The virtues of hope

(Nimue)

Recently, I was reminded by philosopher Brendan Myers about the powerful, ethical reasons for staying hopeful. (If you aren’t familiar with Brendan’s work, I can recommend his books.)

The evil things humans do comes from many motives, including greed, selfishness and disinterest in the wellbeing of others. When people slide into apathy and feelings of powerlessness, they become enablers for whatever awfulness is going on around them. Doing nothing is a choice that supports whatever is going on.

Hope is a good antidote to this. Hope for better things, and the ability to imagine how the world could be made better go hand in hand. We won’t make meaningful change if we neither imagine it nor believe in it. 

With this in mind, the value of cultivating hope becomes more apparent. The personal battles to resist despair become distinctly political acts that have implications for the world as a whole. If you cannot do anything else, fighting to hang on to the idea that there is hope for better things and that keeping your hope alive matters, is important. At the same time, those of us who are better resourced can do our best to lift and encourage anyone we see struggling.

It’s easy to rubbish things, to knock people down, sneer at their dreams and meet their hope with unkindness and cynicism. Doing this takes little effort and no imagination. It calls for no wisdom, skill or insight. It gives a certain limited power to people who feel unable to act in positive ways. For the person who feels powerless, the path of cruelty and destruction clearly has its temptations. I believe it’s often a consequence of not feeling good about themselves.

Breaking things is easy. Creating things takes skill, knowledge and time. One of the key things for giving people hope is helping them to imagine that they have it in them to be a force for good. If you can imagine yourself making a good and welcome contribution I think you are more likely to want to invest in that. There isn’t much real pleasure in being destructive and no one will love you for acting in toxic ways. 

Creating hope calls for creating community, and space for people to share and to shine. When we work together to improve something, our combined power becomes larger than the sum of its parts. When we affirm each other and amplify each other’s efforts, we get more done.

Hope is something we can create together, and hang on to together. Sustaining hope is itself a meaningful act of resistance against all that is wrong in the world, and it gives us the foundations from which we really can build something better.