A REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS OF HOPE
We like a secure illusion of control over the world, yet that hasn't gotten us much further along. We recognize something's missing. Han writes, "Amid problem-solving and crisis management, life withers. It becomes survival. … It is hope that opens up a meaningful horizon" (2).
Han explains how a lack of hope furthers the current neoliberal capitalist trajectory:
"Fear and resentment drive people into the arms of the right-wing populists. They breed hate. Solidarity, friendliness and empathy are eroded. … Democracy flourishes only in an atmosphere of reconciliation and dialogue. … Hope provides meaning and orientation. Fear, by contrast, stops us in our tracks. … Hope is eloquent. It narrates. Fear, by contrast, is incapable of speech, incapable of narration" (2-3).
Climate activist Roger Hallam recently wrote that the human race is likely going extinct this century, yet he demonstrates his hope in the very action of continuing to write our way through and by suggesting public alternatives to political capture. When we're no longer open to seeing possibilities, we get held fast by fear, but it appears to be a feature of the system, not a bug.
"The current omnipresent fear is not really the effect of an ongoing catastrophe. … The neoliberal regime is a regime of fear. It isolates people by making them entrepreneurs of themselves. … Our relation to ourselves is also increasingly dominated by fear: fear of failing; fear of not living up to one's own expectations; fear of not keeping up with the rest, or fear of being left behind. The ubiquity of fear is good for productivity. … To be free means to be free of compulsion. In the neo-liberal regime, however, freedom produces compulsion. These forms of compulsion are not external; they come from within. The compulsion to perform and the compulsion to optimize oneself are compulsions of freedom. Freedom and compulsion become one. … We optimize ourselves, exploit ourselves, to the bitter end, while harbouring the illusion that we are realizing ourselves. These inner compulsions intensify fear, and ultimately make us depressive. Self-creation is a form of self-exploitation that serves the purpose of increasing productivity" (9-10).
This brings to mind the many life hacks promoted to help self-automate our lives by creating habits to try to help us blow through chores and work without noticing it, as if to better sleepwalk through it all in a psychological version of Severance. As long as we're optimizing ourselves, we're not being; we're merely objects that can work more efficiently, which further prevents our connection with others. Social media also paradoxically erodes social coherence, but "Hope is a counter-figure, even a counter-mood, to fear: rather than isolating us, it unites and forms communities" (10-11).
Han calls hope, "the antidote to all of humankind's ills. As a remedy, it is still hidden. It ensures that, despite all the ills of the world, we do not resign ourselves. … Consumers have no hope. All they have are wishes or needs. … Those who hope do not consume" (18). Han calls for a shift:
"What is needed is therefore a politics of hope that creates an atmosphere of hope against the regime of fear. … To hope means 'to spread hope', to carry the torch. … Hope is the catalyst of revolution, the catalyst of the new. … There is no revolution through fear. … Hope is the spring, the zest, that liberates us from our depression, from an exhausted future" (14-15).
We need community and humanity. Han explains that Artificial Intelligence can't help us think our way through the conundrums we're facing because knowledge requires being stirred (55-7). We need to break radically with what exists in order to be open to what is coming.
CHIN UP! - PROBLEMS WITH OPTIMISM
I'm typically suspicious of hope, but Han's explanation of it clarifies that the deceit of optimism, or a hope for something (more accurately a wish) is the trouble, rather than hoping (a state of being). Han distinguishes between passive hope, that's a wish related to an object or event, and active hope, which inspires people towards creative action:
"Hope develops a narrative that guides action. … It actively dreams. A wish necessarily involves a feeling of lack, whereas hope possesses a fullness and luminosity of its own. Strong hope does not lack anything. … Hope is a force, a momentum. A wish, by contrast, is never forceful" (23).
When we wish for things, when we're optimistic, we have expectation and excitement, but it's mixed with at least a tinge of resignation that the fruits of our labour might not come to pass, which creates a sense of lacking and an inner pleading that we sometimes call hope. Active hope is without aim at a specific narrow point because it's listening for which direction to take. It's open to what might be.
Han points out this cynical view of hope in earlier Camus as well, who said, "hope serves mainly to create illusion and distract people from the present," and calls hope "the fatal evasion" (17). This type of positivity has an illusion of certainty that things will take a turn for the better with a closed view of time, but, by contrast, active hope fully accepts our reality and the non-sense we're enduring:
"Optimism lacks negativity. … Absolute hope involves an unshakeable belief that there is a sense in things … that gives us orientation and puts us on a sure footing. … A brokenness is inherent in hope. The negativity of fracture inspires hope. … An 'and yet' is inherent in hope. It defies even absolute disaster" (39).
Han clarifies the difference by comparing the scheduled future and unknowable l'avenir. We bank on a future that can be anticipated and planned for. It's comforting to think we know what will happen. L'avenir accepts an unpredictable, transformative future, the yet-to-come that's unexpected and incalculable: "It opens up an available space of possibility. It announces the unforeseeable coming of the other" (7).
Han refers to Václav Havel's understanding of hope:
"It is a dimension of the soul; it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit. … an ability to work for something because it is good. … It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." (47)
Han explains the importance of detachment from outcomes and expectations:
"As a 'state of mind', hope cannot be disappointed, because it is independent of the immanent course that things take. … The substance of hope is a deep conviction that something is meaningful, independent of any concern for whatever actual results are achieved. Hope is located in the transcendent, beyond the inner-worldly course of events. As a faith, it makes it possible to act amid absolute despair" (51).
This is reminiscent of the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, in 1952,
“Nothing worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”
HOPE STOOPS FORWARD TO LISTEN
The imagery Han uses throughout helps to illustrate this perspective. In contrast to my former view of hope as passive denial, Han explains that hope comes from the German 'hoffen':
"to stand still in order to listen, to hearken, to pick up the scent. … Someone who hopes tries to … find the right way to go. It leans forward and listens attentively. The receptivity of hope makes it tender, lends it beauty and grace. … Hope is a searching movement … enters into the unknown, goes down untrodden paths, and ventures into the open, into what-is-not-yet. It is headed for what is still unborn. It sets off towards the new, the altogether other, the unprecedented. … It awakens. Frequently, it must be called upon, appealed to … characterized by commitment" (4-5).
Hope leads us over difficult terrain and "shows the way" (47). Hope doesn't know the path or direction or destination, but it is receptive to the way. "Amid absolute despair, it raises me up again. The hopeful become susceptible to the new. … The hopeful expect the incalculable, possibilities beyond all likelihood" (68-9).
Camus wrote differently about hope later in his career. Han includes part of the speech Camus wrote this after winning the Nobel Prize (expanded from the original a bit beyond Han's text):
"Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the every-threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all."
Han's view of hope is "the midwife of the new … an inner readiness, that of intense but not-yet-spent activeness" (26). He writes, "Absolute hope arises in the face of the negativity of absolute despair. It germinates close to the abyss." Nietzsche touches on that connection with the opposite to bring forth newness with an allusion to the acceptance necessary during pregnancy:
"We have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. 'What is growing here is something greater than we are' is our most secret hope" (552).
Han also includes Hegel's imagery of hope:
"It seems to resemble the brave mole of history who confidently digs tunnels endlessly through the darkness. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel compares spirit to such a mole wearing seven league boots: 'Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, 'Well said, old mole ! canst work i' the ground so fast?'), until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away … and spirit displays itself arrayed in new youth, the seven league boots are at length adopted'" (p. 547).
As a creature in the depths or from fairy tales in which the boots allow the wearer to take huge leaps at a time, Han writes, "The spirit of hope is likewise an onward striding. It keeps working away amid darkness. There is no light without darkness" (8-9).
IT'S A MOOD
Mariame Kaba describes hope as a discipline we cultivate:
"It's less about 'how you feel,' and more about the practice of making a decision every day, that you're still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you're still going to get up in the morning. And you're still going to struggle, that was what I took away from it. It's work to be hopeful."
But Han describes it more as a mood that alters our perceptions.
"Fulfilment and satisfaction are alien to hope. Hope is not bound up with an object or inner-worldly event. It is a mood. … As a fundamental mood, hope is pre-linguistic. It attunes language. Hope cannot be a habit or virtue that we acquire or consciously bring about. Inherent in it is a transcendence that exceeds the immanence of the will. … A mood differs categorically from a habit. … We are simply put into moods. We fall into them" (24). "Before we direct our attention at something, we find ourselves already in a mood. A mood is not a subjective state that then colours the objects. Rather, it discloses the world at a pre-reflexive level." (72)
If we can't provoke a mood of hope consciously, how do we cultivate it or encourage it? I seem to be able to change my mood from forlorn to uplifted with music, poetry, or film. Can art rekindle hope?
Han refers to a passage from Adorno to present hope as a medium of truth:
"Truth is not something that once was and is retrospectively brought to light, but something that first needs to be wrested and gained from the false, from the badly existing. … 'Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence to be bad, to present it as truth simply because it has been recognized. … Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.' … Hope as such has something magical about it. It does not care about the logic of the world as it is. Hope is carried by the belief that everything could radically change" (62-3).
He contrasts his position of a foundation of hope to Heidegger's foundation of anxiety which was deemed necessary to individualize people, but which then keeps them isolated. For Heidegger, in authentic solicitude we find ourselves through the anxiety that separates us from the masses, and in inauthentic solicitude we attempt to appropriate the other or make them dependent on us, but, according to Han, Heidegger overlooks the concept of loving solicitude.
"A community is not founded on the side-by-side of isolated human beings. … Hope does not have its centre in the self. Rather, the hopeful are on their way towards the other. In hope, one places one's trust in what exceeds the self. Hope therefore approximates faith. … That is why Havel believes hope originates in the transcendent - that it comes from the distance" (78-9).
"Anxiety is ultimately the fear of death. Heidegger's thinking is attuned not by birth but by death. This focus on death blinds Heidegger's thought to what-is-not-yet, to the unborn. The thinking of hope takes as its point of orientation not death but birth -- not 'being-in-the-world' but coming-into-the-world. Hope hopes beyond death" (86).
So, hope is a mood that comes over us which can reduce isolation and lead us to truth and possibly revolution. But I'm still not sure how to get in this mood.
LIFE'S A PAGE TURNER!
Maybe I'm already part way there.
In reading this book I realized that, although I immerse myself in climate, conflicts, disease, and the horrific state of the world today, that my fundamental mood doesn't align with the news. I'm generally pretty happy, prone to sing and quick to laugh. What I've avoided calling hope, I've always thought of as an experimental disposition, but could that be the same thing? I was raised seeing the world as a place to question and wonder and test out various hypotheses. I'm driven by curiosity instead of ambition because even a failed experiment is fruitful by showing us what won't work. If we hit a dead end, we just re-set the parameters to try again. The experimental attitude is always grounded in reality, yet open to what might be. Anything can happen next. It's an adventure! The ability to accept uncertainty is a start.
As a mood, we can't choose to be hopeful. If hope is something we fall into, how do we inspire it to sweep over us, and how does our hope inspire others?
I can understand the attempt to grasp it only as a shift in attitude: Between despair and hope is a maybe. It might all go to shit, but it's possible it won't. Hope isn't how it ends; it's how it begins. But then I'm back to Kaba's definition of hope as a discipline or mindset.
My hope for hope that perhaps it can be captured in practice: doing what makes sense, in every little decision of the day, regardless how it may turn out. As Frankl advised, "Our answer just consists … in right conduct." Water warrior Maude Barlow offers a definition that enables more intention: hope is "the commitment to protect all that is good for the future generations and the planet, knowing that you can't control the outcome, but put your hand out anyway and touch the universe when you can, and have faith that others are doing the same-- faith that you're not alone."
I used to worry most about climate change knocking out our species, but now I think we may become our own executioners long before then. And yet there's always the possibility we won't, so we keep living rightly and watching and listening for what we might bring into this world tomorrow.
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