The time between Christmas and new year ought to be a time of relaxation, lulled into pleasant somnolence by good food and good company, interrupted only by the occasional brisk walk. For many, it is no such thing. Seeing others huddling cosily together only deepens the grief, pain or numbness.
Yet even if our personal lives are relatively stable and untroubled, the wider world cannot be ignored. And there is much to be anxious about: wars and rumours of war, looming ecological disaster, or societal failure to provide homes.
Yes, there is also beauty, goodness and kindness. However, attempts to focus only on the positive can smell of hopium, a mash-up of hope and opium, signalling addictive false comfort destined ultimately only to disappoint.
Hope is not optimism. The latter is a sunny belief that things will turn out well, sometimes despite the evidence
I want to make a case for hope, instead. The apostle Paul declared that faith, hope and love endure, and the greatest of these is love. Hope is perhaps the most neglected and misunderstood of these three sisters.
Hope is not optimism. The latter is a sunny belief that things will turn out well, sometimes despite the evidence.
While optimists fare better than outright pessimists, they often devolve into cynicism when disappointed by optimism’s failure to protect against suffering and disappointment. Jamil Zaki in his recent book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, suggests that cynicism has become the default for many of us.
Having been let down by people or circumstances, cynics end up subscribing to three basic propositions. No one cares much what happens to you. Most people dislike helping others. Most people are honest chiefly because of fear of getting caught. There is an ingrained cultural bias that cynics are smarter and more realistic. Hopeful people are perceived as gullible, naive eejits.
Cynics pride themselves on seeing reality as it is but their outlook is more damaging than blind optimism and makes the world worse than it already is
Counterintuitively, Zaki outlines research demonstrating that cynics are less likely to spot liars than non-cynics. Cynics suffer more depression, drink more heavily, earn less money, and even die younger than non-cynics. Cynics pride themselves on seeing reality as it is but their outlook is more damaging than blind optimism and makes the world worse than it already is. Their corrosive energy is draining and demotivating.
Hope is not blind optimism, but it’s not blind cynicism either. It denies nothing of the harshness of the world. It knows the future is uncertain but takes action anyway.
Few people would have the courage to admit, like Zaki, that he is cynical and unwilling to trust. He recognises the irony of his cynicism, given that his primary research area concerns the importance of empathy.
He wrote this book as a tribute to Emile Bruneau, who was seemingly acknowledged as a kind of secular saint by all who knew him. Bruneau’s area of research was the neuroscience of peacemaking. He died of cancer at 47, leaving a wife and two young children.
Bruneau grew up in poverty and his mother was afflicted with intractable, poorly understood and even more poorly treated schizophrenia. She became homeless, unable to live with or raise her son. Yet Bruneau had protective factors. His father had the gift of “underbearing attentiveness”. Bruneau knew he was loved. His mother visited him and, en route, would be seen gesticulating and muttering, entrapped in her mental illness. Through Herculean effort, she maintained lucidity for the short period she was with her son.
Bruneau developed prodigious empathy and tolerance. He poured his considerable talents into neuroscience-backed peacemaking efforts in places like Colombia. Inspired by his friend, Zaki began researching alternatives to cynicism. He found it in hope.
Hope has a cost. It persists in the face even of unimaginable horror
Zaki’s definition of hope is surprisingly similar to that of Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominican philosopher and theologian of the thirteenth century. Aquinas states that “the object of hope is a future good, arduous but possible to obtain.” In other words, hope is hard work. To be clear, Aquinas saw it as a theological virtue oriented to eternal life whereas Zaki’s approach is relentlessly secular and based on scientific research.
Hope has a cost. It persists in the face even of unimaginable horror. Gisèle Pelicot thought she was married to a kind man who adored her. Instead, he drugged her, raped her and encouraged more than 200 men to abuse his helpless wife.
Pelicot would have been perfectly entitled to hide away for the rest of her life. Instead, she went every day to a courtroom where the appalling abuses committed against her were recounted in vivid detail. She said she went because she wanted “shame to change sides”, to attach it where it belongs, with the perpetrators, not those who were raped.
Perhaps the most devastating argument against cynicism is Zaki’s assertion that it is a tool of the status quo. As he says, “most of us want a society built on compassion and connection, but cynicism convinces us that things will get worse no matter what we do. So, we do nothing and they worsen.”
Pelicot did not do nothing. By her actions and courage, she has kept alive the fragile flame of hope that misogynistic attitudes toward women and their bodies can one day be changed. In doing so, she has become an icon of hope.