Hope in the 21st century by Roger Knight
……why, then, not a philosophy of hopeful pessimism to guide us into the future…..
Mara Van der Lugt - Hopeful pessimism
When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in 1732, he expressed the notion that ‘hope springs eternal in the human breast’.
However, this was in the age of enlightenment, with no climate emergency to anticipate, and the world was less populated, and interpersonal engagement had not yet been changed by social media.
So, where does that leave our belief in hope today? Does hope still spring eternal, given the conflicts raging around the world, with societies more divided and fragmented, along with the rise in autocracy that enforces subjugation on entire populations?
As a consequence, has hope now become just a survival trait, a coping mechanism in the face of increasing uncertainty and economic / ecological hardship? Are we now living more in an age of anxiety rather than enlightenment and in an age of climate breakdown, is to perhaps live in an age of sorrow as well?
Our world today is undoubtedly wounded, and therefore, maintaining any sort of hopeful outlook has become even more of a challenge.
Has continuing to hope become something like the scene depicted in Nicolas Poussin’s painting of The Deluge [1660-4] where desperate souls are literally clinging to the wreckage?
The painting seems to say to us, ‘This is how life tends to be: clinging to the wreckage, desperately seeking temporary security on a bare rock.’ (from Art as Therapy by Alain De Botton and John Armstrong).
Hope may indeed be the bare rock that saves us from drowning, from abandoning hope altogether, which if we really care and still believe, even remotely, that things can improve, that possibilities can still exist, that an army is capable of stepping back from war, that corners can be turned and our best intentions do not always go amiss, and a people someday, will elect a leader who really cares for them and not just their self-aggrandizement, then, it is still surely worth holding on for.
The following lines written by the poet John Masefield seem to affirm this:
I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races
So I trust too.
But, to live without any hope, is not to live at all. Each day would be like the drudgery and futility of Sisyphus’s labour. It would be like being on a journey without an intended destination or purpose; it is to deny ourselves any sort of meaningful future, no matter how bleak, along with that of our genetic torch bearers.
The absence of any hope at all is too dire to contemplate. We have to remain as a hopeful / half glass full species, able to resist a degree of chagrin, despite our quiet, and for the most part, well controlled desperation which unrelentingly confronts us and potentially can erode our sometimes tenuous hope, if we allow it to.
RAK 4/25
