1/22/12

“What does it mean to be hopeful? Hope is a human disposition to believe that the future will be better than the past, that the future will bring happiness. Is it irrational to be optimistic or hopeful? One is inclined to respond: it depends on the circumstances. Rational hope needs reasons to believe, it measures future prospects against past experience. For those who live in the middle class in the west it is reasonable to hope today, given current levels of nutrition and medical knowledge, to reach the age of three score years and ten, indeed four score years, whereas it would not have been reasonable for anyone one hundred years ago. But it seems unreasonable to hope that the current economic recession is going to end any time soon and this will impinge on the life expectancy of those who have nothing in the first place.

Since it is a disposition, hope is not simply something one can decide to have, it is not something that is parceled out by a calculus of reason. It is, rather, a frame of mind that human beings by and large are predisposed to be in for it is the will to live itself: “hope springs eternal in the human breast.” Since hope is a disposition it tends to feed upon itself. The hopeful person is more likely to find her hypothesis of a brighter future confirmed simply by virtue of the fact that she is hopeful. Our experience of happiness partly depends on our capacity to experience happiness. Nothing will make scrooge happy. A hope that doesn’t take account of reasons not to be hopeful is false hope. But while the person who insists on being hopeful is undoubtedly naïve, I don’t think he is necessarily foolish; after all, the eternal optimist is a happy person.

Yet what does our will to live amount to in the face of old age and death? For the hard-nosed realist it is little comfort to be told by the religious person that there is a form of life beyond death far more glorious than this one in the Kingdom of God or in a perpetual cycle of reincarnation. The whole infrastructure of religious belief appears constructed to give false hope to an essentially bad situation. There are two ways of answering this. While it is true that one cannot be optimistic about conquering death, unless in the possession of religious belief, to hope to conquer death is itself an essentially irrational hope; there is no reason to hope for something that cannot occur. The atheist can remain an optimist. The other answer is that religious hope is not irrational hope, but a distinctive kind of hope; it is a hope that is absolute and cannot be measured by reason.”