Hope

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein

The term “hope” designates a desire for change and the belief in a situation that is better than the existing one. The Oxford English Dictionary defines hope as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen.” In Hesiod’s Works and Days, the most famous myth of hope in Greek mythology, hope (Elpis) is depicted as Zeus’ punishment to humanity. Zeus sends Pandora—the first mortal woman—to Earth to become the spouse of Epimetheus. With her she brings a jar full of gifts or vices. Despite Prometheus advising his brother against it, Epimetheus accepts the offering. Pandora opens the jar and all the contents escape except hope. To Nietzsche, hope was Zeus’ revenge: “Zeus intended that man, notwithstanding the evils oppressing him, should continue to live and not rid himself of life, but keep on making himself miserable. For this purpose he bestowed hope upon man: it is, in truth, the greatest of evils for it lengthens the ordeal of man” (1908, 102). In this account, “hope” misleads humans into believing that happiness is attainable. This reading contrasts with those that recall that hope was a gift. Pandora’s contested myth thus compelled new philosophical understandings of “hope” as a value, a psychological state, and as an “anthropological” feature of humanity (Geoghegan 2008). The Latin word for “hope” is “esperanza” (a word that has the same root as “esperar,” from Latin “esperare” (“to wait”). The Latin root “spe” is usually related to the Indo-European root “spe” (“to expand”). In the etymology of the Latin verb “prosperare,” “pro” means “for” and “spe” means “hope” (i.e., anticipation, expectation; object, embodiment of hope). Prosperare means to flourish, to succeed, to thrive, to prosper. In this sense, to bring hope is also to bring prosperity.

Hope is also a theological category. To Thomas Aquinas, “hope” was “a movement of appetite aroused by the perception of what is agreeable, future, arduous, and possible of attainment” (quoted in Nicholas Smith 2008, 8). For Christians, “hope” refers to a reality witnessed but not yet realized, which—although already inaugurated by Christ—will not be fulfilled in this world (Dinerstein and Deneulin 2012). For example, the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (in Romans 8:24) recounts how “we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope: for why does one still hope for what he sees?” (Holy Bible, 785). Saint Augustine highlights: “As we do not yet possess a present but look for a future salvation, so it is with our happiness. . . . Salvation such as it shall be in the world to come, shall itself be our final happiness” (1962, 133).

In the late 1930s and during the 1940s, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch articulated a new meaning for “hope” outside of the religious framework in a context marked by profound political disappointment and the horrors of war and the Holocaust. As a “religious atheist,” Bloch regarded religion as “one of the most significant forms of utopian consciousness, one of the richest expressions of the Hope Principle” (Löwy 1988, 8). He distinguished the “theocratic religion of the official churches, opium of the people, a mystifying apparatus at the service of the powerful” from “the underground, subversive and heretical religion” in a way that refuses to see religion “uniquely as a ‘cloak’ of class interests” (Löwy 1988, 8). Bloch (2009) engaged with Marx’s view that religion is “an expression of man’s real misery and a protest against it.” Indeed, for Marx, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions . . . the opium of the people.” Consequently, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness” (1982, 131). For Bloch, “The critique of religion in the spirit and context of Marx’s thought liberates from undiscriminating taboos far more than Marxism does. One cannot of course expect miracles from a consideration of the opium-quotation in its entirety . . . but it might at least open the way, as they say, to conversations between believers purged of ideology and unbelievers purged by taboo” (2009, 51).

Bloch’s three-volume treatise The Principle of Hope portrays hope as the most genuine feature of what makes us human. Hope is not fantasy, faith, optimism, or wish, but rather the strongest of all human emotions. “Hope, this expectant counter-emotion against anxiety and fear is therefore the most human of all mental feelings and only accessible to men, and it also refers to the furthest and brightest horizons. It suits that appetite in the mind which the subject not only has, but if which, as unfulfilled subject, it still essentially consists” (Bloch 1995, 75). In this view, hope possesses a utopian function, which enables us to engage with the “not-yet” dimension of reality that inhabits the present and can be anticipated here and now. Hope in this sense is willful rather than wishful (Levitas 1997): it informs people’s concrete endeavors to forge a better life.

During the 1950s, Martin Luther King Jr. revitalized the idea that hope amounted to the possibility of a new reality. As one of the twentieth century’s best-known advocates for nonviolent social change, King inspired a generation of activists. In his famous “I have a dream” speech of 1963, he envisioned a world in which people were no longer divided by race. This dream became institutionalized in 1964 when Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act and King received the Nobel Peace Prize. Many of his statements—compiled in James Washington’s book A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches (1986)—seem inspired by Bloch’s ideas. For example, in Bloch’s 1961 lecture “Can Hope Be Disappointed?” he claimed: “Hope must be unconditionally disappointable.” This was because “hope is not confidence. If it could not be disappointable, it would not be hope. However, hope still nails a flag on the mast, even in decline, in that the decline is not accepted, even when this decline is still very strong (Bloch 1998, 340; 16–17). Speaking in a similar fashion to an audience in Washington, King insisted that “we must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

During the 1960s, “hope” became essential to various revolutionary theologies. In his Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation (1971), Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez conceived of theology as a hope-inspired praxis. Drawing on Bloch’s insights, he suggested that “the hoped-for salvation of humanity comes about not in the historical incarnation of hope represented in the activities of Jesus and a community of believers but, rather, in a transcendent future which makes the promise available to a receptive humanity” (Moylan 1997, 101). This characterization, in which hope appears as a guide to revolutionary action, developed alongside revolutionary politics in Latin America. It also coincided with the concurrent discussion among bishops at the 1968 Latin American Episcopal Conference about how to adapt the Christian message to the world. As conceived by Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, liberation theology called on the church to relate to popular movements and their struggles.

Similarly, new radical pedagogies put hope at the center of liberation struggles during the 1970s. Brazilian radical educator Paolo Freire (2004) connected hope with dialogical learning experiences. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), he contended that pedagogical dialogue cannot exist without hope: “Hope is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search—a search which can be carried out only in communion with others. . . . Hope, however, does not consist in crossing one’s arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.” (Freire 2000, 91–92).

After the “no future” politics of the 1980s, the 1994 Zapatista uprising explicitly reinserted “hope” into contemporary social movement discourse. For Subcomandante Marcos, indigenous struggle amounted to an “experience of hope” pursued by an “army of dreamers” (Lorenzano 1998, 157). Throughout their declarations and communiqués, the Zapatistas make clear that “hope” is neoliberal globalization’s antithesis. Echoing Bloch’s formulation, their First Declaration recounts how “a new lie is sold to us as history.” Specifically, this is “the lie about the defeat of hope, the lie about the defeat of dignity, the lie about the defeat of humanity.” At a time when global capitalism asserts itself as “dreamlessness in regard to the future . . . [where] there is fear, not hope” (Bloch 1971, 32), the Zapatistas propose: “Against the international terror representing neoliberalism, we must raise the international of hope. Hope above borders, languages, colors, cultures, sexes, strategies and thoughts, of all who prefer humanity alive. The international of hope” (SIM 1996a).

Today many social movements define themselves as mobilizers of hope, with prefiguration as their main strategy (Dinerstein 2015). Hope was the implicit motif in the global justice movement’s declaration: “Another World Is Possible.” Here hope is indexed to the real possibility of transforming the world. At its best, then, the global justice movement marshaled hope as a tool to counteract transnational capitalism.

Other political and religious forces have tried to leverage hope from positions of power in order to articulate new senses of possibility. On July 9, 2015, Pope Francis called for the “globalization of hope” in a speech to the Encounter of Popular Movements in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: “The globalization of hope, which emanates from the peoples and grows among the poor must replace this globalization of exclusion and indifference.” Upon winning his second presidency, Barack Obama declared that his supporters had “reaffirmed the spirit that has triumphed over war and depression, the spirit that has lifted this country from the depths of despair to the great heights of hope.” He went on:

I’ve never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead . . . [and] I’m not talking about the wishful idealism. . . . I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting. (2012)

Syriza leader Alex Tsipras’ 2014 election as prime minister of Greece prompted similar utterances. “Today we are opening the road to hope,” he declared. “Today we open the road to a better tomorrow with our people united, dignified and proud” (Euronews 2015). With both Obama and Tsipras, “hope” is articulated to invoke a new social imaginary to challenge catastrophic reality (Letts 2009). As Marcus Letts recounts, by describing hope vaguely (e.g., as “that thing inside us” or “what led me here today”), Obama was able to reach a multitude.

New theorizations of radical change associate “hope” with “utopia,” “prefiguration,” and an immediate temporal conception of the “future” (i.e., not as something that will occur later but something that is unfolding now) partly to escape the concept’s appropriation by institutionalized politics and policy. Here radical change is no longer conceived as a revolution that involves taking state power, but instead as a process of learning and teaching hope. According to critical scholar Sarah Amsler, “In conditions of intellectual, political and cultural foreclosure such as exist now in extreme neoliberal societies, the learning of hope is both a critical element of radical democratization and a practical politico-educative activity that can be cultivated anew at each new conjuncture” (2015, 6).

The utopia that emerges from the process of learning hope is not an “abstract utopia” that follows the plan of the party for a future-oriented revolution. Instead, it is a “concrete utopia,” a praxis-oriented category (Levitas 1997, 70). In these praxis-oriented concrete utopias, “knowing-concrete hope subjectively breaks most powerfully into fear [and] objectively leads most efficiently towards the radical termination of the contents of fear” (Bloch 1995, 5). Concrete utopia ventures into the not yet, the seeds of which already exist in latent form within the present reality. As Bloch highlights, the idea of concrete utopia is “only seemingly paradoxical.” This is because it is “anticipatory” in nature and, for this reason, “by no means coincides with abstract utopia dreaminess, [or] is directed by the immaturity of merely abstract utopian socialism” (1995, 146). The distinction between these two modes found concrete expression through the tension between the neighbors’ assemblies and the traditional left party activists during the radical mobilizations in Buenos Aires in late 2001 and early 2002. The party activists regarded the neighbors’ mobilization as a tool for the attainment of a future abstract revolution led by the party. For the neighbors, however, this attitude undermined the development of alternative political practices here and now. For them, the future did not lie ahead in a linear sequence but could be anticipated by movements through collective action.

Gift or vice? Today conflict persists between those radical scholars and activists who perceive hope to be a guiding praxis that must be cultivated and protected against opportunistic appropriation, and those who argue that hope undermines movements’ capacities to change the world. Derrick Jensen is in the latter camp: “The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line” (n.d). For Bloch, however, hope “is not content just to accept the bad which exists” and “does not accept renunciation.” Instead, educated hope (docta spes) guides praxis: “It is a question of learning hope” (1995, 3).