On hope and optimism
What's not to like?
I’ve long suspected that hope isn’t really that great a thing, and the only sense in which it has feathers (contra Emily Dickenson) is that feathers are scratchy and tickly and hence irritating. This is not an Orthodox View. It also goes against everything I’ve recently spent two posts saying in praise of Don Quixote and his illusions providing hope to the people around him. So what kind of hypocrite am I, exactly?
A standard philosophical analysis of hope holds that it is a desire for some outcome together with a belief in the possibility that the outcome could happen. (It’s different from a wish, then, because you might desire what you wish for but not think it’s possible.) Some years ago I reviewed a book on hope that extended this account to include the claim that in addition to having that desire and belief, a hopeful person also takes their desire as a reason for hopeful activities.
Sometimes hopeful activities are just expressive, like when sports fans hoping for a win dress in their team’s colors, engage in minor superstitions,1 and cheer from their living rooms. Or, for example, I over-frequently check my phone or email when I’m hoping to get a message. I know this will neither cause nor hasten its arrival, but I take myself to have reason to do it anyway.
Sometimes hopeful activities can help produce the outcome, like when someone hoping to get a date to the school dance gathers the courage to ask. I have experience with this too: I’m pretty sure that hopeful activities such as running a philosophy movie series are a nontrivial part of what got my job converted from a term contract to tenure track years ago. I’m also currently hoping to get a book published, and doing things that (I hope!)2 will get it there.
I take it, too, that something along these lines is the value of Don Quixote’s vision to people like Sancho and Aldonza: he makes it possible for them to hope for better things, and through that he gives them reasons to take steps to bring about what they hope for.
So sure, I admit that hope has benefits. But I don’t always like it, and I’m still not sure it’s all it’s cracked up to be. It can drag out things that we’d be better off closing off. This is why I very rarely give incompletes at the end of a semester. Usually a person who hasn’t finished their work has multiple causes for this that aren’t likely to change in the immediate future. Giving them hope of finishing a course in a situation like that is a mental burden that keeps them from moving on and devoting their energy to solving the underlying problems.
Maybe it’s this uncertainty, this lack of resolution I don’t like. You usually hope for things that are in your control only to a limited—if any—extent. Hope is an open problem, a feather tickling you in the back of your mind. Hope is fluttery like that. (Maybe Emily Dickinson isn’t so far off after all.)
But more than that, I think the problem is that you can hope for things you don’t (or shouldn’t) expect to happen. Because that 1% chance is still a chance. It’s not a chance you should bet on, but hope won’t let it go, even when you might be better off doing so—even when you know you would.
As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I am by nature an optimist. But I’m not sure that’s always a good thing either, because optimists are in the business of hoping. And in my case, at least, I can’t seem to help it. Even if I know better.
Over the past several months, my daughter has been unwell in a way that doctor after doctor couldn’t figure out.3 I realized, as I shepherded her from one specialist to another, that the problem with optimism is that as an optimist I’m never really prepared for disappointment. The structure of the issue as I see it is that I hope for some outcome (like a diagnosis and treatment plan) and, although I know that there’s only a small chance that my outcome will be the result of some action I take, I expect it anyway. (Anybody with me here?) When it doesn’t happen, I’m somehow not prepared for the disappointment even though I knew the probability was low and I shouldn’t have been expecting what I hoped for. The disappointment isn’t really warranted, because the expectation wasn’t. It’s a head/heart disconnect problem. I blame hope.
And yet, I like being an optimist. I really wouldn’t trade it, probably because I like my illusions that things are possible. They’re sunny and warm. And often enough I get what I hope for. When I don’t, I get over the disappointment, though sometimes it requires curling up into a little ball and crying for a while. I like a literal rainy day now and then—maybe part of me likes the figurative ones too.
I guess that’s what kind of hypocrite I am.
For example, not wearing red the week of the Michigan-Ohio State football game. Which I am not allowed to do because My Dear Spouse is a Michigan Football fanatic.
Is this a meta-hope? A hope within a hope?
In case you’re wondering, we do now have a diagnosis and treatment plan. All will be well.
"Hope is terrible. It is better not to have any hope as long as it doesn't mean to despair. To me, to despair means to fail to accept the hopelessness of one's situation. To be able to continue living a half decent life, you absolutely have to accept the situation you find yourself in and to do the best you can. Hope is evil, if it is not grounded in reality." This is what I wrote in my diary 2 years ago when struggling with some setbacks regarding my younger daughter's condition. My wife and I are in a better place now in terms of accepting our situation. That being said, there is an experimental gene therapy that we have been trying to get for my daughter for the past year, so here comes hope again, for better or worse... Trying to get through the bureaucracy of all this has been a nightmare and we are still not sure whether we will able to get her treated, with everything involved. I'm with Camus on this: hope is bad when not grounded in reality. But who defines reality?
I very much hope your daughter is doing better since you wrote this post. Let me know if I can be of any help as a non-pediatric neurologist.