Pope Francis was a nice fella, but was he wrong about hope? Diagnosing the problems of the modern world, he argued that what we need more than anything today is belief in a better future. Yet many of the worst actors globally are infused with overconfidence, or excessive optimism. Hope itself appears to have become an impediment to tackling urgent challenges.
Action on climate change is weakened by a general hope technology will come to the rescue. European defence against Russia is undermined by a hazy belief Vladimir Putin will metamorphose into a peacemaker. Dealing with Ireland’s housing crisis is crippled by a faith in the same old policies.
I’ve lost track of the number of people who said in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as US president “ah, sure, he mightn’t be so bad”. And then there’s the irrational exuberance surrounding artificial intelligence, with governments now tending to see the glass as half full regarding this potentially cataclysmic technology. Not for nothing is the biography of OpenAI boss Sam Altman called The Optimist.
Philosophers have long discussed the paradoxical nature of hope.
“Only one thing is more stupid than absolute pessimism and that is absolute optimism,” said Albert Camus. His thinking on the matter was informed by a conundrum that also troubled Pope Francis: Why are people so indifferent to the suffering of others?
Francis described indifference as “the opposite of love”, and believed it was a much more common evil in human affairs than hate. Camus, who was active in the French resistance against the Nazis, was also deeply troubled by political apathy and saw it as essentially anti-love. Modern man “fornicated and read the papers”, Camus wrote in a damning assessment of our unmotivated condition.
Francis saw hope as the answer to indifference. “It is often said that ‘so long as there is life, there is hope’, but the truth, if anything, is the opposite: it is hope that keeps life going, protects it, takes care of it, helps it to grow,” he wrote.
Camus was more ambivalent about optimism, and argued pessimism could be a more powerful force against inertia, what he called “man’s strongest temptation”. He was particularly wary of ideological hope in “some great idea” – be it religious or secular – that deflected us from reality.
“We find in his [Camus’s] pessimism a clearsightedness that cuts through all the subterfuges and evasions available in his time to the beating core of his activism: that we must do what must be done, for reasons of justice and solidarity – because we owe it to our fellow human beings to prevent their suffering as best we can ... Camus proposes a fierce philosophy of action that is as bold as it is stark, stripped from any confidence of victory,” philosopher Mara Van der Lugt writes in a new book, Hopeful Pessimism.
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Camus’s wariness of hope seems well founded when considering the utopian thinking of today’s tech moguls. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, dreams of occupying Mars and re-engineering democracy. And to achieve this goal, we need less – not more – concern for the suffering of our fellow human beings. “The fundamental weakness of western civilisation is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilisation, which is the empathy response,” the multi-billionaire whined on the Joe Rogan podcast earlier this year. For utopians like Musk, human solidarity interferes with grand visions.
So what is the right approach to hope?
One way of resolving the conundrum is by definitions. Hope can be defined as either positive thinking or constructive thinking. One is more passive than the other.
Optimism can be defined as a belief in a positive outcome. It has a faith element, and potentially carries higher risks and rewards.
Studies show optimists live longer but are also more likely to take risks. “The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn and costly,” the psychologist Daniel Kahneman said. He had in mind particularly the optimism around public projects, and how spending estimates on infrastructure were always pitched towards the most hopeful end of the spectrum. Hello National Children’s Hospital.
Then there is utopianism, which can be defined as an ideological attachment to progress or some idealised future.
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So defined, it’s always good to have some hope. Treat optimism with caution and be very wary of utopianism.
Van der Lugt resolves the matter in a different way, saying we should strive to become “hopeful pessimists”. This aims to take the best of what optimism and pessimism both have to offer. It has the advantage of drawing us away from self-centred hope, and towards the responsibilities we have to our fellow human beings and the wider world.
“If anything, the pessimists have taught me this: with eyes full of that darkness there can still be this strange shattering openness, like a door cracked open, for the good to make its entry into life. Since all things are uncertain, so too is the future, and so there is always the possibility of change for better as there is for worse,” writes Van der Lugt.
An exclusive focus on hope can lead us towards passivity and indifference. Better that we are hopeful pessimists who, as Van der Lugt puts it, “strive for change without certainties, without expecting anything from our efforts other than the knowledge that we have done what we are called upon to do as moral agents in a time of change”.
