Delphic Maxim 62: Praise hope
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
62. Praise hope
A lot of the time, the dichotomies that people set up in life are pretty false. To make things simple, we have a habit of suggesting that things are either this or that, black or white, left or right, on or off. It’s a simple method of categorising — the most fundamental, in fact — and a decent heuristic that helps us analyse our world. So from the outset, I want to be clear that I don’t think the dichotomy of pessimism and optimism is an absolute, or that people don’t have shades of each (the opposite of a dichotomy being a spectrum).
But in a sense, people do fall somewhere on the spectrum between optimism and pessimism, which for now serves as a kind of crude approximation of hope versus despair. That’s not to say pessimistic people are always prone to despair — I think pessimistic people are often shrewd strategic thinkers. There’s a lot of value in pessimism. But that’s not today’s maxim — today the question is really “why is it virtuous to praise hope”?
It’s interesting that we’re not just talking about hoping as a verb, but the praising of hope instead. Hope can feel naive sometimes. It’s the politics of hope that drives progressive figures like AOC, or Obama. That kind of activated hope is deployed in imagining a better world than the one we already have. It’s distinct from the conservative view that things are good just as they are. A progressive worldview grounded in hope leans on the idea that things can get better.
That doesn’t mean that all progressive politics is grounded in hope — there is some that is grounded in despair or pessimism for the future (often because of serious moral and ecological crises that we face). This maxim ducks around the possible naivety of pure hope by suggesting that we should praise the ideal, perhaps, of hope. It’s a reminder that while we can be realistic and pragmatic, we shouldn’t be purely cynical. Hope is an imagining and an optimism, a sense of positive capability towards which we strive (as opposed to Keats’ negative capability — finding comfort in chaos and uncertainty). With hope, we imagine that there are solutions and possibilities, that situations don’t last forever, and that something better is on the way.
I take this maxim as a reminder that we should all be optimists — even if we are realistic optimists. I may see the value in pessimism, but I’ve never seen the value in being pessimistic, not as long as you are capable of maintain a critical, pragmatic worldview while being optimistic. Praising hope is a way to remind ourselves of the need for purpose and meaning, and that life is pregnant with opportunity for joy and growth.
Given all that, how could we be anything but hopeful for the future?
