Post #146: Hope

27 Sep. 2024

“Love, hope, and joy, fair pleasure’s smiling train,

Hate, fear, and grief, the family of pain,

These mix’d with art, and to due bounds confin’d,

Make and maintain the balance of the mind:

The lights and shades, whose well accorded strife

Gives all the strength and colour of our life.”

—Alexander Pope: An Essay on Man: Epistle II, Part III

     “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” Pope famously pronounced in the first epistle of the same poem, but with the cautionary reminder to do our hoping in a spirit of humility, awaiting “the great teacher Death” and not presuming to ascertain the inscrutable decrees of God. (“What future bliss, He gives not thee to know, but gives that hope to be thy blessing now.”)

     For St. Paul too, in the widely-known conclusion to 1 Corinthians 13, hope is a crucial support and included among the essentials of a pious life: “Faith, hope, and love, these three.” It is not so much the promises of this current existence that are meant to inspire hope in a Christian, however, as the possibilities of a future state beyond the trials and tribulations of our earthly condition.

     From other angles hope can look more problematic. Thus Seneca, in the fifth of his Epistles, expresses reservations that Buddhists too will easily recognize:

In the writings of our own Hecaton I find it said that limiting one’s desires is also a remedy for fear. “The two feelings are very different,” you may say. But although they seem opposed, they are connected. Just as the prisoner and the guard are bound to each other by the same chain, so these two that are so different nonetheless go along together: where hope goes, fear follows. Both belong to the mind that is in suspense, that is worried by its expectation of what is to come. The principal cause of both is that we do not adapt ourselves to the present but direct our thoughts toward things far in the future. No one is made wretched merely by the present.

The trouble with hope is evident: it implies dissatisfaction with the present, and its wishes for the future are easily disappointed, resulting in anguish that is sometimes even greater than physical misery.

     So should we abandon hope, all we who have entered here?

     I’m not so sure. It’s true enough that hope can be a danger sign; if we were truly accepting of the present (and therefore contented), as perhaps we ought to be, there would be no need for hope. But if we find such acceptance out of reach, and dissatisfaction inescapable, then is hope really so bad? How would it make us better off if we found ourselves miserable in the now and hopeless as to the future at the same time? Granted, by my own admission the future is a mere projection, and hope a chimerical thing almost by definition—a dream, not a reality. But is all dreaming bad, so long as one does not lose sight of the fact that one is dreaming?

     I repudiate absolutely the idea that the power to make our dreams come true rests completely with us. That looks a dangerous delusion to be, mere wishful thinking, and a denial of the obvious—thus a failure to grow up from the pleasure principle to the reality principle, as Freud might have said (#106). But was Freud not also a dreamer of the first order? And was he, or are we, any worse off for his dreaming?

     The germ of dissatisfaction that we all carry with us, sometimes more, sometimes less noticeably, may be a nuisance in that it spoils (even at the most desirable destinations, where dreams come true) that perfect delight which we wish to enjoy. It undermines inner peace and happiness, our nagging little voice of dissatisfaction with anything and everything, even if it is often so faint that we do not hear it very clearly. But does it not serve a purpose too, this nuisance, by keeping us on our feet, complacency at bay, and the doors open to further development and growth?

     In a world built upon ignorance, craving, and aversion, as the Buddhists teach, such development may look as if it might not count for very much—until one realizes how the dissatisfaction behind it is a continual spur towards liberation as well! The animals are too miserable, in the Buddhist telling, and the gods too contented; but we humans, in our precarious intermediate position—living always at the edge of dissatisfaction, but not always so frustrated that our position becomes hopeless—are perfectly placed for all manner of fascinating developments. (Not by design, we moderns might say, but by evolution, and yet not therefore any less creatures of potential par excellence!)

     But why all this trouble, what for? Theists relate our purpose to the divine will; the Buddhists reject this angle and depict existence itself as radically inadequate, giving off a whiff of feces even in the smallest doses, as the Pali Canon puts it (Anguttara Nikaya 1:328, see also my #3). But perhaps a modern, reconciled to being born between feces and urine (#80), need not turn away in disgust, but can find his own Why within the human condition as we know it (#100) and even come to thank the goading by his dissatisfactions.

     In this quest, hope does not have to be of a religious nature: the gods need not enter into it, except as a metaphor; and what is hoped for need not be deliverance from all earthly ills. If the prizes keep proving imperfect or even disappointing, very well: then we keep moving on from one to the next, again and again, until we no longer can. (In other words, felicity in this life, as Hobbes put it, may consist not in tranquility of mind with a goal once attained, but in a continual pursuit of what we desire, and occasional success in obtaining it (Leviathan 1.6.58). Only in the end, when the race is truly run, perhaps we will be able to look back with satisfaction and say that it was good, even if it never seemed fully satisfactory along the way.

     Thus we might arrive at a reasonably hopeful note to end on if it weren’t for a troubling afterthought. By far the most unavailing direction in which to extend one’s hopes has become, in modern times, one of the most common: the realm of politics. It is true, of course, that the stupendous material advances of the past centuries (and these past couple of decades especially, practically worldwide) justify much more than previous ages did the sentiment that better things might lie ahead in this life, with little need to project our hopes (or so the secular might say) upon hypothetical future lives about which we can, as ordinary worldlings at least, have no knowledge whatsoever. To hope for a better life this side of the grave, then, has become quite reasonable in a way it wasn’t usually before, and it is tempting to extend the logic to our collective, and not just our personal challenges.

     Nowhere is this bad turn more evident, or more melancholy in its effects, than in the United States, where the Presidency has long been treated as if it were a prophetic office imbued with near-magical powers (hence the capital P), even while the institution was designed with just the contrary intentions—namely to provide no more than a modest executive element in a system meant, above all, to safeguard limited government. However much we may put the White House on steroids, the system in which it remains embedded is so patently constructed to prevent concentration of power that even the most ambitious initiatives to recast its workings (while paying lip-service to its founding inspiration, of course) can only go so far before they run into old constraints that were put there for a reason, namely to prevent precisely such political extravagances from gaining a foothold.

     To be sure, the presidency has become vastly more powerful (largely for extra-constitutional reasons) than it was ever intended to be by its framers; but when it is now made the object of visionary hopes, from whatever political direction, the result can only be a tragicomic cycle of grossly inflated expectations meeting with vastly exaggerated promises—thus inevitable disappointment and disillusionment. Every election anew, it is the same sorry story: one side asks too much, the other promises too much, and both presume entirely too much about what government can legitimately and effectively accomplish. Instead of achievable goals delivered by modest governors who make no secret of their limitations before a level-headed populace, we get a never-ending, deafening cacophony of recriminations over undeliverables. When the vicious cycle has worked its bad magic once again, the conclusion is by no means to ratchet down the demands, on the one hand, and the promises, on the other. Instead “hope” gets dragged out (Hope!) to fuel the flames further, rather than to tamp them down, which would be the only prudent course of action.

     The prerequisite for sanity in our political affairs (not to be hoped for, alas, any time soon) would be more realistic starting points, that is to say, more humble ideas of what decent (suitably restrained) governments can, with reason, be held responsible for in our world, and what not. (I am not saying anything very radical here, unless calling for a return to long-established old liberal principles be considered a revolutionary act, see #68). The list of items that get routinely treated as if they lent themselves to public management by political means, when in fact they do not, or only very inadequately, would be long indeed, and no doubt disenchanting to many. Over time, however, such a much-needed downward adjustment might offer some small hope (very much lower-case!) of correcting at least a little that rampant political cynicism which must result from our contests in mutual overbidding—whereby the two sides, voters and office-holders, keep egging each other on to ever more dizzying heights of absurdity and irresponsibility, and produce, in turn, ever lower levels of trust, as the political soap bubbles keep bursting one after another. (Needless to say, the clean-up required as a result of failing over-government will invariably be presented as an argument for further overstepping measures by the same powers.)

     Visions of paradise should be kept where they belong: in the realm of art and mythology and faith. Even in the religious domain, they can look to the sober-minded observer like so many wish-fulfilling fantasies, more or less along the lines that Freud bemoaned in his Future of an Illusion. We may let them stand, nonetheless, since nothing definite can be established about these otherworldly dominions; as matters unverifiable and therefore unfalsifiable in principle, they are beyond the reach of what knowledge and dispute could hope to settle.

     What we should be careful to avoid, meanwhile, is to secularize these dreamy visions and project our unwarrantably high hopes upon the planet as we know it and its troublesome human inhabitants. All-too often, these recalcitrant earthlings have been imagined as if they were mere chess pieces to be moved more or less at will, in hopes of thereby arriving at a more optimal overall position—or what their religious and political leaders have imagined to be such. Even leaving aside all there is to be said against the very existence of scales by which we could reliably determine this kind of society-wide optimum, and the poor historical record of such games played from on high, the ostensible masters of the board keep forgetting that they are dealing with pieces that have minds of their own and will wander, unbid, from square to square, according to their own and not their self-appointed directors’ wishes, as Adam Smith pointed out in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.*

     If hope we must, as human beings, then let it be hope for a better life, some day; or for success with our worthiest projects—not so much because they are ours, as because they are worthy; or for redemption, we know not how, at the end of days. Only let us not forget, as we raise our sights thus, how often our best-laid plans will go awry, be it by our own fault or simply because there is so many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip even under the best of circumstances.

     Above all, let us take care to keep our hopes well away from the sands of the political arena, because the dust and dirt (and the blood too) must be thick there not as an incidental feature, but one integral to the nature of the beast before us. Not that the fight will always be to the death: in Rome too, though life was cheap and killing commonplace, the better gladiatorial schools (“families” they were called) knew something about how to limit the carnage, not out of humanitarian scruples, needless to say, but for plain reasons of economy: excessive bloodshed makes neither for good business nor for a good show.

     Or to shift the metaphor slightly, to a different kind of blood, so long as human beings insist on their sausages, there must be a place for sausage factories also (says the long-time vegetarian, though not very strict in recent years); these horrid institutions may be able to make the best of an inherently bad job, but they are not places to make yourself at home, or your hopes. The political process likewise is as necessary as it is nasty, even under relatively benign, pluralistic social conditions—to say nothing of the control-and-command models that have so often been the practical accomplices of lofty political fantasies gone sour, bitter, and rotten.

*In part VI, section II, chapter ii, p. 257 in the 2009 Penguin edition: “The man of system is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess–board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess–board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.”