Hope is the human resource to rebuild our world
The ancients thought of hope as a solitary virtue, writes George Pitcher. Today it's what we do collectively and it can serve our economy, our politics and our media
Across the broadest sweep of classical literature, Hope strikes a forlorn and lonely figure. In Greek mythology, the poet Hesiod has Pandora open her box (actually a mistranslated jar) and release curses on mankind – it was the later Greek elegaic poet Theognis of Megara who spun that “Hope is the only good god remaining among mankind”.
And it was an Italian of the 16th-century Renaissance, Gabriele Faerno, who added to the story that "Of all good things that mortals lack,/Hope in the soul alone stays back."
As Dante enters the gate of hell, the inscription above it reads: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Even as late as the 17th-century Enlightenment, in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Hopeful is the pilgrim who replaces Faithful as Christian’s travel companion all the way to the Celestial City.
In the Hebrew bible, the prophet Jeremiah (writing about the same time as those Greek poets) declares to the Jewish people that “I have... plans to give you hope and a future”, which is at least reassuring in its plurality. But the luckless test-case in faith that is Job observes that “there is hope for a tree that, when it is cut down, it will sprout again”. And for the psalmist: “You alone, O Lord, are my hope.”
These are solitary figures, clinging to a similarly solitary God for some comfort of hope. Then, in the Christian scriptures, hope becomes a more collective grace. St Paul puts it with faith and love as one of the three principal virtues of the new covenant, resonant of a God who has joined his humanity through the threesome of the Trinity. The Reformation’s Book of Common Prayer speaks of a “sure and certain hope of the resurrection”.
Lest we run away with the idea that Christians alone re-booted hope as an altogether less depressing and lonely companion, Hinduism holds that hope is a karmic concept that serves the common good.
Cultural freight
So this is just some of the cultural freight that the idea of hope in humanity’s future lugs with it. As we emerge tentatively from the miseries and privations of this pandemic, it’s worth asking whether there is something more substantial in our hopes for that future than is currently represented by the iconography of the seemingly endless photo opportunities of a prime minister holding his thumbs up.
Hope has a more real resource than that. For the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, in his book The Principle of Hope, it’s a historical materialism that promises a utopian future for humankind. For American psychologist Barbara Fredrickson it’s a source of human creativity – how, if you like, we make a drama out of crisis. For her fellow psychologist Charles Snyder, it’s both how we define our goals and the means through which we map our routes to those goals.
These last contributions conjure the enervating prospect of management self-help books in airports. But there are more natural-science explorations of the evolutionary role of hope. British paediatrician Donald Woods Winnicott saw an unruly and naughty child as expressing an unconscious hope that it would negotiate wider society beyond the constraints of its parents. Similarly, object-relations theory suggests that hope is a means of transferring our minds from past traumas to a healthier future.
Productive future
All of which we may need in spades if we’re to drag ourselves and consequently our economies into a productive future. For Snyder, hope (or the summoning of it) is a mechanism through which we develop a mentally healthier future – how we find things that we’re passionate about and that make us feel good about ourselves. This isn’t a million miles from The Passion Economy, through which the podcaster Adam Davidson defines his rules for thriving in the 21st century.
And this is where hope becomes the key resource for those who aspire to create a better politics at the start of the new millennium than the two-party dead-weight that we’re saddled with, a polity held to account by media with healthy internal economies and serving commercial markets that serve the common good as well as enriching their participants.
We hope for better politicians in government and opposition. We hope that journalism rediscovers its mojo and purpose, holding the powerful to account with accurate and widely distributed information. We hope that capitalism with properly executed oversight will prosper our peoples and enable them to lead fulfilling lives.
These are not vague and purposeless hopes. They are affirmations of what we desire, our goals, and the way in which we order our minds to achieve them. We intercede in the world with these hopes, on behalf of ourselves, those we love and those we serve. It’s a mindful exercise and, in another sense, it’s like a prayer.
The key is to define what our hopes are for – not their function, which I hope I’ve rehearsed in part here, but their form and their object. Then we have a plan for getting from where we are to where we wish to be.
We’re nowhere near that yet. The world doesn’t work as we wish it to. But we live in hope.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest