HB 15

13. Global Hopes

            Many of our hopes are small scale, personal hopes.  We hope for a new job, for rescue when stranded, and for better relationships.  At a slightly larger scale we might hope that our school or business prospers, or that our city government solves its budget challenges.

            Recently I’ve been reading essays edited by Andrew T. Brei, in Ecology, Ethics, and Hope (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).  The thinking in this book emerges from the intersection of environmentalism and moral philosophy.  The authors are convinced that human destruction of nature, primarily through anthropogenic climate change but also exhibited in less extreme environmental ravages (air and water pollution, desertification, extinctions due to habitat loss, etc.), is either an accomplished fact or inevitable result of industrial society.  They all agree that climate change, caused by human release of carbon monoxide, will be an existential threat to civilization in the current century.

            What can we hope for in the face of global climate catastrophe?  But wait!  Before answering, let us consider other catastrophic possibilities:

1.     Since the mid-1950s human beings have had enough thermonuclear weapons to eradicate our species—and probably most other species as well—by means of heat, radiation, and nuclear winter.

2.     We’ve also invented non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical agents.  Such weapons, if used on a large scale, could depopulate vast areas.

3.     No one outside of government can know how far research has “progressed,” but many of us worry that bioengineering will enable the production of super-germs.  If released, either by accident or act of war, bio-weapons could kill almost everybody.

This list could be extended.  We are familiar with science fiction movies and novels that frighten us with economic collapse, race wars, totalitarian states, or meteors smashing into Earth.  Our apocalyptic imaginations range from pure fancy (invading aliens) to the very real threat of nuclear holocaust. 

Catastrophic climate change is different, say the contributors to Ecology, Ethics, and Hope, because climate change is not a mere possibility.  Anthropogenic climate change is already happening.  Given the extent of carbon monoxide we have already pumped into the atmosphere, even more drastic climate change will occur in the decades ahead—even if we could somehow stop producing greenhouse gases immediately.  But much of the general public, encouraged by certain business and political leaders, does not believe the scientific consensus.  And there are other people who, knowing that climate change is real and accelerating, have despaired that anything can be done to stop it.  So a great many people respond to the global climate change crisis with disinterest or lethargy.

As the title of his book suggests, Brei and his fellow authors recognize the situation as a moral crisis, not just a matter of scientific or technological expertise.  Our planet’s environmental crisis demands immediate and extraordinary action, they think, and such action is much less possible when people despair.  When preaching to the general public, environmentalists must offer people hope; without hope, people are very unlikely to take the dramatic actions needed to stave off disaster.

So we return to the question: How should we hope in the face of global catastrophe?  A number of other questions lie under the surface of this first one.

First: what is it we should hope for?  What is the “object-state” we desire?  Environmentalists differ in their answers.  At a minimal level, we should desire and work for a global environment that supports human life and civilized societies.  In some scenarios, climate change so devastates the natural world that industrial society collapses, decimating human population and leaving the survivors in a new stone age. 

More likely (though how can we estimate probabilities for a world fifty years hence?), industrial and technological civilization will survive.  Rather than depending on the natural world for resources (food, clothing, building materials), humanity will fabricate most of what it needs by means of genetic engineering, 3-D printing, and new inventions.  We would survive, and in some ways thrive, by using our technology to adapt to shifting climates.

Environmentalists have a word for this homo sapiens dominated world: the anthropocene period.  It is a new age of the earth, with a climate driven by the activities of one species.  Authors in Brei’s book say that we have already entered this new phase of our planet’s history. 

And that’s bad, they say.  These authors agree that nature—the wild, untamed world—is a good thing.  In the anthropocene era, nature ceases to exist; the whole world is controlled, used, polluted, fenced, or (possibly) protected by humanity.  The object-state we should desire and hope for, these environmentalists want to say, is one where nature is still nature, where our species lives symbiotically with other creatures and the natural systems of earth.

They want to say that, but many of them believe that it is already too late.  A pure “nature” is lost.  The best we can hope for is to minimize negative effects of the anthropocene.  So there is division among environmentalists.  They may agree that we need hope, but they disagree about the object-state we should desire.

Second: as a global crisis, climate change affects everybody, but no one person’s actions can bring about the desired object-state.  When an individual thinks of a pathway to a goal (e.g. taking a college class to get a better job) and acts on it, she often feels more hopeful, and her feelings help sustain her along the path.  But the only pathways toward solutions to the climate crisis involve hundreds of millions of people.  The contribution of any other person is so small compared with the need that it approaches zero.  How should we hope when our hopeful actions are infinitesimal compared to the task?

Third: the authors in Brei’s book identify despair as a vice.  Some of them admit to struggling with despair in their own lives as they think about the magnitude of climate change.  They do not use the word “presumption,” traditionally used to describe another vice related to hope.  (In Aquinas, despair is the vice of abandoning hope because the object of the hope is too hard, while presumption is the vice of assuming that hope’s object is already or easily attained.)  The environmentalists do recognize that some people have convinced themselves, without good reason, that “everything will turn out okay,” and thus fail to take necessary actions.  Though they don’t use the word, the vice they describe is presumption.

I think these features of environmental hope can be found in other cases of global hope.  In particular, the questions of object-state and individual action will attend to hopes in regard to eliminating poverty, preventing war, ending starvation, extending education to all, and other worthy “global” hopes.  What is it that we hope for in such cases?  What role, if any, does action play in such hopes?

HB 14

Interlude:

Retrospect and Prospect

            Can one write a philosophy book as a series of short essays?  Perhaps only in draft form; so far what I am calling the “Hope Book” seems choppy and disjointed.  I’ve adopted this mode of presentation as a way to squeeze writing into the school year.  I’m able to average about 1000 words a week.  The project certainly needs editing.  In anticipation of that task, here is a progress report, a look back and a look ahead.

            In chapter 1, I described the basic structure of hope: that it combines a desire for some good thing that is judged to be possible, neither certain nor impossible.  Chapter 2 listed four categories of hopes: immoral hopes (e.g. Don Juan’s hope to seduce his neighbor), innocent but unimportant hopes (e.g. that the Mariners win the pennant), morally praiseworthy hopes (e.g. Bernie’s hope to provide for his children after he dies), and the theological virtue of hope (which, for Aquinas, focuses on eternal friendship with God).  I mean that list to be suggestive, not definitive; there may be other important kinds of hope, and particular examples may lie in the imprecise boundaries between the four kinds.  In chapter 3, I introduced C.R. Snyder’s hope theory, which defines hope as entirely cognitive and claims significant therapeutic success.  Chapter 4 presented Adrienne Martin’s “syndrome” account of hope, which makes hope something more complicated than Snyder’s formula: pathways + motivation = hope.  Chapter 5 recounted an argument by Simon Critchley against hope—that is, an argument that many of our hopes are irrational and unwise.  In particular, Critchley complains about hope’s bad influence on public policy.  If the subject is “audacious hope,” Critchley sides with Nietzsche, not Obama.  In chapter 6, I turned to Adrienne Martin’s “incorporation thesis” to defend the rationality of hope against the philosophers’ typical modern criticism of hope, which Critchley illustrates.  Martin argues that there are two judgments in hope: a probability judgment that some outcome is possible and a practical judgment that the desired end is important enough to “license” oneself to hope for it.  Martin concludes that hope for very unlikely things can still be rational.

            Chapter 8 introduced Michael Bishop’s theory of positive causal networks, which he intends as a paradigm theory of positive psychology.  PCNs are “homeostatic property clusters,” says Bishop, and they are a real feature of the world.  In chapter 9, I dealt with a side issue.  Bishop’s theory will be controversial among moral philosophers, because he explicitly argues that wicked people can have happy lives, that human flourishing and moral goodness do not implicate each other.  Whether or not Bishop adequately defends his thesis on that point, in chapter 10 I argued that Bishop’s PCN theory gives helpful insight into hope.  Bishop’s book rather cavalierly treats hope as merely hopeful feelings, but his theory actually fits Martin’s syndrome account of hope very well.  Hope is complicated; it includes perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and actions—and more perhaps.  The various parts of hope reinforce each other just as Bishop’s PCN theory says the parts of a causal network reinforce each other.

            Having noticed the likeness between PCN theory and the syndrome account of hope, in chapter 11 I moved to the question of how we can develop hope.  We can learn to perceive the world in accord with knowledge, as when we train ourselves to see the world turning beneath a stationary sun.  So we can, I suggested, train ourselves to perceive the world in a hopeful way.  (Thick masonry prison walls become not just a barrier but also an escape route.)  Chapter 12 pressed the point a bit further.  We can attend to the world with hope, as the wounded hiker listens for any sound of a passing vehicle.  Chapter 13 returned to Snyder’s hope theory.  While the hope theory definition of hope is too simplistic, it does point to ways we can grow in hope: by thinking of pathways around barriers and by recognizing in ourselves motivation to use those pathways.

            I want to discuss at least as many aspects of hope in the succeeding chapters, but of course, since I haven’t written them yet, their contents are not yet determined.  In a preliminary way, here are upcoming topics:

            *Should a person prioritize his hopes?  Soren Kierkegaard wrote about hope as a “task.”  He thought a life could be concentrated into a central hope.  He suggested examples from literature and imagination of a life’s central hope.  But as a Christian, he also criticized many possible central hopes.  Our “task” of hope, he wrote, is to build a life around the right central hope.

            *Kierkegaard wrote as a Christian.  Does his notion of the task of hope square with biblical teaching about hope?  Is there a doctrine of Christian hope in the New Testament?  N.T. Wright, a bishop in the Church of England and a well-known Bible scholar, says there is.  He also complains that many contemporary Christians seem ignorant of the Bible’s teaching.  Many church people today, Wright says, have adopted notions of hope from popular culture rather than their own tradition.

            *Wright and Jurgen Moltmann try to describe an “ethics of hope.”  So far this book has focused on hope as a virtue in the lives of individuals.  Is it possible that hope could be an organizing principle in a social ethic?  What is the “ethics of hope”?

            *Is hope—as related to social questions—a purely Christian concern?  Jonathan Lear writes about “radical” hope, based not on Christian theology but on the observation that the goodness of the world is greater than our conceptual grasp of it.  Is Christian hope, based on a transcendent God, a version of “radical” hope?

            *It seems to me that Lear’s argument for a secularized radical hope ought to be paired (conceptually anyway) with “radical” fear.  I’m not enthusiastic about this idea, but it may need attention.

            *Thomas Aquinas identified two vices that contend against hope: despair and presumption.  Since I have written a few chapters about how to hope, perhaps I should have already included comments on these vices; how not to hope.  But the vices of hope impede our social hopes as much as the hopes of our individual lives, so reflections on despair and presumption will be appropriate at that time.

            I’m pretty sure that won’t be everything, but it is enough for now.

HB 13

12. Pathways and Motivation

            C.R. Snyder’s “hope theory” says that hope consists in two beliefs: that the individual can think of pathways toward desired outcomes and that the individual is motivated to use those pathways.  According to the theory, hope is entirely cognitive.

Now I think Snyder’s theory is too simple.  The hope syndrome (or positive causal network) includes other elements, such as the way we perceive things and the way we direct our attention to certain features of the world.  Further, it seems obvious that some of our actions contribute to the syndrome/causal network of hope.  Every time Andy Dufresne dropped bits of masonry in the prison yard, he reinforced his hope of escape.

Nevertheless, if we are asking how to hope, Snyder’s theory directs us to parts of the hope syndrome that may be especially amenable to agential control—at least, in regard to some of the things we hope for.  That is, we can see that certain things are true simply by introspection; and when we recognize their truth, hope is strengthened.

Imagine Andre, who wants a new job.  He’s been doing the same thing for fifteen years, working in a factory, office, or store.  He feels trapped.  Andre needs the income, since he and his wife have two children, but without more education he can expect no advancement.  Andre’s disappointment with his job seems to color everything in his life.  He’s frustrated with his children.  He often snaps at his wife, and then feels guilty about it.  He drinks too many beers.  Andre sees commercials for clinical trials of a new depression medication on television; it occurs to him that he might be depressed, though he would never tell anyone.  Andre’s family and religious upbringing strongly discouraged admission of mental illness.

Andre wants a new job, but it wouldn’t be accurate to say he hopes for it.  Michael Bishop would describe his state not as a positive causal network but a negative causal network.  If things keep going this way, Andre may develop clinical depression.  Various negative aspects of his life reinforce other negative aspects of his life—the kids’ medical bills, marking time on the job, his wife’s lack of understanding, the sky-high cost of a college degree, his drinking, his anger at his wife, feeling sad and trapped, the job…

Suppose that somehow Andre learned precepts of C.R. Snyder’s hope theory/therapy.  Maybe someone on the pastoral staff of his church lent him an article describing hope theory and met with Andre to talk about it.  Andre says the article intrigues him, but he doesn’t see how hope theory could apply to him.  He’s stuck; there’s nothing he can do to change his situation.  The pastor points out that Andre did read the article, and he did come to meet with the pastor.  So there are some things that Andre can do.  Perhaps in thinking up pathways to goals (a better job, a college degree, a better relationship with his wife, etc.) Andre doesn’t need to imagine every step of the way.  Perhaps he can think of little steps that take him part way to the goal.  Encouraged by the pastor, Andre says he could ask whether his company would pay for college classes.  Many companies offer such support, says the pastor, and even if Andre’s company doesn’t pay for education, making the inquiry might impress Andre’s managers at the company.  There is nothing to keep Andre from asking—if he wants to.  Andre realizes that he does want to.  By introspection, he sees that he has a possible pathway toward his goal and he is motivated to use it.  Andre says he will go to the human resources office tomorrow.  The pastor promises to meet with Andre again next week, just to make sure he carries through.

Obviously, this is only one step.  Andre will need to invent further pathways and find the motivation to use them.  Hope theory holds that such little steps increase a person’s hope.  We can readily imagine how Andre may feel more hopeful.  C.R. Snyder’s research team claims that positive affect often accompanies increased hope.  That is: once clients have the right beliefs about pathways and motivation, positive feelings will follow.  In real life hope may increase more slowly than our imagined case, though Snyder’s research team says that even simple interventions may increase hope in measurable ways.

Hope theory does not promise easy solutions for all situations.  Therapists may sometimes help clients to redirect their desires.  Suppose Andre wanted not simply a better job, but to become president of the company, a multi-billion dollar corporation with branches in ten different countries.  Hollywood fantasies sometimes promote the myth that “anything is possible,” but Andre’s pastor friend—precisely because he is a friend—should encourage Andre to focus on genuinely possible goals.  On Adrienne Martin’s “incorporation thesis,” we may “license” ourselves to hope for unlikely things if they have sufficient practical import, but it is not rational to hope for impossible things.

A question arises: can we hope for things toward which one sees no pathway?  According to my personal journal, in the 1980s I hoped and prayed for peaceful change to come to the Soviet Union.  As a private citizen in the United States, there was no pathway I could pursue, other than prayer, to achieve peaceful change in Russia’s government.  I don’t know what Snyder’s colleagues would say about such a case.  Does prayer for a thing count as a pathway toward achieving that thing?  Is it rational to hope for such a thing?

Snyder’s theory focuses on ordinary mundane goals: better jobs, better relationships, success in projects, etc.  Examples like hoping for peaceful change in a one-party state raise a different set of questions about hope.  Beginning with my next chapter I will explore extreme hopes.

Last Walk 12

The Last Walk 12:

Surprises

            The email said: “Thank you, Karen and Phil.”

            For a moment I was knocked off my pins.  The names, Karen and Phil, linked so simply, hit hard.  After 39 years, that link has been broken.

            The explanation is straightforward.  As department chair I had written an email to Karen Murphy, asking if she would consent to teach a couple courses for us next year.  Karen has served as instructor before, and she’s done good work.  If she was willing to teach, I wanted her.  I copied Paula Hampton on the email.  Paula is the department administrative assistant; she magically transforms the results of my phone calls and emails into neat spreadsheets.  Karen accepted my invitation to teach, so Paula happily filled in two more slots on the College of Christian Studies load sheet.  She replied to both of us: “Thank you, Karen and Phil.”

            The email surprise lasted only a second, until I saw that Paula meant Karen Murphy, not my Karen, the Karen.  For a second, though, the deep opened up.

            Some reminders shout their arrival in advance.  Karen’s birthday came in early February.  I imagined it would be a harder day than it turned out.  I was busy all day grading papers, exercising, shopping and attending basketball games; maybe that explains it.

            Other reminders are, well, surprises.  There’s an empty notebook on the end table by the couch where I watch TV.   How long has that been there?  I pick it up, and there is Karen’s handwriting.  It’s not just her words; her hand—the firm, clear strokes made by a woman who could have been an artist.  The deep opens again.

            She could have been an artist/composer, but for much of her life, she wasn’t.  She pursued psychology instead.  She worked hard to become a psychologist, and she made herself successful in her specialty, neuropsychological testing.  Looking back now, I think she would have pursued music, except for a disastrous first marriage.  Before we met, Karen endured three years of abuse, violence, and fear before she escaped her husband.  She went into psychology partly to seek healing of those wounds.  As the years went by and our marriage proved secure, she ventured ever more deeply into music performance and composition.

            Another surprise: only now, after she is gone, do I gain insight.

            I dread doing taxes this year.  For many years Karen and I did our taxes together.  We collected 1099s, W-2s, giving records, taxes paid, evidence of business expenses, and all the other details you need to fill in form 1040 and its schedules.  (Actually, Karen did most of the collecting, but I helped some.)  Then we would sit down together at my home computer and work TurboTax together.  (I’m not endorsing TurboTax.  It’s just the program we happened to us.  Using the same product repeatedly makes it easy to update records from one tax year to the next.)

            We had a system.  There’s something deeply irritating about doing taxes, at least for us.  If we tried to “plow through”—just keep at it ’til we’re done—we would exasperate ourselves.  Instead of plowing through, we took turns.  One would sit at the computer keyboard entering numbers, addresses, and justifications for claims; the partner would dig through the expandable file to collate receipts, reports, and other stuff.  We’d work on the tax program for an hour, then take a break; maybe come back to the job the next day. 

            But now my partner is gone.  I have to do it alone.  I’ll follow the old system of work-break-work-break.  I wonder what surprises there will be.  If tax season doesn’t bring them, something else will.

           

           

HB 12

11.  Paying Attention

            We can learn to perceive the world in hopeful ways.  That is to say: we have some measure of agential control over our perceptions.  In this chapter, I want to think about a particular aspect of perception, which we can call paying attention.

            I borrow an illustration from Mark Bernier, author of The Task of Hope in Kierkegaard.  (The example comes from one of Mark’s conference papers, not his book.  I will have more to say about the “task” of hope in a later chapter.)  Mark inspired the example, but he is not responsible for the lessons I derive from it.

            Imagine a man hiking a logging road in the Maine woods.  Hunting season is over, and winter has set in.  He visits the woods late in the year precisely because almost no one else does.  A farmer in a pickup truck waved to him an hour ago, the only person he has seen since leaving his car a hundred yards from the end of the pavement.  He loves quiet and the beauty of the forest.  On an impulse he leaves the road, walking down a slope into the stillness of nature.  The snow isn’t deep, and his boots keep his feet dry and warm.  He wanders deep into the wilderness.  He sees the forest as a natural cathedral, full of majesty and mystery.

            Then he slips.  The snow isn’t deep, but it concealed a soft patch or a fallen branch.  He falls, rolls, and hears a terrifying snap.  The pain of a broken leg surges through him, followed by a wave of fear.  He cannot walk.  Now five inches of snow—before, merely an element of forest beauty—constitutes a deadly threat, because he must crawl back to the logging road.

            He had planned to walk out of the woods in daylight.  Now?  At best he might reach the road before dark.  Out of cell phone range, the hiker realizes his survival depends on two things: reaching the road and the arrival of a rare passerby.  He chose this day for his hike partly because few vehicles would use the road, yet now he yearns for the sound of an engine.  If one comes, the loudest sound he could make is a scream.  His fingers curl around a stone; rising on his knees he might be able to throw it to the road and get the attention of a driver.  As he crawls uphill toward the road, he listens intently for any indication of a vehicle.

            Reflect for a moment on the hiker’s attention.  The beauty and serenity of the forest no longer register in his mind.  The hoped for sound of an engine is all that matters.  No one would fault the hiker for this.  His survival depends on hearing a vehicle and successfully signaling its driver. 

Notice how the hiker’s situation fits Adrienne Martin’s incorporation thesis.  It is not impossible that a car or pickup could come, though it is very unlikely.  The hiker rightly judges that the arrival of a vehicle is possible and that it is of great practical importance.  Therefore he “licenses” himself to hope for one.

The hiker’s attention resembles, but is slightly different from Andy Dufresne perceiving Shawshank Prison’s walls as possible escape routes.  In hopeful perception, one construes something or sees something as having certain features.  In hopeful attention, one is not construing or interpreting sensory information; rather he readies himself to receive certain information.  Hopeful perception (Andy Dufresne) interprets what already is; hopeful attention (the hiker) looks for what may be.

The difference I am describing between perception and attention is so small we might ignore it.  But I think it makes a practical difference for hope.  Sometimes hope interprets certain features of the world, while at other times hope anticipates or waits for things.

Imagine a Somali refugee in a sprawling refugee camp in Kenya.  She lived here with her mother for four years, until her mother died.  That was ten years ago.  Her desire to return to Somalia evaporated long ago.  She wants to emigrate to the United States.  To that end, with the help of aid workers, she has made application and submitted to interviews.

The refugee hopes to emigrate.  The decision lies in other people’s hands, people whose lives she can hardly imagine—ambassadors, presidents, immigration officials, and so on.  These people’s judgments are to her as inscrutable as the pronouncements of pagan gods.  Often she gets discouraging news: the quota is full this month, or a new president has decided that refugees from her country should be excluded from the United States.  She may interpret or perceive bad news as temporary setbacks; she persists in hope.  Additionally, though, her hope consists in attentive waiting.  Her hope not only colors the way she interprets today’s news, it anticipates tomorrow’s news.  It looks toward something that is not yet.

We will return to the notion of attentive waiting as a component of hope in a later chapter.

For now, back to our hiker.  Consider another feature of the hiker’s attention.  Out of many things he might attend to, he selects only a few.  He is listening for the sound of a car or truck to the exclusion of almost everything else.  Other sounds of the forest (admittedly, there aren’t many) he ignores.  Selective attention is true of all of us all the time.  The world presents us with a kaleidoscope of possible perceptions, and we cannot attend to all of them.  It is no objection against hope to say that in hope a person attends to only some aspects of the world.  Perhaps a perfectly rational and timeless being (i.e. God) would focus equally on every aspect of the world.  But this is not something we should expect of finite dependent creatures such as ourselves.

           

HB 11

10. Perceptions and Hope

            If hope is a syndrome, a positive causal network comprised of multiple elements, it may be possible to grow into hope in different ways.  In this and subsequent chapters, I will suggest ways that a person might move into hope.  Adrienne Martin includes “modes of perception” alongside motivations, feelings, and thoughts in the syndrome of hope.  I will begin by reflecting on the place of perceptions in hope.

            The first thing to notice is that different persons, or the same person at different times, can perceive a single reality in different ways.  A loud sound wakes up everyone in a motel; guests rush out of their rooms late at night.  Someone excitedly says he heard a gunshot.  The motel clerk calms everyone, returning them to their rooms: “The steam press in the factory across the street breaks a rod at least once a month.  My brother works there, and he says management is just too cheap to buy a new press.”

Suppose someone in fifth grade exclaims, “It’s snowing!”  The whole class looks out the window.  What do they see?  Some of them remember last week’s snowstorm, when school was canceled for two days.  Perhaps one of them will say, with hope, “It’s really coming down!”  Someone else, perhaps the teacher, who listened to the weather forecast on her drive to work, will say, “I don’t think so.  Look.  See how small the flakes are?”

Everybody is familiar with such examples.  Different people, seeing or hearing the same thing, do not perceive it in the same way.  Witnesses to a crime often give conflicting reports about what happened.  We know our perceptions are influenced by our beliefs, moods, and expectations.

Consider the way we perceive something as common as morning shadows. 

Long shadows stretch over the landscape at dawn and shorten as the morning progresses.  For millennia people said, “The sun is rising.”  That’s what it looks like.  The sun climbs into the sky, and the morning shadows flee.  But since Copernicus we know better.  We still use words like “sunrise” and “sunset,” but we know the sun only appears to rise or fall; in reality the earth is turning. 

Our perceptions are a way of construing the world.  Two people see evening shadows lengthening; one construes/sees the sun going down, and the other sees the world turning beneath a stationary sun.  Here’s the thing.  We can learn to perceive in according to knowledge.  With a little practice, we don’t see the sun “rising”; instead we see it standing still as the earth turns. 

            How does this apply to hope?  In The Shawshank Redemption, most of the prisoners at Shawshank prison regarded escape as impossible.  Andy Dufresne would readily admit that escape was unlikely, but he believed it possible.  Since he believed escape was possible, he noticed—perceived—something the other prisoners didn’t see: the thick masonry walls of Shawshank prison could be tunneled.  He noticed/perceived that his tunnel could reach the big sewer line and the sewer could serve as an escape route.

            Adrienne Martin’s example of the cancer patients, Alan and Bess, demonstrates the importance of perception in a slightly different way.  The doctors have told both patients the experimental drug has only a tiny chance of curing their cancer.  Objectively speaking, each knows the drug will almost certainly not help.  But they perceive the drug trial differently.  Alan does not hope.  Perhaps he joins the experiment thinking that at least this way his death can contribute to science.  He perceives the drug as an experiment only.  But for Bess, a one-in-ten-thousand chance is still a chance.  It’s possible the drug will cure her.  So she hopes.  She perceives each injection as a lever wedging open the door to life.

            One way to move into hope is to perceive the world the right way.  Some philosophers will immediately object that the only “right” way to see the world is in accord with evidence and reason.  We should never deceive ourselves into thinking our desired outcomes are more likely than they are.  It is important to remember that Martin’s “incorporation” thesis has already accepted this point.  Bess does not deceive herself that the drug has better odds.  She accepts the unlikelihood of success.  But she goes further than a probability judgment; she judges also that the hoped for outcome is practically important.  So she licenses herself to perceive the drug hopefully. 

It is rationally permissible and practically useful to train oneself to see features of the world in a hopeful way.  Andy Dufresne sees massive walls as possible escape routes.  Bess sees an experimental drug as a possible cure.  By perceiving the world in these ways, they strengthen other parts of the homeostatic property cluster known as hope. 

Hope works.  My research friend at the Oregon Health Sciences University, Kent Thornburg, reports that hopeful patients do better, on average, than those without hope.  C.R. Snyder hypothesized that psychotherapies based on very different theories of psychology all work (and there is evidence they do) because each therapy increases hope in patients.

            My point is not that one can create hope or cure depression by some simple mental trick.  I say again: a person’s perceptions are only a part of the syndrome of hope.  Nevertheless, because the way we perceive the world is at least partly a matter of training—we can learn to perceive the earth as turning rather than the sun as rising—we have some degree of agential control over perception.  We can learn to perceive the world in accord with hope.

HB 10

9 Hope:

Instantiating a Positive Causal Network

Most people like to think, with Aristotle or Epicurus, that goodness and happiness go together.  Or, like Kant, they think that goodness and happiness ought to go together.  Bishop’s 2015 book, The Good Life, challenges this predilection.  Well-being can be empirically studied, he argues.  We ought to accept what the research shows us.  If it shows us—and it does—that well-being can be achieved without goodness, we need to get used to that fact.

Bishop is not proposing a moral revolution.  He says that well-being is real, that it is objectively valuable, and that it can be studied empirically.  He says that individuals and organizations (including governments) should consider information supplied by positive psychology when deciding what to do.  But he does not say that well-being is the only factor decision makers should take in mind.  Bishop says that individuals or organizations may rightly decide that other factors outweigh well-being in some particular case; e.g. it may be morally right for a person to sacrifice some of his well-being to care for his mother, and a government may rightly decide not to adopt some policy that would increase overall well-being if that policy infringed the rights of some minority. Well-being is one factor among others when making moral decisions.  

            Now I think that makes good sense.  In science, we try to explain phenomena by reference to the fewest possible basic concepts.  A characteristic of a good theory is that it will be simple.  Very often, moral philosophers have tried to mimic theories in natural science by reducing morality to a single principle, such as Bentham’s notion of utility or Kant’s notion of the categorical imperative.  I think such attempts are mistakes.  Long ago, Aristotle wrote that we should not expect more precision in any given field of inquiry than is appropriate for that field.  In geometry and logic we can be very precise, but in inquiries like ethics we have to be content with a lower standard of exactitude.  It seems unlikely to me that a good theory of morality will be simple in the way theories in natural science are simple.

            Some years ago, the city planning commission, of which I was a member, agreed that we wanted to recommend a certain policy to the city council.  Writing a formal recommendation to the city council required that we include proper “recitals.”  Recitals include routine references to the history of the proposal—e.g. that duly noticed open public meetings were held for the discussion of the matter, —and, just as important, reasons for the policy proposal.  Various members of the commission tried to create justifications for the proposal by appealing to justice or fairness or equality.  But they became frustrated.  They thought the proposed policy was a good idea, but they could not figure out how equality or fairness supported it.  They felt stuck.  The proposal they wished to recommend did not promote injustice, but in honesty they could not say that it aided fairness or equality.  It was just a good idea.  Their difficulty was not caused by a defect in the policy but by their too narrow conception of the goals of city policy.  Once we admitted that the proposed policy promoted well-being (without infringing fairness), we had a ready “recital.”

            The point of the illustration is this.  Just as a proper conception of the goals of government cannot be reduced to a single principle (e.g. justice), the “goods” of a good life cannot be reduced to a single principle (e.g. utility or rights).  Bishop’s contention that well-being is only one of multiple goods reminds us of this point.  And he makes the point emphatically: it is possible for a wicked person to have well-being.  Well-being is an objectively good thing to pursue, but not at all costs.

I want to ask now how hope figures in Bishop’s theory.  Bishop doesn’t talk about hope very much, but when he does he uses it as an example of an “attitude.” For Bishop, attitudes are one of four elements of positive causal networks.  The others are feelings (aka “moods” and “emotions”), traits, and accomplishments.  Bishop intends, I think, that we understand these categories something like this.  Feelings happen to us.  Attitudes are something we take up toward the world and people.  And we live out our traits through dependable habits.  Thus, we experience varying levels of voluntary control over different components of a PCN.

By using hope as an example of an “attitude,” Bishop treats hope far too simplistically.  It is true that sometimes we willfully adopt a hopeful attitude; in this sense hope reflects our agency.  But hope is also very frequently a positive feeling, something that happens to us whether we will it or not.  And in the Christian tradition hope is a virtue.

Bishop’s “positive traits” are what we normally call virtues.  He gives friendliness, curiosity, and perseverance as examples of positive traits.  But he gives no attention to the traditional idea that hope is a virtue.  He seems to think of hope exclusively as hopefulness.  If so, then he’s wrong.

Most likely, Bishop mentioned hope only to illustrate the category “positive attitudes.”  His attention is on positive causal networks and the elements that contribute to them.  He’s not trying to give a thorough analysis of hope. This is both understandable and unfortunate, because I think hope serves as a pretty good illustration of the network theory.

What is hope?  As I explained in earlier chapters, modern philosophers define hope as a combination of desire and a certain kind of belief.  To hope is to desire some outcome while believing that it is possible (neither impossible or certain).  Since hope = desire + probability judgment, many moderns advise that we should restrict our hopes to highly probable outcomes.  Adrienne Martin, in her 2014 book, How We Hope, subjects this idea to devastating objections.  Borrowing language from Margaret Walker, Martin suggests that hope is a “syndrome.” Hope is marked not just by desires and perceptions (probability judgments can be understood as a kind of perception), but also by certain forms of attention, expression, feeling, and activity.  Hope is complicated.

That fits Bishop’s network theory beautifully.  Rather than use hope as an example of an “attitude,” Bishop would have done better to think of hope as a PCN, a complicated homeostatic property cluster.

Imagine Yakub.  Yakub has significant ambitions; he wants to begin a new career that will enable him to better provide for his family.  Because of religious discrimination in his country, even though Yakub is university educated, most occupations are closed to him in that country.  Yakub has a daughter who suffers from renal disease.  Medical care for his daughter is expensive and very hard to obtain.

Yakub is unique, but he is not unusual.  Many people face harsh obstacles in life.

Suppose that in spite of the difficulties in his life Yakub is hopeful.  We can think of this as an attitude that Yakub adopts as an act of will.  This seems to be the way Bishop thinks of hope.  But how does Yakub’s hopeful attitude play out in his life?

One result of Yakub’s hope is that he imagines ways he could move toward his goals.  C.R. Snyder called this “pathways thinking,” a crucial element in his hope theory.  In addition to imagining pathways, Yakub makes plans on the basis of his ideas and acts on them.  Sometimes, perhaps infrequently, his actions succeed; they move him toward his goals of better employment or healthcare for his daughter.

Now we have three elements: hope as an attitude, hope as imagination, and hope as behaviors.  We may well imagine that Yakub also experiences hope as a feeling, especially when his actions net some success.

Yakub may judge correctly that it is unlikely that he will get the employment he wants or the healthcare his daughter needs.  But he also judges, rightly, that these outcomes are possible.  So: hope also involves belief; Yakub believes certain outcomes are possible.  And further, as a practical matter, he judges that these outcomes are very important to him, and that therefore it is permissible and proper for him to hope.  In Adrienne Martin’s terms, Yakub licenses himself to hope.

Some people in Yakub’s situation would despair.  Yakub could despair.  But he doesn’t have to.  He can hope.

I contend that Yakub’s hope fits Bishop’s description of a positive causal network.  The various elements of Yakub’s hope reinforce each other.  They cohere in a “homeostatic property cluster” which can endure, in the face of many discouragements, for a lifetime. 

Many people have observed that hope can sustain people in harsh circumstances.  Bishop’s network theory may help explain why this is.  More precisely, his theory gives a framework for psychological research, and that research may explain how we may learn to hope.

In 1 Thessalonians, perhaps the first New Testament document written, Paul thanks God for his readers’ “…work produced by faith, labor prompted by love, and endurance inspired by hope.”  This is a familiar idea, that hope helps us endure hard times.  Later on, however, Paul wrote to the Romans that Christians should “rejoice in sufferings, because suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”  The idea here seems to be that hard times lead to hope.  The Bible reader might be led to object, which is it?  Does hope sustain us in hard times, or do hard times help us develop hope?

Both.  Practical experience teaches that a right response to hard times encourages hope and that hope helps us keep going in hard times.  Bishop’s network theory of positive psychology helps us conceptualize the matter.  Hope is not only an attitude we adopt toward life; it is a “syndrome” of perceptions, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors that reinforce each other.  Hope is, in Bishop’s terms, a positive causal network.  If that is true, we should expect multiple answers to the question: How do we hope?

Some aspects of hope may be involuntary, feelings that happen to us.  But other parts of the Syndrome/PCN of hope are voluntary.  We can “take up” attitudes.  We can examine evidence to judge whether a good outcome is possible.  We can imagine ways to accomplish our goals, and we can judge that we are motivated to act.  We can act in accord with those plans.  If hope is complicated, the things we do to hope will vary.