The Dark Side Of Hope

The word 'hypothesis' comes from the Ancient Greek word 'hupothesis.' 'Hupo' means 'under' and 'thesis' means - variously - "to place, to propose, to put down." 'Hypothesis' suggests moving something forward for examination. "I am putting this entity under your scrutiny." That is why I like this word. I like anything put forward as an idea, a suggestion, a provocation of thought.

I like the idea that something can be floated. The idea that an idea doesn’t need to be a commitment. We can put forth explanations for phenomena that can be worked out on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper or conversation and while our conjecture may be mocked or capsized by empirical data nobody gets hurt. No astronauts are lost on their way to Mars because of faulty calculations. No bridges collapse because of bad concrete and/or an overly optimistic faith in hypothetical technological innovations.

An idea isn’t brick. An idea is air. Brain waves. The spirit afloat in speculation. The sensation of wonder, of wondering, of wandering, of roaming in the unlimited zone of reverie. The brain may not be the only site of thought and this is a hypothesis. It's an idea. Thinking may require all the body's nerves and sensations, all the proprioceptive awarenesses and apprehensions that don’t stop at the body but that implicate our being in the general universe of folds and curves and doors and thumps and thunder. The skin is not a terminus.

Hope is a form of hypothesizing. It has two components: a cognitive and a conative aspect. The cognitive component is rooted in knowledge and understanding. Hope isn’t just a vague, optimistic emotion; it’s based on facts relating to the possibility and likelihood of future events. This gives hope a respectable amount of empirical ground. It’s not completely a conceptualization of pending events leavened by fantasy. It’s framed within the sober mahogany of the real. It corresponds to external phenomena.

The conative aspect is the propellent. It’s what drives us to take action. This is a peculiar feature of hope, and what makes it such an interesting emotion. It’s an act of will. It’s also a paradox: the reason we’re hoping for an outcome at all is because there is no clear action to take, and because there’s fundamentally no control whatever to guarantee a favorable development.  There may be some things we can do, or there may be nothing at all that we can do. But hope gives us the motivation to do something, however small and seemingly inconsequential. Hope deludes us into believing our actions are powerful catalysts when, in fact, they’re most likely futile.

Hope is a creature born of desire and magnification. It disposes us toward action and persuades us that our tiny efforts will have herculean results. Emily Dickinson called it “a thing with feathers.”

Hope is the thing with feathers 

That perches in the soul, 

And sings the tune without the words, 

And never stops at all, 

  

And sweetest in the gale is heard;         

And sore must be the storm 

That could abash the little bird 

That kept so many warm. 

  

I’ve heard it in the chillest land, 

And on the strangest sea;        

Yet, never, in extremity, 

It asked a crumb of me.

It’s pertinent that Dickinson refers to hope as a ‘thing.’ The image she suggests is that of a fledgling, a young bird too immature to be identifiable. It’s an amorphous ball of feathers with a craning neck and an open beak. But even that is going too far. It could also imply something more monstrous, a mutation or abnormality. The word ‘thing’ resists definition and leaves us with a squiggly, amorphous thinginess to ponder. She’s not quite sure at the outset that hope is a good thing, and implies that it’s a bit freakish and perhaps not to be trusted, but doesn’t extend her metaphor in a morbid direction; she develops her conception in a more optimistic vein. Hope warms the spirit and comforts us in trying circumstances. This is the interpretation most people would choose to go with. It’s the usual assumption, the most natural assumption anyone could make. Hope is what you do when there is little else you can do. How can this hurt? Even in extremity, hope asks for nothing, not even a crumb.

But look more closely. That thing with feathers that asks nothing of us, that perches in our soul chirping away like a maniacal canary, is deceptive. It has a dark side.

I’m not a fan. I don’t like hope. I don’t like hoping. I see hope as a monster. So did Hesiod. In Hesiod’s poem Works and Days, Zeus – in his anger over Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to humankind – presents Prometheus’s brother Epithemeus with a woman named Pandora, who arrives carrying a beautiful jar. Unbeknownst to her, the jar is crammed with all the evils of the world. She has been told to never open the jar. But Pandora, unable to resist her curiosity, opens the jar and all the evils fly into the world. She rushes to close the lid, but manages to trap only the one remaining evil: hope. “Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door.”

So hope is included among the evils of the world, but is left trapped in the jar where it (ostensibly) can do no harm. Why then, if hope is trapped in the jar, does it continue to plague people?

Perhaps Hesiod is suggesting that – unlike all the other evils on the loose – hope is still under our control. We can choose whether to indulge it or not. It may serve us well in a time of need, or it may delude us into thinking we have agency over phenomena that a more rational perspective would dismiss as futile. Hope is embedded in ambiguity. It’s clearly not a panacea. Not even close. It might be closer to heroin. It might have a dulling effect on our sharper faculties, soothing us with illusions while robbing us of judgment.

Hope appeals to human weakness and - like most medicine - has some pretty troublesome side effects. But evil? Evil is a strong word. Is hope evil?

Nietzsche went as far as too say hope is the ultimate evil: “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

The worst of evils? Isn’t that a bit over the top?

I don’t think so. I agree with Nietzsche. Hope prolongs our torment. It encourages denial at the same time it deludes people into thinking they can do something to alter a menacing situation simply by a mechanism of piety and wishful thinking. It doesn’t empower, it enfeebles. It nourishes a condition of impotence and insufficiency. Hope, like prayer, is a call on the supernatural. If the supernatural fails us, we have been twice betrayed; betrayed by a universe we assumed to be benign, betrayed by ourselves for our speciousness and evasion.

It’s an easy seduction. It takes more than courage to face a truly harsh reality. Hope is a convenient tool. There’s not much to it; it’s essentially just a feeling. Feelings don’t do much. They motivate action. They don’t insure action.

What makes hope so potent is its deceptively rational aspect. This is what makes it so compelling, so quietly inimical. Hope can undermine action as much as it can motivate action. If persuades people that if they get into the habit of recycling their garbage and driving less and going vegan, they can save the world. These are good things. I won’t say this kind of behavior won’t have any good effect. It will. It just won’t save the planet from its current demise.

Hope is like buying an inflatable pool and hoping to blow it up into a cruise ship.

Hope is devious. Hope is sly. Hope is hoping to rid the air of greenhouse pollutants by using biofuel. But biofuel is taking food away from people to preserve a status quo of happy motoring and Amazon deliveries. Not to mention that in order to produce enough corn or sugarcane or elephant grass to fuel millions of cars and trucks, an industrialized agriculture on that scale is going to produce a lot more methane and carbon dioxide than simply growing corn to be eaten as corn, or switchgrass dedicated to the false promises of biogas. Add to that the humungous quantity of water required to grow energy crops, the inability to contain harmful microbes, heavy pesticide use, soil erosion, flooding due to compaction and surface water run-off, and the scenario grows even more destructive. Biofuel is for biofools.

Nor are extraterrestrials going to save us. Or – who knows – maybe they will. I’m not omniscient. Far from it. Maybe a fleet of starships from another galaxy will arrive at the 11^th hour and save us from our own self-induced doom. We will learn a valuable lesson and change our ways and look happily into a future of renewable resources and a greatly dilated sense of interrelationship with the rest of the universe. Maybe that will happen. But I’m not holding my breath.

The opposite of hope is despair. The inscription above the entrance to the inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy stated “abandon hope all ye who enter here.” Despair, a state of utter hopelessness, pretty much sucks. It’s not a happy answer to the false remedies of hope.

There’s another side to despair, however: acceptance. Acceptance offers automatic relief. All that is required of you is to accept the inevitability of a situation and adapt to it as best as you can. “Acceptance and tolerance and forgiveness, those are life-altering lessons,” observes Jessica Lange. If hope is a bottle of snake oil, a thing with feathers stuck in a jar, acceptance is wine. Acceptance is a liberating libation. A thing with heat.