Hope Still Flies

"Hope, to me, is wishing for something good to be true. I believe it is inherent in all of mankind to hope, not because we need to escape where we are, but because we have souls- and those souls were made for something greater than this world. I write about it so often because I think it compels us all. I want to make songs that people at any intellectual level can feel stirred by. Hope is the basest of human feelings to me, the feeling that all emotion springs from." -Reese Roper

“Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.” - C.S. Lewis

I had the pleasure of attending the final Stuck with Virtue Conference at Berry College back in November. The last panel was on Higher Education, namely, if it really existed. Since education is tending toward more and more practical job training, the question was posited if truly liberal education--that is, education that liberates the soul and teaches us how to be free of our baser instincts--can endure. One presenter made the forlorn point that liberal education is necessary for civic virtue... and that without it, we can expect an increasingly productive work force without a clue about who they are and how they should spend their mounting resources. After the last panel concluded, everyone migrated to the ballroom for a catered lunch. Faculty representing several of the attending schools stood and offered final thoughts. Most expressed gratefulness for the event and the presentations. Then a faculty member from Berry stood and directly addressed the bleak professor from earlier. "I think in all our talk about the loss of civic virtue, I think we need a healthy reminder of one of the virtues you missed... a Christian one. The virtue of hope." It was this scene and the interview with Reese Roper of Five Iron Frenzy I did with Mousertime that caused me to mull and ponder on this elusive virtue.

What is hope?

Hope is the belief that the world, both in its temporal circumstances and its ontological value, will be somehow better tomorrow than it is today for the whole of mankind and for the individual himself; it is grounded in a faith that nothing is outside the purview of a benevolent higher power which controls the cosmos and responds to our personal desire for the world to improve.

This is not to say that the world always gets better in the way that the hoper thinks it should. Sometimes circumstances become tragically worse rather than better. Imagine the young father diagnosed with a terminal cancer. He and his children hope that he will overcome every day, yet every day he grows weaker and weaker with chemotherapy until finally he dies. It can't be said that their circumstances became more subjectively favorable. It might even appear to them that their hope was in vain. Maybe hope isn't even real.

This is not to say that hope doesn't have any empowering component either. Consider the case of the man paralyzed by a back injury. Doctors tell him that he will probably never walk again. He returns home dejected, thinking that nothing can be done for him. Then he hears the story of an unorthodox physical therapist in town, reputed to have a greater success rate than any local therapist. Still unimpressed, he wallows in depression until he sees the first shaky steps of his granddaughter. Inspired, the handicapped man hopes that the therapist can help him walk again. So he goes to the therapist week after week, straining through pain and frustration failure after failure. The hope of walking with his granddaughter keeps his perseverance strong and he finally makes those first wobbly steps himself. His hope made him strong and against all odds he persevered. Surely hope can be powerful.

But was his hope any stronger than the family of the first example? Certainly not. Likewise, could not one imagine a scenario in which the body of the grandfather failed him altogether in spite of all hope? Or what if, in the first example, somehow the father's will to live overcame defeated cancer against all odds? That too is not all that alien a story. Thus we must concede that the strength of hope is probably not the variable here, lest we accuse the young father of failing his family by not willing or hoping hard enough. The circumstances were simply different.

True, there was a component of man changing his circumstances in the second example. The crippled grandfather could have simply hoped from the wheelchair that his station would change. Though he hoped until his death, if he did nothing he would (more than likely) remain as he was. In fact, hope was the impetus to action in both stories. The young father and the grandfather both hoped that their condition would improve, then they acted in accord with a realistic hope. Neither man can be faulted for a weak attempt at healing or weak hope for things to get better.

The variable is the providential element of hope. There must be an unseen power which manipulates circumstances beyond the control of man. It is this which inspires man to hope in the face of uncertainty at all. Some will object that they don't believe in any providence of any sort, that no God or gods or force or energy exist or are benevolent friends of man. However, their lives betray them because they certainly hope whether or not they mean to. So why hope if things are truly left to chance? It won't do any good. It can't be chalked up to an evolutionary psychological leftover. For how could it benefit survival to deny capricious chance? A real survivor is one who accepts a situation as it is, not how he wishes it were.

Again, it must be seen that man is more than a mere self-perpetuator. He is a soul with needs, crying out into the silence for an answer. Why cry if there is no answer? Why hope if there are no hands to carry you through? Why ask if there's anyone listening to the minorly and majorly hopeful thoughts floating about in the mind if no one else can ever hear them?

And finally, most poignantly, something must be said about when things don't turn out like we hoped. Does God delight in dashing our hopes? Here inquiry must cease. This visceral pain won't be assuaged away by clever rhetoric. Really only two responses present themselves. The first is to walk away from all hope and transcendence in disgust. Burn all the hopeful books and journals written, ignore all the wisdom of the ages for it cannot complete its ontological explanation of human suffering. The second is to take by faith that sometimes things great and small don't work out like we hoped because God knows better. Our hopes may not have been misguided but short-sighted. Our hope that things will work out in the end isn't always empirical but it has proven logical. Logic requires a kind of faith that our thoughts and concepts tell us true things about the world we live in. And if you have the faith to be logical, how small a step it is to have the faith in the superlogical, things above and beyond what we can conceive and imagine. Tragedy will become victory when the superlogical is revealed. That is the greatest hope of all.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
-Emily Dickinson

The Reality of Fiction

When one places life's center of gravity not in life but in the "beyond"--in nothingness--one deprives life of its center of gravity altogether. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, everything natural in the instincts--whatever in the instincts is beneficent and life-promoting or guarantees a future now arouses mistrust. -Friedrich Nietzsche

My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. [...] The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. -G.K. Chesterton

Sometime in early February:

I sat at my usual spot at the coffee shop I've come to frequent here in Louisville. I cautiously brought the cup of hot cinnamon tea to my lips, hoping to bump into my new friend. I first met my friend Henry several months ago while helping some friends move. He reminded me of Thoreau, a man with luddite tendencies desperately trying as hard as he can to escape the corruption of the world. I would consider him to be some kind of existentialist, even though he would probably refuse the label and call himself an individual (as any good existentialist would).

A sip. Ah, the tea is perfect.

Henry arrived as if on cue. We greeted one another cordially and I slid aside my impressive (though only to me) stack of books on medieval theology. He took a seat and I lit my pipe. He produced a pack of cigarettes. We ignited our vices and began to reason together.

I had an ulterior motive in meeting with him, of course. You see, I care tremendously for his soul. As is so common in our ultra-modern, ultra-convenient times, he seems to me a listless and tempest-tossed alien. He has never been more comfortable and never so homeless. In addition to the cosmopolitan curse, he is also weighed down by survivor's guilt. His best friend drove thirty miles into the glorious New England countryside to drown himself ingloriously in a pond just a bit off the highway. Henry blamed himself for being so far south when his friend took his own life. Needless to say, I continue to release many fragrant prayers to the Lord for him.

"I'm working on a project," I announced after the pleasant small talk had subsided, "maybe you can help me."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. I could use another pair of ears. Y'see, I'm writing on hope. Tryin' to figure out what exactly it is, what it does for us, why we need it, is it even real? Maybe you can help me sort through all my thoughts."

"Okay," Henry agreed. "What do you have so far?"

"Well, I began... um, are ya familiar with the 'Green Lantern' comics?" He nodded. "Well, then you know how the Blue Lanterns work. The symbiosis with the Greens and everything, the symbolism of hope being useless without willpower, but together hope can super charge willpower. Right?" Yes. "But isn't that just a fancy way of saying that hope is just a delusion?"

"How so?" he asked.

"Think of it. Hope isn't real, it's just a tool. It really doesn't matter what you hope in, so long as you hope for something. Nietzsche would say that hope is a great lie, particularly when imposed from the outside. It's a fantasy, a tool for control. Or it's just something we need in order to function, an existential necessity. Anyway," I concluded, "that's where I'm stuck. Ya got any thoughts for me?"

He mulled it over for a moment. Then he answered, "I think hope is fantastic in some sense. Honestly, I'm not really as much of a philosopher as a writer or English dork. But I think fiction really resonates with people because it IS fake. Maybe it's not real, but that's what so compelling about it."

"So you would say that the compelling things about literature aren't really based on anything real?"

"They're rooted in our experience, or how we perceive it. We want the world to be better than it is. We wish our experiences were more than they are."

"It's just a wish then? It has no reality?"

"It's a real desire for things to be better than they are. There's nothing false about wanting things to be better than they are. In fact, idealization keeps us going. Writers craft ideal characters to fit their stories. The people they invent function just the way they're supposed to in the narrative. But any good writer will tell you that a solid character eventually writes themselves. That sorta makes them real, doesn't it?" Henry asked whimsically.

"But are the characters really ideal? Are ideal or realistic characters better?"

"Realistic ones, of course. I meant that they function ideally in the story. They do what the author wants."

I conceded the point. "But why are realistic characters better? Why not the perfect ones?"

"I think real characters need to be relatable."

"Why do the readers need to relate?"

"Are you leading me somewhere?"

"I asked you first."

Henry sighed in defeat. He knew that I was in fact leading him somewhere. Still, he was the one who had to get there. To state it plainly wouldn't mean the same to him. "I think readers need to relate because they need to see themselves in the story. They ought to recognize what kind of person is in the story and how they're like that character. They need to see that a character will react in a story just like they will, or if they're different, why they did otherwise."

"So a realistic character has to seem real, not entirely fictional?"

He was thoughtfully quiet before replying, "I suppose so."

"So might it be fair to say that the compelling thing about fiction is, on some level, not what is imaginary but what is real about it. Aristotle praised poetry for this reason; it attained unto the universal. It uses narrative to tell us what's true about being human in a way that philosophy never could."

"Interesting."

"Couldn't hope be the same?" I asked. "Could it be that we're not compelled by fiction but by reality? And not reality as it is--for the real world is a harsh place--but reality as we always hoped it could be? As though our hearts yearn for the world to be better than it actually is not because we can imagine it better but because it is supposed to be better than it really is? What if there's something terribly wrong with the world? We think that our hopes aren't real because we don't see any tangible proof of them. But the hope itself is the evidence! Or else why would there ever have been hope at all?"

(A more thorough treatment of the question of hope will follow this dialogue.)

Varnish on the Abyss

But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence. The least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of. -Lord Byron

Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulant to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it — so high, indeed, that no fulfillment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (Precisely because of this power that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the most malign of evils; it remained behind at the source of all evil [that is, in Pandora's box],) -Friedrich Nietzsche

Hope, if it is indeed a mere convention, is a powerful tool in the hands of the user. Hope can instill that great endurance which would be wholly absent apart from it. By willing ourselves to hope, we can achieve far more than we ever could without it. Honing the power of hope can unlock the will to make our greatest desires a reality. Hope has toppled dictators, freed the masses, won Olympic medals, brought hearing to the deaf, and made the lame to walk again. Hope is the difference between the great men and the barely-subsisting ones.

The truly, utterly desperate have only the will to live. They are but a short fall from losing even that. The nations with the greatest poverty are those with the most despair. Even the regions of America with great poverty (for instance, Appalachian eastern Kentucky) are communities marked by high levels of fatalism. When a man believes that all things are ordained by fate apart from any human action, he is bound to find himself locked into a cycle of hopelessness and destitution. Everyone needs hope just to operate. Even a hope so slim as another day's pay or another meal can be the impetus unto life. But more than feed is needed to pull a man out of the pig trough. He has to believe that he can be empowered.

This is the mantra of modern counseling in all of its circles. Victims must be taught that they are not merely at the whims of a victimizer. The key word here is "empowerment". Empowering a victim means convincing him that he can take control of a situation. He is not at the mercy of his attacker. By equalizing the power between them, he robs the attacker of power. He can again become the master of his destiny and overwhelm the adversary. This is also the mentality of educators, particularly in low-income classrooms. Teachers must convince students that no force on earth has locked them where they are. They can go to college, they can hold down jobs, they can break the cycle of poverty which strangles their communities. If students be convinced in their own minds to hope for the future, no star can ever shine brighter.

But a tool is just an instrument in the hands of its user. And a hope which sees no fulfillment is the greatest tool of all.

How can that be? Because hope in oneself can be a powerful asset, so too can hope in another. By placing our hope in someone or something external to ourselves, we become the living puppets of the external. Hoping in Barack Obama makes you a slave to him, for you would follow him into the flames of perdition itself. Isn't that what great generals have known for centuries? Robert E. Lee was not canonized for his gentlemanly virtues or singular greatness. He was canonized because his men put their whole hope and trust in him. He could throw his men pell-mell against vicious gatling guns and they would stubbornly absorb the bullets of the inevitable future. Some great general; he lost the war! And yet still in loss they lionized him all the more, for though the cause be lost the man lived on as a champion of Southern dignity in defeat.

Yet imagine a hope which has no fulfillment. In spite of every proof to the contrary, it is never shaken. Think about the blind jingoism on the right which leads America into travesty after travesty. Or think about the naive idealism on the left which puts all its hopes in an inept government that can't resolve anything. No matter how much evidence is provided to the contrary, the hope of these extremists remains resolute and unwavering. Each party may respectively lead us into costly war or paternalistic tyranny. Frankly, neither hard right nor hard left seem particularly worried by the prospects of their darkest futures. "What does war matter when America is great and in the right?!!" "What does civic tyranny matter if everyone is equal; aren't we under the tyranny of the rich elite anyway?!!" Though many have been disillusioned out of either political extreme by circumstances, imagine if everyone continued to hope in a thing in spite of the evidence against it AND a lack of evidence for it.

Maybe hope deferred and unfulfillable can endure all things, even leading to death. Consider the hope instilled in jihadists for the certainty of heaven and the promise of seventy-two virgins. Have we any empirical evidence that their souls ascended unto Paradise to commune with Allah and consort with nubile women? All we have is airplane debris and charred corpses of fanatic slaves of extremist imams. Consider if Osama bin Laden really believed this doctrine? Do al-Qadea bosses really believe that the only sure-fire way into Paradise is through martyrdom against the infidels? Then why aren't they in the hijacked planes? This is just a lie they purport to control men for their own ends.

Control is why parents lie to their children about Santa. "Be good so that the red elf will reward you." And if a child doesn't get what he wants, "There's always next year!" It may revile you to think that hope is just a tool for brokering power--to barter power to and fro for control or empowerment like an abacus in balance--but how many times have you yourself perpetuated this same lie?

And isn't Nietzsche right when he says that Jesus weaponized hope like no one else? Dan Brown certainly agreed when he published The Da Vince Code in which the Church used the lie of the crucifixion and the resurrection to coerce Christians for millennia. The teaching of the Christian Church--Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant--is that Jesus was the first fruits of a general resurrection when creation will be restored from its fallen state. Death will itself die, they say, when Jesus returns. Nietzsche scoffs, "'Behold, I am coming quickly.' Great lie!" And knave after coddled knave pray the prayer, bow the knee, and willingly submit to slavery bound in chains of hope deferred and unfulfillable. Despite the promise of his imminent return yet unfulfilled, Christians will obey even unto death the mandates of the faith without even seeing a single Jewish hair from the Messiah's head.

Hope is the great lie when it is based on nothing real, nothing tangible, nothing certain.

Or so says the nihilist. I will examine more on this next time.

Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man. -Nietzsche

Hope Burns Bright

Hope is a waking dream. -Aristotle (attributed)

[H]ope not only desires something good for the future; it expects it to happen. And it not only expects it to happen; it is confident that it will happen. There is a moral certainty that the good we expect and desire will be done. -John Piper

In the Green Lantern comic books, the Green Lantern Corps are essentially intergalactic cops, enforcing justice throughout the cosmos. They use a power ring fueled by the willpower of the universe; their rings can create green-light synthetic constructs based on the will of the user. Whatever a given Green Lantern can imagine and will to appear shall appear to help him or her combat evil. Yet within the past few years, the Green Lanterns discovered that they were not the only corps. Other ring-bearers have emerged from the corners of the universe to wage war on one another. Their rings are represented by different colors on the emotional spectrum. Some are good like the Greens, some are consistently evil like the rage-powered Red Lanterns, and some are neutral like the mysterious Indigo Tribe. As our true heroes who always come out on top, you might imagine that the Greens are the most powerful lanterns in the universe.

Wrong. The Blue Lantern Corps is the most powerful group in this war of light. Their rings are powered by the blue light of hope instead of the green light of will. Rather than responding to the creativity of the wielder, the blue rings create constructs based on the hopes of the target. For example, when the Blue Lantern Saint Walker is trying to escape from Green Lantern John Stewart, his blue ring projects into Stewart's mind images of him reunited with dead wife. He is left awe-struck as Walker escapes, filled with the confident hope that he will see his wife again. On another occasion, the Blue Lantern finds a world whose sun is dying. He tells the people of the world to put their hope in him; his ring is supercharged by their confidence in him and he is able to reignite the star and save the doomed world. Their rings can even supercharge a green power ring and completely drain a yellow ring (powered by fear).

Their fatal flaw? A blue ring is almost useless without a green one nearby.

The symbolism might strike as heavy-handed. Sometimes it's as though the writers are poking you with a stick saying, "Get it? Hope destroys fear. It inspires our wills. See? But without willpower, hope is useless. Didja get it? Huh? Huh? Didja?" And maybe that shouldn't surprise; it is a comic book, after all.

Still, this fits well our modern definition of hope. Hope is an exercise of the will. It is the decision to operate under the assumption that things are going to be better even if all evidence is to the contrary. And just like the blue and green rings' symbiosis, our hope empowers the will to accomplish more than it could alone. It's a loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a paradox--and really, an absurdity. By making the conscious decision to hope, the will is stronger. The hope isn't based on the certainty of the accomplishment, but in wishing it to be so. Ignoring the reality of a tough situation in order to overcome it.

But apart from its usefulness in self-delusion, what's the point? This version of hope is at the center of existentialism. Existentialism takes as a granted the reality of nihilism (which is the belief that nothing is really true; "truth" as a proposition is a combination of lies the powerful use to control the weak and the fantasies weak men need to function). Existentialism sees the abyss at the end of nihilism (madness in the face of everything being illusory and false), and consciously rejects through willpower and emotion what the mind knows to be true. "Truth is really a lie," says the nihilist. "Fair enough," replies the existentialist, "now let me invent a lie I can live with. Ignorance is bliss. I will make a truth that works for me." Hope then is an invention concocted by weak men to function.

Or is it? A further examination of hope will come next time.

In fearful day, in raging night,

With strong hearts full, our souls ignite,
When all seems lost in the War of Light,
Look to the stars-- For hope burns bright!
-Blue Lantern Oath