Work, Pt 2

Some Thoughts about Work, Part 2

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest—

and poverty will come on you like a bandit

and scarcity like an armed man.

Proverbs 6:10-11 (repeated verbatim 24:33-34)

(New International Version)

            I concluded part one of this essay by claiming that there is a universal moral law, recognized in every culture:

The “moral law of labor” (revised): Every person who is able ought to work.

Obviously, I have not gone round the world to survey existing cultures, nor have I scoured history and anthropology texts searching for counter-examples.  If I haven’t done the empirical research, how can I be so confident?  By engaging in what might be called “experimental philosophy”:  Try to imagine an historical culture that had no moral preference for labor.  Once you realize that it can’t be imagined, you realize it can’t be real.

Experimental philosophy is not new with me.  Philosophers have long used thought experiments.  Here’s one from the philosopher James Rachels: How do we know that every society on earth has a moral rule favoring truth telling?  Well, try to imagine a society in which people could lie at any time, in which there was no belief that other people should tell the truth.  Sometimes I ask students to imagine a society that had no preference for telling the truth, and I ask, “What time is it?”  Someone invariably says, “Four-thirty” (or some other incorrect time).  I then chide the class for not being creative.  If there is no preference for truth, someone could just as well say “Oranges” as give a time.

You see the point?  Our preference for truth telling is so deep in us that we struggle to imagine a society where that expectation is entirely absent.  Different cultures have different rules about exceptions, that is, times when it is right to lie—perhaps it is right to lie to outsiders, to save a life, to spare someone’s feelings, and so on.  But no culture says it is right to lie willy-nilly, at any time to any person for any reason.  If there were no expectation of truth telling, language would collapse.  We would grunt at each other.

            Enough about truth telling.  Let’s return to the moral law of labor.  Can we imagine a culture that denied it?  I believe that today we can, and I will explain below.  But for most of human history it seemed obvious to everybody that people needed to work.  Therefore, every culture has had a moral preference for labor over idleness.

            Why?  Why have we always believed that people have to work?  The saying I cited above (which occurs twice in Proverbs, an indication of its importance in the minds of the ancient sages) points the reason, an explanation obvious to everyone in the ancient world.  If you don’t work, scarcity will overtake you. 

            Remember Paul’s words to Titus, which I cited in part one of this essay.  He wanted Christians to work in order to “provide for daily necessities.”  We all recognize that people have needs.  Human life is impossible if these needs are not met.  For all human history (until very recently, as I will explain) it has seemed obvious that many human needs can only be met through human labor.  And it has seemed obvious that we need to work hard; in the story of the fall (Genesis 3) God tells Adam that he will wrest his living from the ground by the sweat of his brow.  We hear echoes of an agricultural society in both Genesis and Proverbs, but the value of hard work was just as plain in pre-agricultural hunting or gathering societies.  Mercantile and industrial societies experienced the same truth.  Throughout human history, for most people in most societies, the margin for error was small.  A bad hunt, a bad harvest, a bad year with fishing nets, a plague of locusts, a plague of germs, an earthquake—peasants (i.e. most people) always lived close to economic catastrophe.  People needed to work hard to gain even a small edge against starvation. 

            I hope I have done enough to defend my assertion that the moral law of labor has been widely accepted.  Now I need to address certain complications.  Later, I will ask whether it is true.

(1)  Immediately someone will ask about the difference between needs and wants.  Much of the work we do aims at getting things we want but don’t absolutely need.  At various times individuals have recognized this fact, and they have said, in effect: “Hey folks!  We don’t need to work so hard.  If we learn to be content with only the things we truly need, we can live better lives.”  Epicurus, St. Francis, the Buddha, and Jesus are among the voices that call us away from the unending pursuit of more.  If these voices are right, then the moral law of labor—Every person who is able ought to work—has to be balanced with other moral values.  When I say that the moral law of labor is recognized in every culture, I do not imply that it is the highest or sole moral value.

(2)  What about people who work, but not to procure necessities?  The vast majority of human beings have been peasant laborers (herdsmen, hunters, farmers, etc.), but the history books are full of rulers and conquerors, prophets and priests, poets and philosophers, musicians and scientists.  If there are some “jobs” that don’t aim at producing the necessities of life, does that undermine my proposition that he moral law of labor is universal?  No, it doesn’t.  Rulers, artists, and scientists all engage in work; to that extent they obey the law of labor.  But it is true that they do not work to procure necessities, an extremely important fact.  Some work aims at producing non-necessary goods.  Such non-necessary goods include things like statues built to honor conquering kings, new religious rituals, and philosophy books and novels.

(3)  What is the difference between needs and wants?  If I admit that some people work to produce daily necessities and other people work to produce non-necessary goods, shouldn’t I give a perspicuous account of the difference?  No.  As an example, consider transportation.  Transportation of human beings and material goods has always been a necessity of life.  Even in the most technologically primitive cultures people needed to go to work (the field, the lake, the forest) and bring the products of their work back home (the cave, the tent, the house).  Over time, human beings met the transportation need by walking; by using beasts of burden; by building rafts, canoes, and ships; by driving trucks, cars, and buses; by building railroads; and by many other methods.  Pretty clearly, transportation of some kind is necessary to human life.  But every time people invented a new means of transportation (e.g. sailing ships), they incorporated that technology into their economy.  New forms of labor appeared, such as sailor, and the overall productivity of human labor increased.  Over time the higher level of productivity made it unthinkable to go back to an economy limited to earlier kinds of transportation.  Therefore, a particular mode of transportation may be considered non-necessary, in that human life went on just fine before it was invented, and a necessity, in that later forms of life require the higher productivity made possible by that form of transportation.

Unfortunately, in beginning this essay, I did not understand how its tendrils would lengthen.  It may become the blogger’s equivalent of the blackberry bush.  I will continue my examination of the morality of labor in part three, next week.

Work, Part 1

Some Thoughts about Work, Part 1

Our people must learn to devote themselves to doing what is good,

in order that they may provide for daily necessities

and not live unproductive lives.

Titus 3:14

(New International Version)

            In “Driverless Cars” I speculated that someday driving would be illegal.  Maybe that won’t happen; after all, people like to drive.  But even if human piloted cars remain legal, this much is almost certain: computer-driven vehicles will prove safer, more efficient, and cheaper to operate than human driven cars, trucks, and buses.  Some people disagree; they say a driver has to be able to respond to ever changing conditions on the road, and no computer program will be able to replicate human intelligence.  Further, even if a computer could be made smart enough to replace a human driver, it would be prohibitively expensive.

            I’m not going to wade into philosophical debates about artificial intelligence.  Whether or not computers can be built and programmed to achieve “true intelligence,” my driverless cars prediction can be treated as simply that, a prediction.  Just wait and see if I’m right: Sometime in the 21^st century, perhaps in my lifetime, computer-driven vehicles will surpass human piloted vehicles in terms of safety, convenience, and cost.

            Consider one implication of my prediction, i.e., that in America in the 21^st century, perhaps in my lifetime, nearly all driver jobs will disappear.  Taxi drivers, bus drivers, long-haul truckers, bus drivers, airport shuttle operators, forklift drivers, delivery truck drivers, and many heavy-machinery operators will disappear from the workforce.  I’m no expert, but I guess that amounts to several million jobs, and at least some of them are prime examples of a vanishing species, well-paying blue-collar jobs that require no college education. 

As I write this in 2015, many of our politicians and policy leaders worry greatly about income inequality.  Since World War Two, America has lost huge numbers of blue-collar middle class jobs as manufacturers have moved their operations from the United States to countries with lower labor costs.  Is this a problem, even a crisis?  If so, political leaders disagree dramatically about what to do about it.  If I am right about driverless cars, the elimination of most driver jobs will only exacerbate the debate.

            The advent of driverless cars is thus one more example of technology eliminating traditional job categories.  Economists often point out that this has been going on ever since human beings started inventing things.  Perhaps we only became aware of the disruptive force of innovation in the last few centuries, as the pace of technological change has grown ever faster. 

            Many economists are pretty sanguine about the phenomenon.  They speak of “creative destruction.”  Someone invented machines that can weave cloth from thread, which threw the cottage weavers of England into unemployment.  The children of the peasant weavers were forced to move into industrial cities where they had to find jobs in factories, jobs that their foremothers could never have imagined.  No doubt, the economists say, many people suffered in the transition.  Workers were abused, cheated, robbed of their traditional way of life, and for a time many of them experienced material conditions (crowded tenements, polluted water, urban crime, etc.) undoubtedly worse than their parents.  But, the economists say, eventually the overall greater productivity of new technology permitted a higher standard of living for everybody.   Our 21^st century political leaders have adopted this attitude.  In the face of ever-changing technology, they urge better education and re-education for the workforce.  We can’t stop technological change, policy leaders say; but we can shape society so that people suffer less from economic disruption.  Leaders on the left say public policies can be found that will more quickly spread the benefits of greater productivity to all people.  The right replies that redistribution schemes (through taxation and social welfare policies) interfere with creative destruction; we should trust market forces to spread wealth around.

            I’m not going to wade into that debate either, at least not now.  Instead, I want to reflect on “creative destruction,” the technological elimination of jobs, from a philosophical and theological standpoint.  I think there are profound questions about work, questions that may have revolutionary implications for human life and morality.

            In his letter to Titus, the apostle Paul said that Christians needed to provide for daily necessities and not live unproductive lives.  In context, it seems that Paul wanted the new Christians in Crete to win a good reputation for the Jesus movement.  (In the 1^st century all Christians were new Christians.)  The believers should be law-abiding, self-disciplined, honest, kind, and hardworking.  In every way they ought to live so as to make outsiders think well of Christianity.

            Now, there have been and still are interpretive debates about Paul’s letter to Titus.  For example, in the 19^th century, Christians disagreed whether Paul’s instructions in chapter 2—“teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything”—was an authoritative endorsement of slavery.  Again, I’m not going to discuss such disputes.  I’m not interpreting Paul here; I want to use him as an example.  Paul’s words exemplify a very nearly universal belief about the morality of work, a belief that I think must be critically examined.  Here is the belief in a raw, unrefined form:

            The “moral law of labor”: Every person ought to work.

Even a little reflection shows that as stated the “law” overstates the case.  Some people—infants, infirm old people, people suffering from certain diseases; in short, anyone who is unable to work—have no duty to work.  Their “daily necessities” must be provided by others; that is, by those who are able to work.  So we modify the raw form:

The “moral law of labor” (revised): Every person who is able ought to work.

In his letter to Titus, Paul takes this maxim, or something like it, for granted.  He assumes that everybody knows that people ought to work.  He wants Christians to win a good reputation for the movement by living up to a commonly accepted moral platitude.  The fact that it is a moral platitude shows that some people disobey it; that Paul had to instruct new Christians to obey it shows that some of them were tempted to disobey it.
I said above that Paul’s words express a very nearly universal belief about work.  Not just in the first century, and not just in the West.  I’m confident that the positive moral value of labor is a universal judgment found in every culture throughout human history. 

At this point some readers want to object: Give me a break!  You are a philosopher and “wannabe” novelist, not an expert in anthropology.  How could you possibly know that every culture endorses some version of the moral law of labor?

I will answer that question in part 2 of this essay.  After that, I will move on to a more important question: Is the moral law of labor actually true?

           

Copyright © 2015 by Philip D. Smith.

All rights reserved.  International copyright secured.

Driverless Cars: a very short story, except that it's not a story.

As silly as this piece may be, I think it has interesting implications.  Maybe I'll dig beneath the surface next week.

Driverless Cars

            Some day it will be illegal to drive cars.

            Don’t believe me?  The timeline will be something like this:

2014-2015: The first serious experiments with computer driven vehicles occur.  Sebastian Thrun, the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, teamed up with Google to build a working test model.  The driverless vehicles successfully traveled hundreds of miles on California roads without mishap.

2017: Volvo sells at least 100 driverless cars (a prediction the company made back in 2015).  Other auto manufacturers jump into the market.

2019: Amazon starts using computer driven forklifts at many of its delivery centers. 

2020: The first big lawsuit: Mrs. LaDonna Macready of San Francisco (where else?) sues Chevrolet for damages, alleging that a self-driving Chevy struck and killed her husband while he was crossing the street.  Eyewitnesses to the accident disagree whether the stoplight was green or not.  The jury endures 500 hours of testimony from Artificial intelligence scientists, including Sebastian Thrun, on both sides.  Chevrolet settles out of court shortly before the jury was to reach a verdict.

2022: The second big lawsuit, a Texas case, makes its way to the Supreme Court.  In Hinkelberry v. Honda, he court rules against the plaintiff, citing the lack of convincing evidence of computer malfunction in Mr. Hinkelberry’s car and the many scientific studies demonstrating the overall safety superiority of computer driven vehicles. 

2020-2035: Traffic fatalities decline steadily in the U.S., even as the number of cars, truck, and buses goes up.  Traffic engineers repeatedly document the superior safety numbers of driverless vehicles.

2027: Bus drivers in Portland, Oregon go on strike, protesting the use of driverless buses.  The transit authority, Trimet, threatens to fire the striking drivers.  In arbitration, the two sides agree that half of all buses will be human driven—for the next two years.  After that, the agreement specifies that as human drivers retire, computer driven vehicles will replace them.

2029: Nationally, one third of all vehicles on the road are computer driven.

2033: Pennsylvania is the first state to designate a “CVO” (Computer-driven Vehicle Only) highway, a high-speed connection between Pittsburg and Philadelphia.  CVO lanes had been adopted in metropolitan Atlanta, Washington, and Los Angeles the previous year.

2037: The third big lawsuit: Jennifer Sohappy, of Des Moines, sues Ralph Olds for damages to her computer driven car.  Testimony in court alleges that Mr. Olds had been piloting his car continuously for more than 55 minutes, and that he was distracted when he plowed into Sohappy’s car.  The jury awards Ms. Sohappy $105,000 to replace her vehicle and $2 million for emotional trauma.  Shirley Newwoman, famous co-host of This Minute America, denounces Olds for his selfish behavior.  “Mr. Olds told our correspondent that he, and I quote, ‘Likes driving.’  It is outrageous that 20^th century attitudes still endanger people on our highways!”

2039: Three fourths of all vehicles on the road are computer driven.

2044: A referendum in Hawaii declares all state highways and roads to be CVO routes.  A year later, the state legislature outlaws all human driving (except on private property, the so-called “golf cart” exception).

2047: The fourth big lawsuit: the Supreme Court rules, in Stoneface v. Hawaii, that there is no constitutional right to drive cars.  Charles Stoneface had tested the Hawaii law by driving his lawnmower between his primary residence and his son’s house, a maneuver that led him to drive 150 feet on a public road.

            2051: Wyoming is the last state to outlaw human driving on public roads.  Nevertheless, the picture of a rugged cattleman, riding his all terrain vehicle across the windswept Wyoming countryside, is still a common feature of beer commercials during National Football League holovision programs.  Of course, football fans know that real Wyoming ranches use computer guided drones to move cattle from place to place, but the image of the rugged ATV rider still sells more beer—certainly more than pictures of computer programmers sitting at their desks.

Vices Opposed to Hope

How to Not Hope

            Hope looks forward to some good future.  The excess of hope is presumption; the deficit of hope is despair.

Aristotle taught that moral virtues fall between two vices, a vice of deficit and a vice of excess.  For example, the virtue of generosity is somewhere between stinginess, an unwillingness or reluctance to give in situations where giving is appropriate, and prodigality, unreasonably giving too much.  One can miss the virtue of courage through cowardice, too little willingness to face danger in situations where facing danger is appropriate, and through foolhardiness, an irrational taking on of risk and danger.  This idea is often called the doctrine of the golden mean.  Aristotle warned that virtue should not be thought of as a numerical average, as if courage was exactly balanced between cowardice and foolhardiness; he thought courage was more often closer to rashness than to cowardice.  It takes good judgment to know how a virtue should be expressed in a particular situation. 

            It’s important to notice the role of good judgment, or reason, in Aristotle’s doctrine.  Actually, the word he uses is phronesis, usually translated “practical wisdom.”  Aristotle thought the intellectual virtue, practical wisdom, had a role in guiding and nurturing moral virtues, such as courage, moderation, or generosity.  It is only by phronesis that one recognizes that this is a situation requiring courage or that this is a situation requiring generosity.  And if it is a situation requiring generosity, it is phronesis that helps one judge how much and in what way one ought to give.  Someone who woodenly follows rules for giving (e.g. “Always give ten percent of your income to your local church”) may find herself creating trouble whereas the giver with practical wisdom effectively blesses those around her.

            For Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle was “the philosopher.”  On most topics, Aquinas adopted Aristotle’s teaching as far as he could; up to the point where Aristotle contradicted the Bible or the creeds of the church.  For example, Aristotle wrote that the world might be an eternal creation of the unmoved mover (God), or the mover may have caused the world at some point in time.  Aquinas could not simply approve this conclusion, since scripture and creed say that God created the world at a certain point.  So Aquinas said that philosophically, Aristotle was right; though reason demands the existence of God (unmoved mover), it does not say whether God creates the world at a time or continually creates the world.  It is only by revelation that Christians know what Aristotle did not know, that God created the world at a time.

            Aristotle did not identify hope as a virtue.  Guided by the New Testament, Aquinas had to acknowledge hope not only as a virtue, but also as a particularly important one.  (1 Corinthians 13:13: “These three remain: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.”)  Aquinas called these virtues “theological” virtues, in that they focused on God and were “infused” in the believer by God.  Since “the philosopher” did not know the Christian gospel, he could not be faulted for not discussing the theological virtues.   Aristotle’s ethics was not wrong, merely incomplete.

Nevertheless, Aquinas adopted Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, and he applied it even to hope.  Christian hope—the theological virtue—has the same structure as natural hopes.  A person can go wrong about hope in two ways, through despair and presumption.

Let’s imagine a case of hope as a natural virtue.  Suppose Nancy would like to gain a promotion at work.  Obviously, the promotion is a future outcome that Nancy desires.  It is not a mere fantasy; if it were, Nancy might wish for a promotion, but she wouldn’t hope for it.  Nancy’s case fits Aquinas’s description of natural hope: a desire for a future good that is possible but not certain.  (Aquinas says that even animals can display natural hope; the hound chases the hare only when he thinks he may catch it and gives up the chase when it is impossible.)  On Aquinas’s analysis, the fact that Nancy wants the promotion does not guarantee that she hopes for it.

First: despair.  Nancy may think that her supervisor unfairly favors Edith, who also works in the department.  Perhaps Nancy is convinced that she lacks the necessary qualifications.  Maybe she thinks that she never gets a break.  And so on.  Though I just said that Nancy “thinks” or “is convinced” of certain things, the elements of despair do not have to be consciously cognitive.  Nancy may just see the world (or the office) as disallowing her promotion.  Her feelings of inadequacy may play a role.

Vice can be just as complicated as virtue.  In another post, I adopted Adrienne Martin’s suggestion that hope is a syndrome.  Despair may also be a syndrome.

Second: presumption.  Perhaps Nancy believes the supervisor despises Edith.  Maybe Nancy has recently attended a seminar on positive thinking and she willfully repeats her hourly mantra: “I am qualified, I am ready, and I will succeed.”  Or maybe Nancy’s Uncle Fred, a vice-president in the company, has taken to visiting the department every afternoon and Nancy sees his presence as her lucky charm.

Aquinas would say that in neither case does Nancy truly hope for the promotion.  A person doesn’t hope if she can’t see herself getting the good thing she desires.  Nor is it hope if she thinks the good outcome is a sure thing.

Aquinas would apply the same analysis to theological hope.  What is the good outcome the Christian desires?  Ultimately, the Christian desires the “beatific vision.”  One way to express this is to say that the Christian desires to know God as an intimate friend.

Even a little reflection marks this good as a very high goal indeed.  How can a finite person, someone who lives a few decades on Earth, hope to be a friend, a companion, of an infinite, transcendent God?  How can a sinner who acknowledges his moral faults—yet knows that his self-knowledge is at best partial (he probably has forgotten most of his sins)—be comfortable with a perfectly holy God?  The more one contemplates the ontological gap between an infinite Creator and a finite creature, the more one can fall into despair. 

But that isn’t the whole story.  To escape despair, the Christian must remember grace.  The incarnate God has done all the heavy lifting; by his death and resurrection, Jesus brings us into fellowship with God.  Christians, Aquinas says, must recognize despair as a temptation.  It is a vice.  If we persist in it, it is a sin, and a particularly dangerous one.  The person who despairs will not repent, because he somehow believes that not even God’s grace can save him.

Sometimes Christians go to the other extreme.  Perhaps they reflect for a time on God’s love and grace to sinners, and they conclude that the great good of friendship with God is a “done deal.”  In fact, God is already their pal.  There really is nothing to hope for.  This is the vice of presumption, and it has its own dangers.  In its worst case, presumption sees no need for the atoning work of an incarnate God, since God’s love always conquers all.

Hope is a virtue.  Like other virtues, it can be improved by habituation—by practice.  Part of practice is to recognize and reject despair and presumption.

Another hope essay

Hoping and Waiting

Those that wait upon the LORD will renew their strength

They will fly on wings like eagles

They will run and not get tired

They will walk and not faint.

Isaiah 40:31

            Old Testament scholar, Howard Macy, tells me that the Hebrew word translated as “wait” in this verse could just as well be rendered as “hope.”  So the NIV says: “… those who hope in the LORD…” I think there is something subtle and important here, though I am not at all confident that I can explain it.

            I agree with Adrienne Martin that hope is a syndrome; that is, it typically combines thoughts, perceptions, feelings, motivations, imaginings, and actions.  We think about the good thing we desire, we imagine what it would be like, we are motivated to certain actions, we perceive or interpret events in the world in the light of our hope, and we are encouraged or strengthened to carry on.  But the various signs and symptoms of a syndrome are not necessary conditions; they appear differently in different cases.

            Consider Marty McFly in Back to the Future.  By accident, Marty has taken a time machine (cleverly disguised as a DeLorean, a futuristic-looking car manufactured only in the early 1980s) to 1955.  After a number of adventures there, Marty wants to return to 1985.  He and Doc Brown devise a plan to send Marty back to the future, a plan that requires them to achieve split second synchronization between a lightning bolt and the position of an accelerating car.  (Hollywood movies are very realistic.  Right.)  The wackiness of the story doesn’t change the fact that Marty hopes.  On the basis of his hope, Marty and Doc Brown take actions that put both their lives in jeopardy.  This light-hearted fantasy connects hope very closely with action.

            If we reflect only on cases like Marty’s—e.g. Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption—we might conclude that real hope always motivates action.  We might say, “If someone doesn’t act on her hope, it isn’t genuine hope.”  Not so fast.

            Consider a much more famous character, from a classic story: Penelope in The Odyssey.  For more than twenty years, Penelope waits and hopes for Ulysses to return from the Trojan War.  Marty McFly and Andy Dufresne took definite actions that aimed at bringing about the thing they hoped for.  Marty drove the time machine toward the electrical connection at just the right speed and just the right time.  Andy spent years digging his escape tunnel.  But Penelope can do nothing to bring Ulysses home.  Her hope is displayed in a kind of waiting.

            Hold the phone!  Someone might object that Penelope’s waiting and hoping was hardly passive.  Penelope hoped that her husband would return and that their lives together would return to normal.  She did lots of things appropriate to her hope.  Most importantly, she did not marry one of the suitors; she could only marry if she abandoned her hope for Ulysses’ return.  And it was not merely a case of saying no; Penelope resorted to various stratagems to put off the suitors; e.g. unraveling at night the weaving she performed during the day.

            So: while Penelope’s actions were not aimed directly at bringing about the thing she wanted, it is not true that she “merely” waited.

            Let’s consider, then, another character, Jeremiah.  Now we move from fiction to history.  Some people might object to that statement; virtually every Bible character has been made the subject of historical skepticism.  But I am interested in Jeremiah as a character in a story, so it doesn’t really matter.

            Jeremiah lived and prophesied through the final turbulent decades of Judah’s independence, roughly 615-580 BC.  In contrast to the official court prophets, Jeremiah predicted disaster for Judah.  The Babylonians were going to win, he said.  The king was going to be captured.  Jerusalem would be burned.  Young men were going to die and young virgins taken as war-booty.  No wonder some of his fellow Jews thought Jeremiah was a traitor.  His prophecies were hardly helpful war propaganda.

            Jeremiah’s prophecies came true in excruciatingly painful stages.  Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar captured Judah’s king Jehoiachin and most of Judah’s nobles and exiled them to Babylon; he installed Jehoiachin’s uncle, Zedekiah, as a puppet king in Jerusalem.  But Zedekiah listened to nationalists and patriots, who said that God would help them defeat the pagan enemy, so he rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar.  The final disaster came in 586, when Nebuchadnezzar burned the temple, killed Zedekiah’s sons (and put out Zedekiah’s eyes, so the last thing he ever saw was the death of his sons), and exiled even more Jews to Babylon.  Nebuchadnezzar installed a Jewish governor, Gedaliah.  But before long, the patriots assassinated Gedaliah, so once again the Babylonian army invaded to punish Judah.  The patriots then fled to Egypt, taking with them a prisoner—Jeremiah.

            Throughout all this suffering, Jeremiah consistently preached disaster and defeat.  God was not going to fight for Judah, he said.  God was fighting for the enemy, bringing judgment on Judah for a variety of sins.  If the Jews had any sense, Jeremiah said, they should surrender to the Babylonians to preserve their lives.  More importantly, they should repent of their sins and obey the covenant.

            As I say, it’s easy to understand why many of Jeremiah’s contemporaries thought he was simply a traitor.  In reality, though, he anguished over the suffering of his people.  (According to tradition, Jeremiah wrote the hauntingly beautiful Lamentations.)  And at the nadir of his dark prophecy, he announced a “new covenant”: “The time is coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers…”

            Christian authors in the New Testament claim that the new covenant has come true in Jesus.  Jewish interpreters, as you would expect, have a different reading of Jeremiah’s prophecy.  We don’t have to settle that debate in order to see that Jeremiah models a different aspect of hope for us.

            Picture Jeremiah in your mind’s eye.  See him counseling Zedekiah to reject the advice of the patriots and submit to Nebuchadnezzar—and then imagine his anguish when Zedekiah’s stupidity brings siege and defeat.  Imagine Jeremiah taken captive to Egypt by fools who rejected his advice again.  For Jeremiah personally and for the country he loved, every thing had turned to ashes and gravel.  In the end, he died a prisoner in Egypt, where he never wanted to go.

            And still he hoped.  Jeremiah could do nothing to bring about a good future for himself.  At one point in the story, God told Jeremiah to go buy property in his hometown of Anathoth.  How strange!  Jeremiah was no farmer, and he had no children, so no one would inherit his property.  Jeremiah bought the parcel as a symbolic gesture; someday Jews would again buy land and farm in Judah.  But that was the extent of it.  Jeremiah’s purchase was purely symbolic.

            Still, he hoped.  Jeremiah believed that God would bring about a good future for Judah, a good future so far from anything he or his contemporaries knew that it would require a “new covenant.”  Jeremiah hoped in a transcendent power, in a good future that he could not well describe.

            How does one hope in this kind of case?  Hoping, I think, is a kind of waiting.  Perhaps not in all cases, but in some.  Sometimes we can’t do anything, but we hope anyway.

A Hope Essay

Hope as a Syndrome

            According to the fount of all immediate knowledge, Wikipedia, a “syndrome” is “a set of medical signs and symptoms that are correlated together.”  Let’s work with that.

Once a correlation between signs and symptoms has been identified and accepted by physicians as important, doctors who encounter one of the signs or symptoms in a patient can be alert for the possible presence of the others.  The known association of one sign or symptom with another can be useful even before the cause of the syndrome is discovered.  Sometimes, as with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, a single direct cause is found, e.g. a virus.  In other cases, such as toxic shock syndrome, we learn that multiple causes can produce very similar clusters of symptoms. 

The concept of a syndrome gets used in wider circles.  In psychology, “syndrome” labels many different clusters of dysfunction.  For example, the Munchausen syndrome, sometimes called “hospital addiction syndrome,” is marked by the patient repeatedly feigning disease, often many different kinds of disease.  Researchers speculate that Munchausen patients are trying to gain sympathy or attention, but psychologists do not have a single theory about the cause of the syndrome.  Obviously, researchers would like to discover the cause or causes of such disorders/syndromes, but in some cases treatment can begin without that knowledge.  It is enough to know that x correlates with y, and that such-and-such treatment can reduce the negative effects of the syndrome.

Now let’s move further afield.

Philosopher Adrienne Martin borrows a usage from Margaret Urban Walker, who calls hope a syndrome.  Martin and Walker want to drain all the negative connotations from “syndrome” when talking about hope.  In medicine and psychology, syndromes are bad; Martin and Walker think hope is good.  The idea is that in hope there are recognizable correlations or associations of a variety of signs or symptoms.  Walker says, with Martin approving, that hope is “characterized by certain desires and perceptions, but also by certain forms of attention, expression, feeling, and activity” (my emphases).

That’s an amorphous and seemingly vague collection of descriptors.  Does it really help us to call hope a syndrome, if the list of signs and symptoms covers so much space?

Maybe.  Martin adopts the syndrome definition of hope because she is reacting against a definition of hope that has dominated modern philosophers’ discussion of hope.  (In philosophy we say anything after 1650 is “modern.”  So the modern philosophers Martin disagrees with include David Hume, who died in 1776.)  Martin says that modern philosophers generally agree that hope has two parts: a desire that some outcome occur along with the belief that the desired outcome is neither impossible nor certain.  Martin calls this the “orthodox” view among modern philosophers (which may be read as a humorous gibe at most of them, who would hate being labeled orthodox in regard to almost any subject).

The modern “orthodox” definition of hope: Hope = Desire + Belief that the desired thing is possible but not certain.

Martin agrees with this definition as regards belief.  We might wish for things that we know are impossible, but we don’t hope for them.  And it hardly seems right to say we hope for something we already have or that we are absolutely certain to receive.  So it seems that we hope for things we believe are possible but not certain.

The place where Martin disagrees with the modern definition regards “desire.”  She points to cases of “hoping against hope,” that is, cases in which people hope for very unlikely things.  Martin asks that we imagine two cancer patients, Alan and Bess.  The doctors have told Alan and Bess that the experimental drug they would like to try has only a 1 in 10,000 chance of curing them.  Alan and Bess both agree to the drug trial, but while Alan holds only faint hopes for a cure, Bess hopes strongly.  Now, Martin asks, how should we explain the difference between them?  If hope is defined only as desire + belief, it seems we must say that either Bess desires a cure more than Alan or that she is somehow fooling herself about the chances that the drug will help her.  Martin, who has spent time with actual cancer patients, says neither of these explanations will do.  Even if, in some cases, one person deceives herself about the likelihood of her desired outcome or has stronger desires, is it likely that this is true in all cases of hoping against hope?

Martin says we need a better analysis of hope.  Hope is not merely desire + belief.  Other things come into play, and that leads to the syndrome analysis of hope.

When we hope, we think about the outcome we desire.  We may imagine what it would be like if the hoped for outcome occurred.  We let our minds dwell on it.  The presence of hope in our mind makes us alert to happenings around us; we perceive events differently.  Hope is often accompanied by positive feelings; in a sense, we rejoice in anticipation of the hoped for outcome.  Hope sometimes affects the decisions we make.  When we hope, we are able to suffer setbacks without despairing of the eventual good result.

Thought, imagination, perception, emotions, decisions, and actions: on the syndrome analysis hope is complicated.  That sounds right to me.

Martin asks us to consider a recent parable of hope, The Shawshank Redemption.  Andy and Red are friends in Shawshank prison.  Red, a prison veteran, warns Andy against hope.  “Let me tell you something, my friend.  Hope is a dangerous thing.  Hope can drive a man insane.”[1]  Against Red’s advice, Andy hopes to escape. 

For more than 20 years, Andy entertains certain thoughts.  He lets himself feel certain feelings.  He imagines certain future scenes.  He plans and executes certain actions.  In the story, Andy eventually escapes.  But the value of hope does not depend on this happy outcome.  Andy’s hope sustained him through many years of imprisonment, and he would have enjoyed this benefit even if his escape failed in the end.  The moral of the story is expressed in Andy’s words to Red: “Remember, Red, hope is a good thing.  Maybe the best thing, and no good thing ever dies.”[2]

If hope is as complicated as the syndrome analysis suggests, it may be that we understand it best through stories.  A narrative can show how the different “signs and symptoms” hang together.

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[1] The Shawshank Redemption.

[2] The Shawshank Redemption.

The Hope Project

          As a moral philosopher, I focus on what is called "virtue theory."  It's a theme reflected in some titles: Learning to Love: Philosophy and Moral Progress (my dissertation), The Virtue of Civility in the Practice of Politics, and Why Faith is a Virtue.  Currently, I'm reading and thinking about hope.  Here is a little essay from my recent work.

Imitatio Christi and Christian Hope

“We have this hope as an anchor for the

soul, firm and secure.” (Hebrews 6:19)

      What is Christian hope?

      The first thing we need to say is that the adjective matters.  Christian hope is both like and unlike natural hopes.  Christian hope is a supernatural hope; it is essentially linked to God, rooted in God’s promises.  Like our natural hopes, Christian hope looks forward to some good thing.  It is the goal, the good thing we anticipate, that distinguishes Christian hope from natural hopes.

      So what is it that Christians hope for? 

1. In the words of countless beauty pageant winners, do we long for “world peace”?  Jesus taught his disciples to pray for God’s kingdom to come and for God’s will to be done on earth.  Biblical scholars tell us that the “kingdom of God” includes far more than absence of war.  God’s shalom means personal and social well-being; it means wholeness and blessedness.  The kingdom of God brings justice, both in the sense of judgment against our sins and in fair distribution of good things.  Should we say that Christians hope for the kingdom of God?

2. Do we want to meet loved ones in heaven?  (Or, like Socrates, to meet famous persons and discuss philosophy with them?)  This idea has been part of Christian thinking from the beginning.  In 1 Thessalonians, which may be the first New Testament document written, Paul reassures the Christians in Thessalonica that those believers who had “fallen asleep” were not thereby cut off from God’s promised future.  He says that at the parousia dead Christians would rise first, to be joined by those who were living at the time of Christ’s return.  Countless Christian funeral sermons have assured believers that they will see the beloved departed again.  Is this the Christian hope, to see and know those who have died?

3. Paul’s correction of Thessalonian misunderstandings concerning resurrection underscores the crucial importance of resurrection in Christian doctrine.  In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul insists that if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Jesus has been raised, and in that case Christian faith is useless.  Should we say, then, that Christian hope is hope for resurrection?  Undoubtedly, many ordinary believers would say they hope for “eternal life,” in the sense of living forever.[1]  We may conflate a hope for resurrection with a hope to live forever.  Is this the Christian hope, that we will live again?

4. In 1 Corinthians 13:12, Paul says that in heaven we will see God “face to face” (in contrast to seeing now “through a glass.”)  Thomas Aquinas and other Christian theologians have said that the highest Christian aspiration is to know God directly, without intellectual mediation: to “see” God.  So perhaps the Christian hope is not merely that we will live in heaven, but that we will directly know God.  Is this the Christian hope, to experience beatific vision? 

The New Testament supports all these notions, and they are part of what we anticipate.  They are all partly right answers.  Nevertheless, I want to propose another response.  1 John 3:2 says, “when Christ appears, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is,” (my emphasis) and the next verse connects being like Christ with hope: “All who have this hope in him purify themselves…”

I suggest that Christian hope aims at a familiar New Testament theme: being like Christ, imitatio Christi.  Christian ethics, from a virtue theory perspective, is the pursuit of Christlikeness.  We want to be like Jesus.  “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus…” Paul says to the Philippians.  “Fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith…” says the writer of Hebrews.

Imitatio Christi is not an ethic of rules or laws, saying “do this” or “don’t do that,” so much as a character goal.  Christians are to grow into the virtues of Jesus, the fruit of the Spirit.  We are to be like Jesus.  On one hand, this is an impossibly high goal.  As Jesus said, we are to be complete or perfect (teleios) lovers (Mt 5:48).  Like Paul, in this life we are always pressing on toward the goal God has set before us (Phil 3:14).  This side of resurrection, Christians are people on the way, pilgrims.[2]

Hope is a virtue for pilgrims.  We do not minimize the wonder or greatness of the goal.  Thus we are saved from the vice of presumption.  But we also remember that Christian pilgrimage is always supported by God’s grace.  So we avoid despair.  In between presumption and despair, we live in hope.

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[1] Some biblical scholars have argued that “eternal life” as used in John has a different, or at least richer, meaning than life that endures without end.  These scholars say that in John’s gospel, “eternal life” indicates a quality of life, life lived in intimate friendship with God.  On this view, “eternal life” may or may not imply unending personal existence.  I think it is safe to assume that few ordinary believers have this idea in mind when they hope for eternal life.

[2] What happens after the resurrection?  Some people imagine the eternal state as something static, but I imagine it as one of eternal exploration of the wonders of God.  We may always be people on the way.