There’s an opinion piece titled “The world is being driven to the brink by thugs and dictators, but there is a route to a brighter future” in today’s Guardian.
Simon Tisdall writes:
“The future lies not in the hands of political thugs and killers, of dictators and megalomaniacs, but in the hands of ordinary people everywhere. It depends on millions upon millions of individual daily acts of kindness, selflessness, faith and courage. So don’t lose heart. Keep your eyes open. Unblock your ears. And don’t look down!”
I like this viewpoint. Still, I’m put in mind of Terry Eagleton’s book “Hope Without Optimism” for several reasons. Eagleton argues that optimism is a temperament. Hope is essentially an act of will and imagination. As Eagleton puts it: “To believe that a situation will turn out well because you are an optimist is as irrational as believing that all will be well because you are an Albanian.” Hope is the other animal. Eagleton again: “Utopia could only be achieved through an intense hopelessness.”
I suspect Simon Tisdall knows this viewpoint. We are now in intense hopelessness. It’s a lousy neighborhood. And Eagleton: “True hope is needed most when the situation is at its starkest.”
Individual acts of kindness do not necessarily spring from false optimism (though they can) but instead from the almost universal desire of human beings to help that man or woman with a broken leg. We have been healers for 15,000 years. That’s hope. Tisdall’s argument that power resides at the local level is not wrong.
Jerome Groopman writes (in his remarkable book “The Anatomy of Hope”) that hope is: “the elevating feeling we experience when we see… a future that is amenable to reasonable pursuit” and I like that pursuit. Groopman who is an oncologist understands that there’s a practicality to hope, hope which we must use with all our might. We must not pretend otherwise.
I was heartened to read Tisdall this morning for the worlds of social media are clogged with pessimism. I see poets attacking poets, disability rights activists clobbering other cripples, internecine spats everywhere. But we should be reminded that despair is a choice, one to which the old men wish you to succumb.
If I’m an occasional optimist this is because I understand the nuances both of temperament and intellect. It’s likely I’m an optimist by means of hardwiring. Hope is practical.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University