to the oppressed between now and their death.” (75). Or, as Greta Thunberg has put it: “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic…and act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.” (76)

Despair, by the way, carries a similar danger. People who have given up, who have decided that there is nothing to do about the inevitable, are not going to change their ways any more than those who find their escape in hope.

“Because things are going to turn out fine, you don’t have to do or change anything. Because there’s nothing you can do to avert doom, you don’t have to do or change anything.” (76-7)

Hope is also complicated because it is often confused with optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will turn out well in the end, especially if we make the right choices and do the right things. Optimism is often mistaken for hope. But it is not:

Vaclav Havel: “Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing regardless of how it turns out.” (73)

Wendell Berry: “We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have the right to ask is, ‘What’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?'” (73)

“Our great mistake”, says Cynthia Bourgeault, “is that we tie hope to outcome.” (84)

So how do we live in hope, if we are – rightfully – not optimistic about the outcomes for us or the world? What does hope look like that is not escapism that leads to complacency? And how can hope overcome despair?

Derrick Jensen: “People sometimes ask me, ‘If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?’ The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough human being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really f*cked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really f*cked. Life is still really good.” (77-8)

Historian Howard Zinn puts it this way: “The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” (81)

When optimism doesn’t work anymore, and escapist hope or paralyzing despair lead to cruelty, apathy, selfishness, or indifference, as history shows they inevitably do, we can make another choice.

That choice is wisdom, courage and kindness. (81) To live “now as we think human beings should live, whatever scenario unfolds. This detachment from desired outcomes makes my response to doom feel less like a matter of intellectual risk assessment and more like a free moral choice.” (81-2)

Another word that encapsulates the motivation for activism in the face of doom is love.

In answer to the question of why he is an activist, Derrick Jensen says, “Because I’m in love.  With salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby lampreys living in sandy stream bottoms, with slender salamanders crawling through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don’t determine whether or not you make the effort.” (83)

Love provides, says McLaren, not a way through to a solution to our predicament, but a way forward in our predicament, one step into the unknown at a time. (85)

“Even if we lose hope for a good outcome, we do not lose hope of being good people, as we are able: courageous, wise, kind, loving, ‘in defiance of all that is bad around us’.” (85)