In Hope's Defense
Under construction
I ran out of time this week to finish this piece. I'll pick it back up, finish, and publish the final draft alongside next week's piece.
Prelude
What's confusing Dylan about hope?
A few months ago a colleague and increasingly good friend punctuated a satisfying meeting over coffee with a confusing admission. I don't quite remember the quote, but my friend shared what he values most in our discussions and it compelled me to write this article.
But first, indulge me while I set the scene. We both work early hours, so we meet regularly for coffee to talk (mostly) about the state of our republic and about the west generally before starting the work day. You'll likely understand, If you're politically awake, when I say that these talks quickly cast us far from shore, aboard dubious rafts, trying to survive rogue waves generated 70 years before we were born. Maybe 250 years. Maybe even 2000 years. Neither of us can boast any authoritative mastery over history, but even we can see the parallels with this or that dictatorship, the "threats to democracy," and utter failure to buttress the walls against the entropic destiny inherent to all systems due to the sapping nature of complacency, greed, and corruption. Every time we meet we unpack the news according to our observations. Every time we unpack this news we find that there is more rotten fruit than there is good fruit and that ratio is rapidly trending in the wrong direction. Is there anything good left or are we simply surviving off the final seeds sown by our ancestors? It becomes easy to throw up our hands and declare that the experiment is over. The republic has failed. We are both locked into to a cart playing a soul-crushing game as it speeds to hell. I-Spy with my little eye something broken. We point out to each other all of the levers that may have been able to switch the track, to avoid annihilation, but are now in disrepair, neglected, rusted and useless. Our leaders, liars; our academies, avaricious; our corporations, cynical; our churches, charlatans; our doctors, delusory; our families, fractured. However, my friend shared with me the thing he values the most in our conversations. He said that I always spy a lever that's not quite fucked beyond all repair. He expressed a deep appreciation for my relentless commitment to hope.
It's really an ironic observation because I am the most negative person you know. I easily transmute any victory into loss. I have literally never taken a compliment. Imagine a printer that prints messages directly into a shredder. That's the inbox I have constructed in my brain to process any positive message written or spoken. Well, written or spoken about me anyway. I believe that I have been able to fake my way through any accomplishment and that it's only a matter of time before the hammer falls. At some point I will be discovered and seen for the first time how awful I am. I can't even claim any agency here by admitting that this is a perspective that I carry. It's rooted so inextricably in my heart I can only express that it carries me. It governs my responses. I have to consciously fight against it and often lose. Probably always lose. It's like anti-hope.
So, this expression from my colleague and increasingly good friend has generated for me a dilemma I can't disregard. I am holding within me a contradiction: I relentlessly subscribe to a hope for our collective future while I also relentlessly subscribe to a hopeless personal future. I aim to dive so deeply into hope that this contradiction is crushed by the pressure. I invite you to come along with me and hope (heuheuheu) there is something here for you as well.
Defining Hope
Is hope a feeling or something more?
The easiest way to define something is to look it up in the dictionary, so let's just start there. Hope is defined as a "desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment." It's said a couple of different ways, but ultimately the definitions mean the same thing to me. I yearn for or anticipate things I want to be true and have some reason for believing they might be true. I hope I will beat this boss because I can recognize its attack pattern. I hope that I will own a house some day because I work hard and save money. I hope that I can break a cycle of negativity because I confront my traumatic past. These are straightforward examples that meet the definition. There is a yearning or anticipation that is supported by some piece of evidence.
Though, I can't help but recognize two fatal flaws with how hope is defined: aspiration towards evil and false or incomplete evidence. What if I hope for something that's wrong? I hope my opponent is too sick to show up to the tournament. I hope my rival at work makes a mistake and gets fired. I hope that those who hurt me are either equally or more brutally hurt themselves. If there are aspirations or yearnings for evil then am I still feeling hope or am I feeling something else? Even if I have evidence that these outcomes might come to pass I am making a mistake for wishing their fulfillment? Alternatively, what if I am ignorant or misled? Maybe the boss has a second phase. Maybe there is an economic downturn. Maybe I untangled the wrong psychological knot. If the evidence changes or was never real in the first place, did I have hope or was I delusional? Ultimately if hope is simply a feeling, do these questions even matter at all? The definition provided isn't telling the whole story or it's at least incomplete because it doesn't withstand scrutiny. Hope as defined is too easily morphed into something else when it is rooted in the relative nature of emotion. Both internal and external pressures can shape and change our physical, mental, and emotional state, so something that is hope one moment becomes something else the next. Maybe there is more to hope than a simple definition.
I often look to God when facing these difficulties and challenges because God has a divine and supernatural nature. He exists outside of me and also sits at the pinnacle of being itself. There's no better measure than His will. As a Catholic, I also have access to not just the the Holy Bible, but also the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC). The CCC defines hope as a theological virtue, one of three that adapts "man's faculties for participation in the divine nature." Regarding hope specifically, the phrase that stands out to me that answers the above flaws is that hope is a reliance not on "our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit." As to not get too side tracked, you might check out this explanation to learn more about the The Most Holy Trinity, but basically the Holy Spirit is also God.
I'd like to try and draw out the importance of this aspect to a theological definition of hope because it transcends an individual's religious view. It's applicable to non-believers and maybe especially to those that have a hostile view of religion. Hope as a theological virtue shifts the "belief in fulfillment" from an individual's perspective or frame of reference to the Creator. If you're uncomfortable with that terminology, you can substitute Creator with Truth. There is technically speaking no difference between God and Truth because God is being itself. Also, I recognize that this is all propped up by massive claims I'm not trying to explain here, so for the skeptical and irreligious, I invite you to read the best cases for what I'm explaining in short and come back. Perhaps A Summa of the Summa is an accessible starting point.
The utility of Truth as the source for evidence instead of one's subjective gathering and interpretation of evidence cannot be overstated. Truth as an objective measure of evidence simultaneously frees an individual while it sets them on a clearly defined path. An individual can fully realize the hope they *feel* because it is being *given* to the individual, not generated from within the individual. What exactly is the difference though? To review, the way hope is defined above is a yearning for something that can believably be fulfilled. There are two fatal flaws because an individual can yearn for something evil or the belief is based on false evidence. If hope is generated within an individual, then hope is susceptible to these flaws because an individual can want evil things and an individual can be ignorant. However, if hope comes from Truth or in other words outside of an individual, then hope can survive these fatal flaws because there is no longer a conflict or contradiction. For example, an individual who yearns for evil would have to reconcile a hope for something good. Said another way, if hope is generated internally, then there is no way someone who wishes for evil things, like a rival at work being fired, could generate actual hope, like forming a very close working relationship with their rival that leads to the flourishing of both of them and their enterprise. If hope came from inside only, that same individual would never be able to hope for the good or in other words could never be redeemed. Additionally, an individual who is ignorant could never have a hope fulfilled because the individual would be incapable of breaching the threshold of believability. If hope comes externally, then the ignorant individual need only recognize it.
By engaging in this process of trying to define hope, I am starting to see parallel's to the contradiction laid out in the prelude. I hold a hope for humanity because that hope is external. It's outside of myself. We have been flourishing for thousands of years. We have been baptized by the fires of calamity and strife to be born again as better in so many different ways. As a believer I also claim to know that we'll be fine. However, for myself I hold an anti-hope that's based on the evil of self-erasure and the ignorance of my impact to those around me. Ultimately, it's driven by a yearning spurred on by fear.