(This is a bit different in style – it is an unscripted video transcript, so it reflects oral more than written speech.)
Can we have hope? I was asked a question recently about what gives me hope. I don’t know whether I have the right answer for this. I’ve tried to write about hope before, but I’m hovering around or between two poles her. One is: “hope is necessary because otherwise why go on?” – but the other also, namely that “hope betrays us.” I mean, frequently we’ve hoped for things and they haven’t come to pass, so how do you deal with the disappointment? And if your hope has been disappointed plenty of times, what is the reaction that you have? Can hope become toxic?
You know the story of Pandora’s Box. Someone gets this box, and inside it are all the bad things, and all of them get out, but there’s still hope inside. But hope can be a horrible weapon. Maybe the hope that was in the box, the hope that remains, is actually the worst thing because it’s so deeply personal, and when your hope gets disappointed over and over again, do you lose it, or do you still say then, “oh I have to have hope because without hope, what is there?”
So are we making our continued existence and our continued creation of a future dependent here on a feeling of hopefulness? How helpful is that if it’s so fragile that it can be easily disappointed? I mean, there are all kinds of reasons to feel hopeless. Every single one of us could probably enumerate such a long list of things that aren’t going right that make us all depressed, that really don’t make us want to continue to live in this world. It is so easy to say all these things, to think of all the bad things in our life.
So maybe the question is wrong, maybe the phrasing is wrong, maybe our understanding of hope is wrong.
I’ve always been struck, not because I’m a Protestant – I’m not – by Martin Luther’s saying that if he knew the world was ending tomorrow, today he would plant an Apple tree. An apple tree takes time to grow. If you want to have apples tomorrow, you probably should have planted a tree many, many years ago, so he’s using this metaphor to illustrate that even in times of greatest despair, there’s always the need to plan for the future.
So, what gives us that energy? Is it hope? I’m not so sure that’s helpful. I would rather think of it as responsibility or duty. Now I may be revealing my Prussian background here, but duty is something that we all have by being born. Someone put us into this world, someone has given us life, and a lot of people have had to work to sustain our life for that long, for long enough till we can ask that question.
So no matter where you live, no matter how your circumstances are, you’re alive, you’re alive because of the actions of others. That means you may have a responsibility to pay that back, and you have to, of course. You can say now “I don’t care” but if you’re honest with yourself, and let’s assume that this is a relevant thing and that this is about honesty, but if you are, let’s just say you’re honest with yourself and you recognize “yes I’m here, I’m alive, and I wouldn’t be alive if all these circumstances wouldn’t exist” – don’t you have a responsibility to work in favor of life or the life of others, be they grown-ups or children, be they human or animal or plant?
This is what it means in the story when we have finally left the Garden of Eden because we have grown up – we are now having the responsibility to be sovereign over the world, and as much as I believe in kinship between humans, animals and nature, I also have to realize that human beings are indeed somehow special, for good or for bad.
For it is human beings who are building houses, pyramids, artworks; who are able to leave the planet eventually, and no other animal can do that. In this sense, yes, we have a special power which also gives us a special responsibility now, like it says in this line from Spider-Man: “with great power comes great responsibility.” There is some truth to that, and when it says in Bereshit or Genesis that we shall have dominion over the Earth, well, that is true – that is our power. But how do you exercise dominion? If you exercise it in a way that you destroy everything around you, you’ll eventually also destroy yourself, and that’s not an example for great leadership. Having dominion over the Earth or being somehow better equipped to do certain things as the kinds of animals that we are gives us both power but also responsibility. So when you see nature around us, when you see other living beings, you have a responsibility for nature, for other beings, also for yourself.
Now let’s say we give up on the idea of hope but we reframe what we are doing around the idea of what responsibility we have to others. Why should you go on living? Because others depend on us, because there’s so much we can do to make the world better, and if we don’t do them, someone else may but, we have a unique talent maybe to do the things we can do.
So rather to be disappointed by unrealistic hopes, we can be encouraged by the idea that no matter how big the change we make in the world, and even if it’s small, we have the capacity to do so. You can dedicate your life to others. They may disappoint you, but you’ll know you have done it and you never know what comes out of it in the end.
Maybe this seems like future-centered thinking, but actually it is a thinking in the present, because you’re actually not just thinking about the future, you’re thinking about the present. You think of others, but it’s being rooted in the present thinking towards the future. Maybe from that we can have a redefinition of what it means to be hopeful.
Something will always come out of what’s happening today. There’s always going to be some future, maybe not for you, maybe not for us, maybe for someone else, but there is going to be a future. Time moves on whether or not we agree with it, and if hope, this is nothing else than the belief in the future, combined with the duty to make the future better.
Maybe that’s all we need, maybe that’s all we’ve always needed, and then we have some agency over that. We don’t have to say, “well, you know, my help has been betrayed,” because actually you have some power over what you’re doing. So if today you say “I’m hopeless, I don’t know how to go on”, then you figure out how to turn that desperation into something good by making someone’s day a little bit better, and even if it’s just feeding the birds, even if it’s just cleaning something so that future you doesn’t wake up in the morning with dirty dishes or something like that, or doing something nice and saying something nice to somebody. See, if someone else has a bad day today, they will benefit from you saying something nice, because then you’ve created concrete evidence that not everything is bad.
If we see ourselves as a force for good, for working together, for peace, for making someone’s life a little bit better, maybe that already is enough and that already is hope: It’s the hope in humanity that we created in others that is relevant.
Erratic Attempts 