The centrality of hope

One of the extraordinary abilities that has evolved in human intelligence is the ability to speculate and think about things that might come to pass in the future. Our nearest primate relatives may possibly share just a little of this ability, but for most animals life is like driving in the dark without headlights. Things happen when they happen, but there is little or no opportunity to see what might be coming.

As with any gift, the ability to think about the future has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that we can anticipate events to a certain degree, and so we can sometimes plan and change things in the present so as to improve what might happen to us in the future. The disadvantage is that we can foresee unpleasant things, like our own deaths, and worry about them.

For creatures who can think about the possible future, hope is essential. If we have no hope, the gift of foresight is simply a pathway to depression. If we have hope for the future, we can bear an amazing amount of distress in the present.

So it is no surprise that the core of most religions, of most political philosophies, of most political movements, and of most personal relationships is hope. Hope that things will be better in the future. Hope that we can avoid this or that future unpleasantness. Hope that we will attain in the future that which we have been seeking in the present.

When we think about making people’s lives better, the important thing is to focus on what offers them real hope. The reason it is better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish is because giving the ability to fish provides hope for food in the future, while the fish given today provides no hope of food tomorrow. Too many of our well-meaning attempts to help people fit the “fish today” model, rather than the “fish in the future” model. That is why a welfare check is not as good as a marketable job skill. That is why shipments of grain to a nation are not as good as helping their farmers to increase their own yields. That is why American troops keeping the peace in Iraq is not as good as Iraqis keeping the peace among themselves.

I had a wise friend years ago who was a graduate student in clinical psychology. I asked him once which “school” of psychiatry he believed in. Surprisingly, he said whichever one he could convince his patient of. He went on to explain that patients came to him believing they were crazy and their condition hopeless. As soon as he could convince them that they weren’t crazy, that their condition was understood, and that there was clear hope for their recovery, they calmed down, and only then he could begin to work effectively with them. Hope was the key. Hope is always the key!