Page Lotze
@dinapage
Page Lotze
@dinapage
While 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.
Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.
This 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.
But 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.”