Kelly seems to have been reading my mind. How did you know I was going to follow up by talking about hope in the big picture?
Here’s the thing: I think we’ve had so many of our hopes dashed that we Americans have become fairly cynical about placing hope in anything. But this also means that we have had an intensifying craving for something to hope in, because hope is a natural way of relating to the world.
So, when something claims to be, well, worthy of hope, we tend either to mock it or to cling irrationally to it.
Irrational hope
Ultimate hope
All we have to do is rewind a year.
(As a disclaimer, I don’t intend to say anything about President Obama, except that he is a human being. He has done some good, and some evil, and has made some mistakes. History will judge his reputation and God will judge his soul and the only judgment I can make is whether or not I vote for him when he next runs for election.)
Then-Senator Obama ran one of the most memorable political campaigns in recent history, and one of the main features was the iconic poster of him with a single word under his upward-gazing face: “HOPE”.
This poster polarized opinions of the candidate, and most people I know took it either as A) a sign that Obama brought a new and better approach to politics, or that B) a confirmation that Obama’s ego had outstripped all sense of reality.
The fact is that, like most politicians throughout history, Obama the candidate promised all sorts of things, some of which were beyond his power to deliver – at least, without the aid of Congress.
In other words, his campaign encouraged people to place an irrational hope in him: a “hope” beyond the realm of possibility.
Rational hope
The virtue of hope, on the other hand, is grounded in reason. As I noted before, hope as a virtue pursues a future good that is difficult but possible. That is, whatever we hope for has to be a real good, and it has to be really possible.
Strictly speaking, we cannot hope for a fantasy, or for something impossible.
And that is where most big “hopes” go awry. Politicians, and salespeople, and coaches, and journalists, and … you get the picture: they all try to raise people’s hopes toward fantasies or impossibilities. And they do this because it works. Many people do raise their hopes to these things, and act accordingly – whether with their votes or their dollars or their actions.
And, when inevitably these hopes fail, these people find it more difficult to satisfy the yearning for good, for something better than all this.
True hope prevails
The solution is to hold fast to the virtue of hope: to insist on reality, on truth. This means sometimes calming the emotions – stepping back to take a more objective view of the promise – and sometimes it means overcoming resistance – especially when we discover a groundless prejudice.
It means putting the right hopes in the right places.
Kelly said:
I just find it so much more exhausting to have hope in, say politics or the state of the world, or an end to hunger.
It’s entirely rational to hope that political action will result in a more orderly or fair society. It’s irrational to hope that politics will make us all better people or make the world a better place. It’s entirely rational to hope for a better distribution of the world’s goods, so that fewer people suffer from hunger. It’s irrational to hope that no one will ever again face malnutrition or starvation.
Growing in hope
Hope for greater things builds on hope for smaller things. If I have no experience of success in learning to play the bass guitar, then I have very little to base a hope for a career (or for politics, or for global reform) on.
This doesn’t mean I don’t desire those great things; it means I’m unable to really understand the difficulty of the task, or to estimate whether it is possible. I’m liable to be suckered in by a fantasy, or to wear myself out striving for an impossibility.
Strangely enough, the best way I’ve found to grow in hope is to constantly seek a reality check. I’ve found that playing bass and political action are easier in some ways than I feared, and challenging in ways I didn’t expect. So, I revise my expectations, and take the next step forward.
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