We are seeing the second coming of the megalomaniac Donald Trump to the American presidency; the genocidal war of Israel in Gaza; the brutal war of Russia in Ukraine; continuing civil wars in Sudan and Syria (although there is a glimmer of hope in the latter with the overthrow of the evil Assad regime); the rise of the far right in previously stable European democracies like France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands; and, above all, the failure of our leaders to grasp the greatest challenge of modern times, how to tackle catastrophic climate change.
Contemplating any one of these huge challenges would would make an ordinary person feel hopeless, let alone all of them together. But it is precisely at times like these that we most need hope. As Seamus Heaney said 30 years ago, quoting the Czech president, playwright, philosopher and dissident Vaclav Havel: “Hope is a state of the soul rather than a response to the evidence. It is not the expectation that things will turn out successfully but the conviction that something is worth working for, however it turns out. Its deepest roots are in the transcendental, beyond the horizon”.
Of course, hope is not only something needed by people in societies full of violence and injustice. To have hope in the future is absolutely essential for all human existence – without it we would have nothing to look forward to except suffering and death. Sometimes when I’m sitting on the bus or walking down the street I look at the faces of all the scores and hundreds of people around me, and wonder: “What are their problems and worries? What keeps them going through difficult times? What hope or joy or love – or perhaps, hope of joy and love – do they have in their lives that sustains them? “
I am not writing about the Christian teaching on hope. I know that in the past 60 years or so this has moved beyond the barren ‘doctrine of the last things’, the events which traditional Christians believe will break upon humankind and the world at the day of judgement and the return of Christ. Christians are now divided – as they are on so many things – when it comes to answering the question ‘What can we hope for?’ The American theologian Michael Scanlon says traditional Christians answer “eternal life after death for the purified soul”; liberal Christians say “Yes, ultimately eternal life, but penultimately a more just, a more peaceful order.” I am referring to hope in this world rather than hope in the world to come (which is something that as a doubting Unitarian I have real problems with), although I believe with Heaney and Havel that the virtue of hope in this world is rooted in something transcendental, that is, not of this world.
I’d like to look very briefly at the two linked elements of hope that Vaclav Havel says are fundamental: that hope is “a state of soul rather than a response to the evidence”; and it is “not the expectation that things will turn out successfully but the conviction that something is worth working for, however it turns out.” And I’m going to cite philosophers and political thinkers rather than theologians for these propositions.
Soul is a difficult concept. The soul is that part of a person which drives him or her to search for a deeper meaning to life: something beyond the immediate and the material, something transcendental which if we glimpse or feel or experience it, however momentarily, will make our lives richer, more meaningful, more worthwhile. Acts of human love, human goodness and solidarity with our suffering fellow human beings are clearly ways in which one can glimpse the soul. It is in this sense that I believe Havel is using the term ‘soul’.
And, again as Havel points out, one does not have to be religious to glimpse the soul. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has written about the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington by Al Qaeda (he was in New York at the time): about the frightening contrast between the “murderously spiritual” – the Muslim fanatics piloting the planes of death – and the “compassionately secular.” By the latter he meant the mobile phone messages sent by passengers on the doomed planes to their spouses and families in those desperate last minutes. He writes: “Someone who is about to die in terrible anguish makes room in their mind for someone else; for the grief and terror of someone they love. They do what they can to take some atom of that pain away from the other by the inarticulate message on the mobile. That moment of ‘making room’ is what I as a religious person have to notice.” That secular ‘making room’ for love could also be characterised as ‘making room’ for the soul at the point of death.
In his essay ‘The Politics of Hope’ Vaclav Havel writes: “I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison)[Havel spent multiple periods in jail as a political prisoner under the Communists], I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation…it is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.
“I feel that its roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are, though of course I can’t – unlike Christians, for instance – say anything concrete about the transcendental. An individual may affirm or deny that hope is so rooted, but this does nothing to change my conviction (which is more than just a conviction; it’s an inner experience).The most convinced materialist and atheist may have more of this genuine, transcendentally rooted inner hope than ten metaphysicians put together.”
Havel goes on: “Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of this breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”
Remember that this was written in 1985, not long after Havel had been released from his latest four year spell in prison, and – apart from the glimpse of hope promised by the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev, then an unknown quantity as leader of the Soviet Union – there was no reason to believe that the communist dictatorships of Central and Eastern Europe would not go on for another 30 or 40 or 70 years. Yet less than five years later communism was in freefall throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and the peaceful ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Prague was about to propel Havel into the Czech presidency. Havel was truly writing in the darkness before the dawn.
Take another great political leader, perhaps the greatest of our age, Nelson Mandela (Have you ever noticed that the two greatest and wisest political leaders and thinkers of the past century have been black and brown men, Mandela and Gandhi?). I have been reading recently about the 1963 trial for sabotage which led to Mandela serving 27 years of a life sentence in a South African jail (he was 46 when he was convicted and 73 when he came out in 1990).
His speech in his defence is an extraordinary testament to hope. This was a man who fully expected that he would be sentenced to death, so he must have believed that these would be his last public words. And what they are is a justification of his life as an African leader trying to overthrow the unjust and inhuman system of apartheid – for many years peacefully and when all peaceful avenues had been closed, with the minimum and most controlled amount of violence. That justification, he made clear, was based on a vision and an ideal. Mandela risked his life for “an imagined possibility”, a vision of how a deeply unjust, firmly entrenched system of treating millions of people as sub-humans could be changed into a just, democratic and multi-racial South Africa.
The account of that speech I took from a book entitled Acts of Hope written by one of America’s most distinguished academic lawyers and classicists, John Boyd White. White compares Mandela’s ‘act of hope’ to a similar stand taken nearly 2,500 years earlier by Socrates. The Greek philosopher had been unjustly sentenced to death by a court in Athens for corrupting the young with his ideas. His friend Crito tries to persuade him to escape to another city. He declines, calmly preferring an unjust death because such a death, unlike escape, would not require him to give up the central purpose of his life: to persuade the Athenians to build a community based on justice. His huge success in doing this – despite and perhaps partly because of his death – is shown by the fact that his teachings (as relayed to us by Plato) have provided much of the foundation for political thinking in the Western world ever since. In White’s words, this Socratic thinking “depends on our being able to imagine ourselves not merely as individuals who happen to be found together, our interests in temporary conflict or harmony, like rats in the maze of life, but as a larger polity, as a city or nation or society that has a moral life and career of its own of which we can ask the question – is it just?”
Once again, Socrates’ decision to stay in Athens is based on a courageous act of hope or “imagined possibility”. Despite the almost certain death that awaits him, he will not walk away from the sense of the possibilities of human improvement to which he has devoted his whole life. Boyd White puts it like this: “It had been a central part of his lifework to turn the Athenians in a certain direction, towards thinking of justice as their ultimate collective concern, and though he is never optimistic about the prospect, it is the imagined possibility that he might succeed upon which he will not turn his back.”
When I see the genocidal slaughter in Palestine and the grinding First World War style warfare in Ukraine, I think about what hope is left, what “imagined possibilities” are left for the ordinary people of those countries. In the most wretched and hopeless places there are always people who are full of hope – who have “hope within them” as a “dimension of their souls,” to use Havel’s powerful image. As a journalist I have been privileged to meet them in Central America, in Ethiopia, in Northern Ireland. I think now about people in countries like Palestine, Syria, Sudan and Ukraine – countries perhaps written off by our comfortable Western world as hopeless – ordinary people doing their best in the face of the kind of poverty and persecution, war and rape and violence that would drive most of us very quickly to despair. And I marvel at the quality of human hope in the face of such unbelievable adversity.
I’m going to finish with an excerpt from a famous Irish poem about hope. As so often, you have to turn to poetry to find the best expression of our deepest human qualities and yearnings. This Seamus Heaney poem is from his verse play, The Cure at Troy, written several years before the Northern Irish peace process got under way. These are his much quoted, but still enormously powerful and prophetic lines about the eve of the end of war in ancient Greece and modern Ireland:
‘Human beings suffer/They torture one another,/They get hurt and get hard./No poem or play or song/Can fully right a wrong/Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols/Beat on their bars together./A hunger-striker’s father/Stands in the graveyard dumb./The police widow in veils/Faints at the funeral home.
History says Don’t hope/On this side of the grave./But then, once in a lifetime/The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up,/And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change/On the far side of revenge./Believe that a further shore/Is reachable from here./Believe in miracles/And cures and healing wells.’
Andy Pollak retired as founding director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in July 2013 after 14 years. He is a former religious affairs correspondent, education correspondent, assistant news editor and Belfast reporter with the Irish Times.
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