Why hope is what we need | Dan Banik

Let me begin by clearing away a confusion, because almost every unproductive argument about hope rests on it.

Hope and optimism are not the same thing.

Optimism is a forecast.

The optimist reads the trend lines, extends them into the future, and concludes that the curve will continue to bend in the right direction.

The pessimist performs the same exercise and reaches the opposite conclusion, seeing not progress ahead, but rupture.

What is striking is that both are playing the same game.

Both are making claims about future states of the world.

They simply seem to disagree about the slope.

Hope is something else entirely.

Writing in the dark years of late communist rule, when by any rational calculation the regime would outlast him by decades, the Czech dissident, playwright, and later president, Vaclav Havel, said that hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

Hope is an orientation of the spirit, not a calculation of probabilities.

It is what gets you out of bed to do the work even when the work might fail.

It is what makes the work worth doing.

This is why hope is so hard to argue someone out of.

You can change an optimist's mind by showing her better data.

You cannot change a hopeful person's mind by showing her a worse forecast, because she already knows the forecast is uncertain.

She's acting anyway.

The action is the point.

The philosopher Jonathan Lear explored this through the Crow people of the American Plains facing the destruction of their entire world, the buffalo gone, their way of life collapsing, and the reservation closing in.

Their chief, Plenty Coups, held open the possibility that something good might still come, even though he had no way of knowing what that good thing would look like.

Lear calls this radical hope.

This is hope without a forecast.

This is hope that is anchored in the single conviction that the future remains open.

That is the hope I want to defend, not the optimist's confident projection, not denial of the genuine threats we face, but what I have come to call on this podcast and in my recent writing, evidence-based hope, fact-based optimism that takes the world exactly as it is, refuses to look away from what is broken, and chooses nonetheless to act on the conviction that the future can be made different from the present.

Hope then, properly grounded, is not the opposite of realism.