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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.

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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.

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8. Positive Psychology and Morality

A fundamental idea in Michael A. Bishop’s 2015 book, The Good Life, is that positive psychologists study “causal networks” composed of attitudes, emotions, traits, and accomplishments.  Because the various parts of a causal network reinforce each other, such networks tend to persist over time; they are “homeostatic property clusters.”  According to Bishop, empirical research conducted by positive psychologists demonstrates that causal networks are a real feature of human psychology; causal networks would exist whether psychologists study them or not.  Positive psychology is the study of positive causal networks (PCNs).

            What makes a positive causal network positive?  At one point in his book (96-98), Bishop says “negative causal networks” may also exist, and that a complete theory of psychology ought to teach us how to recognize and escape negative networks (e.g. cycles of depression or obsessive compulsions) just as the complete theory would teach us how to recognize and promote positive networks.  Bishop says little about negative psychology—the “theory of ill-being”—because his task is to propose a theory of well-being.  He does, however, recognize that it is crucial to his theory to distinguish positive causal networks from negative ones.  Bishop says:

...among all the causal networks (i.e. homeostatic property clusters of emotions, attitudes, traits, and accomplishments) in the world, the positive ones are those that feel good, that bring about states that feel good, and that are valued by the person or her culture. (41, emphases added)

Bishop knows full well that philosophers will take him to task here.  That a person or culture values a state does not mean that state is valuable, they will way.  That a state feels good and leads to states that feel good does not imply well-being, they will say.  Bishop faces this criticism head-on.  He imagines “Josef,” a

… wicked, sadistic man with a robust PCN.  He instantiates a causal network involving feelings, attitudes, traits, and interventions in the world that are ‘successful’ in the sense that they consist of positive experiences for Josef and are valued by Josef and his culture.  This seems to be a real possibility, particularly in sick societies (think Mengele). (187-188)

A moralized view of human well-being, Bishop says, would deny that Josef leads a good life.  This is a feature of what Bishop calls “consilience” views of well-being; on any consilience view, virtue and well-being converge.  Bishop points to Aristotle’s ethics as a prime example of a consilience theory, but there are many other important philosophers who held such a view.  For example, Epicurus asserted that virtuous living had to be pleasant and that without virtue one could not have pleasure.  Disagreeing with Epicurus, Kant recognized that goodness and happiness do not always converge in this life, and for that reason he proposed that rational persons might believe in an afterlife and a moral God who could guarantee that goodness and happiness would coalesce in the next life.  Kant was as convinced as Epicurus that goodness and happiness should converge.

But there are problems with moralized views of well-being, Bishop says.  First, there are a great many notions of the good life on offer, and they disagree significantly about components of the good life.  More importantly for his project, Bishop says that moralized views of the good life will systematically exclude empirical evidence from positive psychology.  We should seek theories of human well-being that are scientifically adequate, and one feature of scientific adequacy is that a theory accommodates empirical evidence.

An illustration will help.  Consider the debate between vegetarians and carnivores.  For many people, deciding whether to eat meat is a purely instrumental matter: will a diet containing meat help them reach their life goals (e.g. health, weight control) as well as a vegetarian diet?  However, for other people the decision about eating meat is an important moral decision.  Some vegetarians argue that it is morally blameworthy for any person (or for most persons) to eat animal flesh, while carnivores reject that conclusion.  It seems that a moralized view of well-being has to take some position on this question.  Either eating animal flesh is immoral, or it is permissible (or permissible in some circumstances, in the past or in certain cultures).  Bishop’s first objection to moralized views of the good life is that such views require that we resolve such debates before we can study well-being.  Bishop’s second, and more important, objection is that whichever side we take in regard to eating animal flesh, we will end up ignoring empirical evidence.  After all, there could be (in this case, there actually is) (1) empirical evidence that vegetarianism can be an important part of a positive causal network, such that vegetarian practice leads to a variety of states that feel good and lead to other states that feel good, and (2) empirical evidence that eating meat can be an important part of a positive causal network, such that meat-eating leads to a variety of states that feel good and lead to other states that feel good.  Vegetarians sometimes point with glee to empirical evidence suggesting that vegetarianism is “good for you” in one way or another; just as often meat-eaters emphasize evidence that moderate meat consumption is also “good for you” and pleasurable.  Both sides like to use evidence (readily available) to show that their view promotes well-being.  Bishop’s point is that both are right.  Therefore we should conclude that well-being is multiply-realizable.  A scientific approach to positive psychology will be inclusive, Bishop says.  Therefore, Bishop rejects moralized views of human well-being. 

This does not mean that Bishop proposes a revolution in our moral thinking.  After all, “Josef” really is a wicked human being.  “It’s just a sobering fact about our world that bad people can have well-being.” (188) 

Bishop says that well-being, studied inclusively according to the network theory, is an objective feature of human lives, and it is objectively valuable. (211) Individuals, organizations, and governments can legitimately weigh factors of well-being when making decisions.  Well-being is not the only factor in making decisions, Bishop says.  An individual may sacrifice some of his well-being in order to keep a promise or promote the well-being of others.  An organization or government might spurn a policy that promised to promote the well-being of many if it were unjust or violated the rights of a few.  (211)

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 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.

To this point, I have merely explained Bishop’s claims.  The next step is to ask: So what?  What are the implications if Bishop’s theory if it is right?  I will turn to that question in my next chapter.

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Part Two: How to Hope

Chapter 7:  Positive Causal Networks

Michael A. Bishop’s 2015 book, The Good Life, introduces a philosophically informed theory of positive psychology.[1]  Bishop’s theory may also offer insights into the virtue of hope, though Bishop did not intend that result.  In this and the succeeding chapters, I will pursue insights into hope based on Bishop’s theory.

“Positive psychology” has been a growth industry for at least forty years, reflecting the desire on the part of many mental health professionals to move from treating illness to facilitating health.  Rather than concentrating on the dark side—neuroses, psychoses, debilitating syndromes, etc.—positive psychologists want to understand the “light” side of human mental functioning.  Are there ways for ordinary people to get better?  Can we be happier?  More content?  More productive?  How can professional therapists help people achieve their deepest aspirations?

The idea is intuitively appealing, at least to some.  So psychologists have produced thousands of empirical studies that investigate one or more aspects of “well-being.”  And they have discovered correlations, some of which must represent causal connections, between behaviors, patterns of thought, accomplishments, attitudes, perceptions, and emotions.  Having discovered causal connections, therapists are sometimes able to say, “Research shows that people who do x fairly reliably experience y as a result.  Since you want more y in your life, I recommend you do x.”

A concrete example: C.R. Snyder’s “hope theory” begins with an operational definition of hope and then, having conducted a great deal of empirical research on the basis of that definition, suggests practical interventions by which therapists can help patients increase their hope.  Snyder’s research colleagues have collected plenty of evidence that these interventions work, in the sense that patients report improved life outcomes on a number of measures.[2]

It should be stressed that Snyder’s hope theory is only one example among many.  Positive psychologists have researched organizational leadership, creativity, marital success, physical exercise, happiness, video game playing, generosity, workplace satisfaction, and lots of other particulars.

According to Bishop, the problem is that until now no one has proposed a good theory to say what positive psychology is.  What is it that all these empirical researches actually study?  His answer: “positive causal networks” or PCNs.  Here is an illustration.

Many runners report that running improves their mood, their creativity, and their overall mental state.  After much experience running, runners have a well-founded belief that goes something like this: “Even though the weather is nasty today and I’m tempted to skip my run, I know I’ll feel better if I do it.”  This belief, or pattern of thought, obviously tends to keep the runner participating in her running regimen.  So there is a feedback loop: running leads to feeling better; feeling better leads to a pattern of thought; the pattern of thought leads to more running.  As Bishop says, persons get “stuck” in a causal network that improves their lives.

Positive causal networks are usually much more complex than my example of running.  Bishop lists four components to causal networks: emotions, attitudes, traits, and accomplishments.  Notice that my example, running, refers to a “pattern of thought,” which may seem hard to fit into one of Bishop’s components.  Bishop might try to squeeze “patterns of thought” into his structure (maybe such patterns contribute to “attitudes”); more likely, he would admit that the components he names may not be all there are.  At several points in his book, he stresses that he is offering an initial theory and would welcome corrections.  The key idea is that the parts of a positive causal network (he calls these “PCN fragments”) reinforce each other.

There is plenty of evidence that positive causal networks are real, Bishop says.  That is, they exist in the world whether or not we understand them or pay attention to them.  To a limited degree, people have long been aware of positive causal networks, before modern science began exploring them in detail.  Consider the time-honored advice of parents: You say you want to do well in school?  Very well, make friends with the good students.  Enjoy the activities they enjoy.  Copy their attitudes toward books and schoolwork.  Build more friendships based on shared academic interests.  And so on.  Your friendships will help you develop the right attitudes and habits, the right attitudes and habits will help you do well in school, and doing well in school will attract the right kind of friends.

Bishop says we should see a parallel here between positive causal networks and other natural kinds, such as “water.”  Obviously, water was an important real thing in the world, though people referred to it for thousands of years without knowing its chemical composition.  When chemists discovered that water is H₂O they improved our understanding of water and enabled us to do things with water that we were previously unable to do.  Bishop says that as psychologists gain better understanding of positive causal networks they will enable us to improve our lives in various ways.

One more example: people who are kind, generous, and considerate of others’ feelings tend to make friends.  Having friends tends to create pleasurable experiences.  Having friends is a kind of personal relationship that is highly valued in our society.  Having pleasurable experiences that are at the same time highly valued by society tends to make persons kind, generous, and considerate of others’ feelings—and the cycle renews itself.  Bishop says that much empirical research by positive psychologists supports the conclusion that PCNs are “homeostatic property clusters.”  The emotions, traits, attitudes, and accomplishments in such a property cluster tend to reinforce each other, so the cluster tends to endure.  Bishop points to empirical research that indicates that people displaying a high degree of a positive trait, attitude, emotion or accomplishment at time t₁ will have (compared to those who have a lower degree of that trait, attitude, emotion, or accomplishment) a statistically significant greater chance of having a high degree of that trait, attitude, emotion or accomplishment at time t₂—even when t₂ is years or decades after t₁.  Further, persons who have a higher degree of one component of a PCN at time t₁, say component c₁, will have a greater chance of having some other component of the PCN, component c₂, at time t₂.  Positive causal networks are real and, as homeostatic property clusters, they tend to endure.  Positive psychology research can teach us how to build and strengthen PCNs.  According to Bishop, that’s what positive psychologists are doing, and that’s how they should conceptualize their work.

            In succeeding chapters, I will use Bishop’s PCN theory to explore hope.  First, in chapter 8, I will discuss the most controversial aspect of PCN theory.

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[1] Michael Bishop, The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

[2] See C.R. Snyder (ed.), Handbook of Hope: Theory, Measures, and Applications.  London: Academic Press, 2000.

After Christmas

The Last Walk 11:

Walking Alone

            It’s been eighty days since Karen died, a bit more than two months since her funeral and memorial service.  I am feeling the pain of my loss more acutely than before, not because of Christmas but because of time away from work.  I don’t have the convenient distractions of class preps and grading of student papers.  Other distractions—holiday concerts, parties, church services, and family dinners—are over.  Since Christmas I’ve had some days “off”; something Karen and I used to welcome when we were together, days for walks, for watching a movie, for creative projects.  Now, when I walk I cannot escape the feeling of loss.  We used to walk these streets together.

            Jerry Sittser, a professor at Whitworth, suffered the simultaneous loss of his mother, wife, and daughter in an auto accident.  Four year later he wrote A Grace Disguised, and a dozen years after that, A Grace Revealed, reflections on God’s work in his life after loss.  (Thank you to Kris Kays, who lent the books to me.)  Sittser says that God can use tragic loss as means of grace.  God wills to redeem us, and he will use even the pain we suffer to work redemption.

            Just to be clear: Sittser does not say, and I do not believe, that God changes evil into good.  A drunk driver killing three members of Sittser’s family was evil.  Karen’s suffering and death from cancer was a bad thing.  The pain I am enduring is not good.  “The last enemy to be destroyed is death,” wrote Paul, and that means that death is a real enemy, God’s enemy as well as ours.

            God does not change evil into good, but he uses evil—even the crucifixion of Jesus—to accomplish good.  God is changing me, remaking me, through pain.  This doesn’t mean pain is a good thing or that God is a vindictive wizard toying with me.  “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself,” and he did this by the cross, by suffering with and for us.  (I’ve written “Atonement as Peacemaking,” which you can find somewhere in the archives of my blog: storymeaning.blogspot.com.)

            I told my sister-in-law, Evie, that there is a temptation to paper over pain and loss.  There must be lots of ways to do it.  Rush into a new relationship.  Spend lots of money.  Binge on alcohol, food, exercise, or videos.  Bury yourself in work.  And so on.  The effect is to dull the pain, to not feel.  To a degree, distraction works; grading student papers helped me get through the weeks after the memorial.  But now the papers and parties are over, leaving me alone. 

            It’s okay to feel loss.  At the least, it’s real.  I’m not writing a novel or doing abstract philosophy.  (Worthy activities, both of them!  But as existentialists point out, sometimes remote from reality.)  I cannot rewrite this plot; I cannot cancel my loss.  I have to feel it, to let it change me.

            How will the new me be different?  Over thirty-nine years Karen shaped me in ways I cannot know.  I would not want to shed those things.  The new me will be changed through addition.  Immediately, it seems, I have become more aware of death and the limitations of our existence.  Suppose I live as long as my friend Arthur, who died recently at 93.  That would mean two-thirds of my life is already over.  Perhaps I will live as long as my father, in which case four-fifths of my life is over.  “Teach us to number our days,” say the psalms.  The hope of resurrection puts the count of days in new perspective!

            As I walk, I feel a new depth of pain.  Surely what I feel is not unique!  People all around me suffer similar losses.  In imagination, at least, the slow loss of a spouse to Alzheimer’s would be worse—and I have friends who are on that road.  What about divorce?  I’ve only watched from the outside, but it seems that loss (accompanied by resentments, fears, and guilt) could be worse than mine.  What about refugees, who lose their countries?  Jerry Sittser says such comparisons are pointless; there is no measure of psychic pain to compare tragedies.  Instead, I should allow God to remake me, to use my pain to spur compassion.

            My neighbor, who lost her husband years ago, says, “You don’t get over it; you get through it.”  Sittser says tragic loss is not like a disease from which you recover; it’s like an amputation that leaves you changed.  I want to be open to grace, to be changed for the better.  The amputation will always be part of me, and I walk on.

                       

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6. The Rationality of Hope

    The attack on hope, described in the previous chapter, doesn’t have to condemn all hope.  Hope is only bad, the objector could say, when it leads us to make foolish decisions.  If we circumscribe our hopes so that we hope only in accord with the probability of the outcomes we desire, hope would cease to be so dangerous.  “Audacious” hope is a vice, but tamed and reasonable hope could be a virtue, though a minor one.
    The attack on hope rests on the modern “orthodox” definition of hope: “to hope for an outcome is to desire it while believing it is possible but not certain.”   Since there is a wide field of probability between impossibility and certainty, “hope” thus defined names very different cases.  We can hope for probable outcomes and be rewarded (usually) with satisfaction.  We can hope “audaciously” and be punished (almost always) with despair.
I said in chapter 4 that Adrienne Martin protests against the “orthodox definition” of hope because it sweeps too much together under the vague term “desire.”  The syndrome analysis replaces “desire” with “syndrome” and allows that hope includes thoughts, perceptions, and motivations as well as feelings. 
    Martin also complains that the orthodox definition of hope makes it impossible to explain the way different people respond to cases of “hoping against hope,” that is, cases in which the probability of the desired outcome is very low.  Notice that Critchley, discussed in chapter 5, aimed his criticism at precisely such cases.  Audacious hope is bad, Critchley argued, precisely because the desired outcome is unlikely.  But before we can judge whether hope is good or bad, we must see whether the proposed definition is accurate.
If hope is simply desire for some outcome combined with the belief that the outcome is possible, why is it that people who have the same desire for an outcome and the same belief about its likelihood can have very different levels of hope?   The defender of the orthodox definition might suggest that the person with greater hope somehow has stronger desires for the good outcome or surreptitiously assigns a higher probability to it.  Martin gives good reasons to suppose these answers are insufficient.
    Consider two terminal cancer patients, Alan and Bess.   They both recognize that the experimental drug offered to them has an extremely low chance of success.  But Alan hopes only a little or not at all.  Bess hopes strongly.  How should we explain the difference between them?  Is Bess somehow deceiving herself about the odds?  Does Bess desire life more than Alan?  Even if one of these options could explain a particular case, would this be true in every case?  Martin points to a fact that many people have experienced: over a period of time, perhaps a single day, our subjective sense of the probability of some event may change without strengthening or weakening our hope for that event.  Hope seems to be something much more complicated than merely desire + probability judgment.  Martin concludes that hope cannot be adequately captured in the orthodox definition.
    Martin offers her “incorporation analysis” as alternative to the orthodox definition.  We need to see that there are two judgments made by the person who hopes.  In the cancer case, Bess does not deceive herself into thinking the drug has a greater chance of success.  Hope is not the same as wishful thinking.  When we estimate the likelihood that our desired outcomes will occur, Martin says we ought to make our judgments in accord with ordinary standards of reason and evidence.  However, the fact that the desired outcome is improbable does not imply that one cannot hope for it. Instead, the person who hopes then makes a second, practical, judgment.  The person who hopes sees that the desired outcome is important to her.  On the basis of these two judgments—that the desired outcome is possible, and that it is important—the person who hopes “licenses” herself to build a syndrome of hope.  Thus, Martin says that hoping for an outcome has four parts:

1.    Be attracted to the outcome in virtue of certain of its features;
2.    Assign a probability between and exclusive of 0 and 1 to the outcome;
3.    Adopt a stance toward that probability whereby it licenses treating one’s attraction to the outcome (and the outcome’s attractive features) as a reason for certain ways of thinking, feeling, and/or planning with regard to the hoped-for outcome; and
4.    Treat one’s attraction and the outcome’s attractive features as sufficient reason for those ways of thinking, feeling, and/or planning.

If hope is merely desire + probability judgment, as modern philosophers seem to think, then it seems the wise advice is to trim one’s hopes to fit probability.  People who hope for improbable things will very likely have their hopes squashed.  We all know or ought to know this.  Therefore, people who hope for improbable things most likely are simply deceiving themselves.  In very many cases, hope is irrational.  If you want to avoid the crushing disappointment of dashed hopes, don’t deceive yourself.  Don’t get your hopes up.
Simon Critchley says we should limit our hopes to those that are realistic.  Against such so-called “realism,” Martin’s incorporation analysis says that hope can be rational even when the probability of the hoped for outcome is very small.  Martin invites us to consider Andy, in The Shawshank Redemption.   Andy and his friend, Red, are convicts in the Shawshank prison.  Red warns Andy explicitly against the dangers of hope.  “Let me tell you something, my friend.  Hope is a dangerous thing.  Hope can drive a man insane.”   If you hope, you get crushed.  Red’s advice mirrors the advice of modern philosophers like Critchley.  Against Red’s advice, Andy hopes to escape from prison. 
Andy’s hope is entirely consistent with a belief that successful escape is very unlikely.  Martin insists that hopeful people must judge the probability of their desired outcomes by ordinary standards of reason and evidence.  This is Martin’s point 2. 
But Andy’s thought process goes further, to a second judgment.  He recognizes that his hoped-for escape is a very important goal; in Martin’s words, he decides that his “attraction to the outcome (and the outcome’s attractive features)” is “a reason for certain ways of thinking, feeling, and/or planning.”  This is Martin’s point 3.
The first judgment, a judgment of probability, is governed by ordinary standards of reason and evidence.  The second judgment, a licensing judgment, is governed standards of practical rationality.  Practical judgments must take into account a person’s moral obligations, projects, relationships, abilities, and so on.  Given Andy’s situation—a life sentence for a crime he did not commit—the very low probability of escape can still function as organizing grounds for his hope.  He 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.”
Paraphrased, Martin’s position is something like this: hope, understood as an incorporation of a syndrome of thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and motivations into one’s life, can be rational, even in cases when the hoped for outcome is very unlikely. 
Critchley’s criticism of audacious hope focused on political examples.  Martin’s argument depends on individual cases.  Can her defense of hope’s rationality be extended to politics?
Yes.  Consider the hopes of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.  They want to live in a peaceful independent state, with secure land rights and human dignity.  Very often, “realism” teaches that these dreams are unlikely.  Israeli occupation of the West Bank seems permanent.  Martin’s analysis suggests that such people may still hope.  Without deluding themselves about the likelihood of a secure independent state, they may incorporate hope for such a state into their lives.  In point of fact, many Palestinian people find such hope to be a crucial part of their lives.  It sustains them through generations of occupation.
It hardly needs to be said that Israelis also have room for hope, focusing peaceful relations with Muslim neighbors.
Of course, some instances of “hope” fail to be rational.  If a person allows his desire for a certain outcome to skew his estimation of its probability (the first judgment), his hope would be irrational.  Probability judgments must be made according to ordinary standards of reason and evidence.  It is also possible that a person could misjudge the practical importance of some desired outcome; this would produce another kind of irrational “hope.”
Silly illustration #1: Ben is a Cubs fan.  On September 12, he reads that the Cubs are “only” 15 games from first place.  He estimates that the Cubs will probably win the division, so he licenses himself to hope for a Cubs pennant.  This estimation of probability violates ordinary standards of reason and evidence.
Martin says that people who hope for very improbable things frequently have back up plans.  “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”   Bess hopes that the experimental drug will cure her, but hoping does not mean she deceives herself about the probable outcome.  She may well make plans for her death (e.g. preparing a will, etc.). Similarly, in the Shawshank case, Andy’s hope does not mean he thinks it is likely that he will escape.  In the story, he writes letters for many years to ask for money for the prison library in order to improve conditions of long-term prison life for himself and other prisoners.
Silly illustration #2: Pasadena resident Charley reads that there will be a partial eclipse of the sun visible in Seattle on January 2, if it is not raining.  Charley is not interested in astronomy.  Though he has tickets to the Rose Bowl where his beloved UCLA Bruins will play on January 1, Charley decides to fly to Seattle on that day, hoping to see the eclipse.  Given Charley’s life goals, this “hope” violates the notion that practical judgments are subject to standards of practical reason, because Charley’s “hope” does not reflect something important to him.
    So yes: hope may be irrational.  It is irrational to let our hope influence our judgment of the probability of the outcome we want.  It is also irrational let hopes for trivial outcomes play a big role in one’s life.  And on Martin’s account, there is no contradiction between hoping for an outcome and having an alternative plan in case one’s hope does not came true.

HB6

5. The Attack on Hope

            In chapter 4, I promised to explore Adrienne Martin’s defense of the rationality of hope—and I will, but not in this chapter.  Before defending hope, we must give space to the argument against hope.  Since the seventeenth century, modern philosophers have thought that to hope for an outcome is to desire it while believing it is possible but not certain.  Is hope, so understood, a good thing?

            In April 2014, Simon Critchley wrote an essay for The Stone, one of the opinion pages for the New York Times, entitled,  “Abandon (Nearly) All Hope” that captures the modern objection to hope.[1]  Writing at Easter time, Critchley meditates on the dangers of Barack Obama’s campaign theme, “audacious hope.”  Obama picked up the phrase from his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Jr. and said that this audacity is “the best of the American spirit.”  It is “the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary.”[2]  If that’s what hope is, Critchley thinks it’s dangerous, a vice rather than a virtue.

            Political decisions based on hope rather than realism lead to disaster.  Critchley reminds us of Thucydides’ account of the Melians, when besieged by the Athenians.  The Athenian army was clearly stronger, and the Athenian navy controlled the waters around Melos.  Still, the Melians hoped: they hoped they might hold out for a long time, they hoped their allies, the Spartans, would come to relieve them, and they hoped to win honor for standing against oppression.  The Melians refused to surrender.  Their patience exhausted, the Athenians conquered the city, killed all the men, and made slaves of the women and children.  Critchley says:

Thucydides offers no moral commentary on the Melian Dialogue. He does not tell us how to react, but instead impartially presents us with a real situation. The dialogue is an argument from power about the nature of power. This is why Nietzsche, in his polemics against Christianity and liberalism, loved Thucydides. This is also why I love Nietzsche. Should one reproach Thucydides for describing the negotiations between the Athenians and the Melians without immediately moralizing the story and telling us how we should think? Not at all, Nietzsche insists. What we witness in the Melian Dialogue is the true character of Greek realism.[3]

            Here is the heart of the attack on hope.  Because it is unrealistic, hope can (and often does) make our lives worse.  Critchley applies the lesson to contemporary politics, thinking in particular (in 2014) about Obama’s policies toward the Middle East.  But his warning can be easily applied to individual lives.  Imagine the tragedies people make of their lives by “audacious hope” in regard to gambling, investments, business decisions, or marriages.  Against evidence to the contrary, they hope that this horse will win, this penny stock will prosper, this business partner will have integrity, or this potential spouse will understand me.

            Now hope is a positive emotion, the objector will say.  It feels good; no one denies that.  But when we act on the basis of hope rather than on realism, we court catastrophe.  When catastrophe comes, we feel despair.  And it’s not only the case of a bad feeling replacing a good feeling.  In many cases the disaster created by audacious hope leaves us objectively worse off.

Critchley concludes his essay with criticism of politically liberal idealism, but his words apply equally well to individual hopes:

You can have all kinds of reasonable hopes, it seems to me, the kind of modest, pragmatic and indeed deliberately fuzzy conception of social hope expressed by an anti-Platonist philosopher like Richard Rorty. But unless those hopes are realistic we will end up in a blindly hopeful (and therefore hopeless) idealism. Prodigal hope invites despair only when we see it fail. In giving up the former, we might also avoid the latter. This is not an easy task, I know. But we should try. Nietzsche writes, “Hope is the evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment.” Often, by clinging to hope, we make the suffering worse.[4]

                       

            We can sharpen Critchley’s point.  If hope, whether we call it “audacious” or not, leads us to act in ways that often make our lives objectively worse, hope is not a virtue.  For modern philosophers like Nietzsche or Critchley, only reasonable hopes count as virtues.  In many cases, hope is not reasonable, and when it is not reasonable, hope is a vice.

            Nietzsche and Critchley picture the contest as one between hope and realism, and they come down on the side of realism.  If they had used an older term from the virtue tradition, they might have opposed hope to “prudence,” the antique translation of phronesis (usually rendered as “practical wisdom”).  Aristotle counted phronesis as a crucially important virtue, since a person needs it to rightly practice courage, generosity, friendship, or any other moral virtue.  But Aristotle said nothing about hope as a virtue; hope enters the virtue tradition through Christianity.  So here is another way to conceptualize the attack on hope.  If hope is to be counted a moral virtue, it should be governed by prudence (phronesis, practical wisdom).  Since “audacious hope” runs free of prudence, it is no more a virtue than the so-called “courage” of the foolhardy soldier who races toward the enemy forces alone.

            Now despite this attack, I think hope is a virtue.  But the attack on hope, whether couched in Nietzsche and Critchley’s terms or in Aristotle’s, helps us to appreciate the importance of the next chapter, where we will examine Adrienne Martin’s defense of hope’s rational status.

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[1] Simon Critchley, “Abandon (Nearly) All Hope.”  The Stone.  Collected at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/abandon-nearly-all-hope/

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid