Life in America is deeply anxious. Where are we headed? How bad could it get? Who are we, anyway? What’s particularly scary is that everyone’s scared. Even the people whose candidate just won are frightened—of immigrants, of the future, but also of the rest of us. In a column from before the election, I described a sign planted in a yard on my street; it read “Democrats Are Communists and Terrorists—ARE YOU?” The election is over, but the sign remains. So does another, not far from me, showing Trump wielding an AR-15. These signs, which loom over storybook suburban streets in affluent small towns, suggest the degree to which our country has become consumed by fear.
In fearful times, people often see themselves as optimists or pessimists. Being a pessimist can be comforting; if you’re a pessimist, then nothing about the future can surprise you, because you already know it’s going to be bad. The problem with pessimism, however, is that it’s limiting. Pessimism makes it harder to imagine, or really believe in, a better future.
Optimists can sometimes picture that future: in a recent blog post, the economist Alex Tabarrok outlined “the Best-Case Scenario for a Trump Presidency.” (For example, “Trump the developer” could expand the housing supply; he might also “appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head a committee on vaccine policy and, after several years of investigation, write a report.”) Tabarrok isn’t predicting that Trump will do these things; he’s saying only that it would be nice if he did them in place of other things he might do. There are shades of optimism: it’s one thing to have optimistic visions, and another to actually believe that they’ll come to pass. The problem with being a believing optimist is that you may become too selective in your reckoning of good and bad. If the situation is dire enough, then believing in your optimism becomes a kind of denial.
What would it mean, at this point, to believe in an optimistic vision for American politics? On what would that optimism be based? We can all point to bright spots while agreeing that the over-all picture is bleak. The Republican Party is proudly unhinged, while the Democrats are primly inert. The Supreme Court is compromised and corrupt; fundamental reforms are unlikely, and it’s possible that Trump will get to replace multiple aging justices. The media are deeply distrusted, and we are soon to plunge further into the realm of “alternative facts.” The January 6th insurrectionists—one of whom lived around the corner from me, in my Long Island town—will probably be pardoned and held up as patriots for our children to admire. The worst political trends are being accelerated by technological developments that are themselves accelerating, and the planet as a whole is rushing toward a climate crisis that will threaten all of humanity.
I’m sure you have your own items to add to the list. On good days, I can conjure a little optimism. On bad days, I feel a sense of foreboding that I can’t dispel. I’m aware of all the ways in which there’s more to life than politics. But I struggle to find a way of relating to our political future that isn’t intolerably dark, or optimistic in a way that’s essentially unearned.
In a slim new book called “The Spirit of Hope,” the philosopher Byung-Chul Han distinguishes between hope and optimism. “Hopeful thinking is not optimistic thinking,” Han writes, with emphasis. Optimism “knows neither doubt nor despair. Its essence is sheer positivity.” An optimist looks around, finds a few signs of possible salvation or progress, and then concludes that “things will take a turn for the good.” But absolute hope is stranger, and in a way more extreme. It “arises in the face of the negativity of absolute despair,” Han writes, and becomes relevant at times “in which action seems no longer possible.” Hope emerges, paradoxically, when there’s seemingly nothing to hope for. The desert “allows it to germinate.”
Han—who was born in South Korea and lives in Germany, and who is best known for his critiques of consumerist online life, as presented in books like “The Burnout Society”—believes that we’re not used to hoping. We tend not to depend on hope, he writes, both because we’re not often in despair and because we live on treadmills of consumption. “Consumers have no hope,” he writes. “All they have are wishes or needs.” We wish for great Christmas gifts, or for bigger houses or upgraded laptops, or for dinners out; we slip into “a constant present of needs and their satisfaction.” But when we hope, we don’t hope for things we can easily name, or concretely acquire, or even specifically anticipate. For optimists, Han argues, “the nature of time is closure. . . . Nothing occurs. Nothing surprises.” When we need to be surprised, we rely on hope. Seeing nothing to be optimistic about, we hope that something new will come along—some not yet existing force that will knock the world onto a better track.
Han quotes Václav Havel, the heroic writer, dissident, and political leader, who was imprisoned for his democratic convictions before becoming President of Czechoslovakia and, later, the Czech Republic. “Hope is not prognostication,” Havel says. “It’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.” Instead, it is “an orientation of the spirit,” which “transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.” Hope involves a sense of distance—a consciousness of unrealized possibilities to which you somehow feel connected. Prison is a “particularly hopeless” place, Havel notes, and it’s in hopeless places that the abstract, unknowable, and perhaps transcendental nature of hope becomes most visible.
When you’re immobilized, hope involves a sense that something, somewhere, is in motion. Han cites one of Franz Kafka’s many parables. Imagine, Kafka writes, that you live in a provincial village infinitely far from the center of the empire in which you reside. The godlike emperor, whom you’ve never met or even seen, has, for some unfathomable reason, leaned down from his deathbed and dictated a special and secret message, intended just for you, to a courier. The courier is strong, and begins elbowing his way through the throngs that surround the emperor. But, even if he pushes through those crowds, he must still make it down the crowded palace steps, and then through the crowded “courts,” and then through the many sections of the “second outer palace,” and then through the mud-clogged streets of the imperial capital, and then all the way across the country to you. In short, he’ll never deliver the message. So, Kafka writes, “you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.”
This may make hope sound a little passive or woo-woo, and a little solitary. But Han thinks this isn’t quite right, either. We must distinguish between a weak, passive kind of hope, he writes, and a strong, active version. The strong version of hoping is a little like hunting: a person with hope “leans forwards and listens attentively,” trying to figure out what’s new in the world; she wants to pick up the scent. This kind of hope, rooted in enthusiasm and motivation, “develops forces that make people spring into action.” If you’re lost in the wilderness, and you have no idea which way to go, hope can sharpen your senses and urge you over the next ridge. And “the subject of hope is a We,” Han writes. We tend to want things for ourselves, but we hope for a more general future. Whatever the emperor’s message is, it’s not the winning lottery numbers; it’s something more profound, about who we are and how we fit in. And, in fact, we’re all dreaming of receiving such a message.
As a philosopher, Han has a spiritual bent. He seems open to the notion that hope is inherently transcendent—that it comes from God. But his basic premise doesn’t have to be religious; it suggests only that the world contains untold potential, that what we see in front of us isn’t all that there will ever be. It’s by helping us know this, Havel writes, that hope “gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”
When Han writes that “the subject of hope is a We,” he means partly that what we hope for is often a better, more connected kind of life, together with our families, our neighbors, or our fellow-citizens. But he also means that other people can be a source of hope, because they may see a path to that life when we can’t. Hope is other people: this can be a difficult idea to accept, especially when the other people seem extremely “other,” and see you that way in return. Still, there are more than a hundred and sixty million registered voters in America, and there’s no law saying that the way they think now will be the way they’ll think tomorrow. The same goes for politicians. Having a politics of hope isn’t just about saying the word. Hope isn’t a vibe; it involves a substantive search for the new, instead of sticking, out of doubt, to the old. This is risky—not just practically, but emotionally, even spiritually. Optimists and pessimists approach the future by diminishing their uncertainty. In contrast, Han writes, when we hope, we place a bet we can’t quite justify—we become “creditors to the future.” Will it pay us back, or rip us off?
There’s only one way to know. Our political culture tells us to see our opponents as uniformly awful—to reduce them to their vote—and yet ordinary human experience shows that most people are complex, decent, and just trying to get along. What should we prioritize: the stark binaries of politics, or the reality of people as we know them? Hope doesn’t deny how grim things are; it doesn’t look away from the news, or wish away the signs in the street, or sugarcoat the terrible plans of those coming to power. But it doesn’t deny the potential in people, either. “The hopeful expect the incalculable, possibilities beyond all likelihood,” Han writes. Which is to say that, if you don’t have hope, exactly—because you can’t quite picture what could fix this mess—that’s partly because life always involves seeing only part of the picture. The precondition for finding hope is having none. ♦
