Page Lotze
@dinapage
@dinapage
By conventional wisdom, hope is empowering, noble, even audacious. In the face of threats to democracy and the slow catastrophe of climate change, we are told, it is vital not to give up hope. Yet as an episode of the sitcom Ted Lasso reminds us: “It’s the hope that kills you.” To hope is to risk the agony of defeat. And what good does hope do as t
... See moreBut hope is not what most of us think it is. It’s not a warm, fuzzy emotion that fills us with a sense of possibility. Hope is a way of thinking—a cognitive process. Yes, emotions play a role, but hope is made up of what researcher C. R. Snyder called a “trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency.”
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously hea
... See moreThis is how we should approach life’s hardships, finding possibility where we can: the prospect of flourishing despite infirmity, of finding one’s way through loneliness, failure, grief, confronting the injustice and absurdity of the world. The question is not whether we should hope, but what we should hope for.
Tim: I think optimism is the expectation that things are going to be OK. That we’re going to get a good outcome. Hope is much more about meaning; hope is the will to hold on to our values in the face of difficulty. Optimism is one kind of hope, a rather flimsy sort of hope. What we need now is a more resilient kind of hope, one not based on an expe
... See moreHope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable,
... See moreWhile it's important to be cautious about making overly broad or universal claims (because not everything applies to everyone in the same way), there's also a need to recognize that some human experiences—like the ability to thrive or suffer—are common across all cultures.
If we say that everything about human experience is entirely dependent on culture or social constructs, then we lose the ability to talk meaningfully about concepts like justice or oppression. To effectively study and critique society (which is what critical social science aims to do), we need to acknowledge that some aspects of human life are shared by everyone, no matter where or how they live. Without this common ground, it becomes difficult to talk about what's right or wrong on a broader, more ethical level.