Hope

Hope was our theme in the advent service last Sunday. I have some eccentric thoughts about hope which you may correct by yes-butting them into submission or avoid by tossing this note in the basket.

If you are like me, you imagine you know what hope is because you have experienced it. Then you are thinking like a poet. Hope is one of those fuzzy words that poets use to alter the mental state without relying on prosaic arguments. I sometimes use that technique myself. Not today, apparently.

If you think like a scientist instead of a poet, hope isn't so simple. It has hidden dimensions including knowledge, ethics and action. Hope is one of the mental states generated by the corpus striatum and nucleus acumbens and those other thingies in there. If you are foolish enough to click that link, you will spend a couple of days discovering that hope is the feeling that the end of the article is coming soon. You already knew that feeling because you've been reading this article. What follows here goes beyond feeling.

So let's save some time. You don't know what hope is. I don't know what hope is. Let's probe the meaning of hope with a fable and find out together.

This fable is about an eel swimming around in the warm, acidic, plastic laden Sargasso Sea. She's thinking, "Those pesky humans have been trashing the ocean. I hope they go extinct and we have a nice clean, cool ocean for my baby eels. I just can't think of a way of making that happen." 

Like the eel, we know the feeling of seeing our world being destroyed. We are afraid, tense, vigilant, distressed, and it's exhausting. Hope invokes relief. That's usually enough. But there's more.

There's knowledge: knowing or not knowing, being unsure so you want to find out more, or believing you know when you don't, or believing things that you know ain't so. I don't suppose that real eels know the source of the plastic messing up the ocean. But if we put ourselves in the story in place of the eel, we know who is to blame, even if we would like to forget it. Sometimes we willfully suppress knowledge of what is happening to give ourselves hope.

Then there's ethics. Eels and many others would feel good if humans went extinct, but whether that would be ethically good is another issue depending on where duty lies. As for me, I hope that humans don't go extinct, but I can see that isn't so good for the eels. They would be better off without us. You're thinking I'm a crazy eel hugger. I'm just saying that the goodness of hope depends partly on who your friends are and we may hide that ethical dimension to get relief from distress.

Moving along, if you have an idea of what to do, there are three options: make things better, do nothing, or make things worse. If we want to make things better but don't know what we are doing, we may make things worse. We might choose to do nothing because it's up to the experts or the government or luck or God or it's just too much bother, and doing nothing could make things better or worse. Making things worse would be crazy but making things better locally can make things worse somewhere else, and making things better now can make them worse later. You see, it's complicated.

Therefore, when we get all blissed out on hope at Christmas, let's stop and consider that hope implies knowledge, ethics, and action. 

You were hoping for the end
and here it is. 

That's today's lesson.
Now we have homework.
Pay attention to what's happening.
Make a plan.
Get to work
and make things better.

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Advent, Climate and Nonviolent Action: Climate Justice Colloquy

Corporate Net Zero: Just Have a Think