Hope

No one better leads us to our hopes in the coming New Year than the two faces of the Roman god Janus, whom the Romans named January after.

And for good reason: Janus looking back and forward nicely describes our two unavoidable New Year emotions: our regrets about yesterday and our hopes for tomorrow.

In our present, of course, the past exists no more than the future, as philosopher Terry Eagleton says.

The past in our present, however, “has the edge over the future in having once loomed large, which is why it can still wield an authority denied to what is yet to come. The present cannot escape the orbit of the past, this is not only because the past is for the most part what we are made of.”

Additionally, our Christian faith teaches us that our future is already known and is saved by the earthly birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

Still, much as we in our secular lives are sorely tempted or want to recapture what has been irreparably lost, our past and our present are but incubators of our future, of our hopes.

Hope is an important idea we often neglect, to our immense loss, likely because hope has far too many nuances. Far too many, in fact, to do justice in such a short space that a column allows.

Nonetheless, hope, as Eagelton points out, “has been a curiously neglected notion in an age that, in Raymond Williams’s words, confronts us with ‘the felt loss of a future.’”

For many of us, presently, this “felt loss of a future” is keenly felt, each time we express our hopelessness over our ill-disciplined social mores and the bottomless corruption and greed of our government officials and politicians.

Such hopelessness has led many to weigh if it would be better to leave our sad, deluded country for other ordered and progressive places and climes.

But despite these harsh realities I immediately argue that we shouldn’t be mired in hopelessness, since to speak of hopelessness — against, for instance, political miscreants and corruption — must logically presuppose the idea of hope.

Which, in this case, then means that “nothing is more otherworldly than the assumption that the world as we know it is here to stay,” says Eagleton, whose book “Hope Without Optimism” informed this piece.

In short, hope is always burning, even amid darkening despair and hopelessness.

To be clear, however, holding out hope isn’t about embracing optimism, which hope is often mistaken for. Optimism is merely an opinion that things will work out well. Relying on optimism is merely buying hope on the cheap.

Hope instead involves strenuous commitment, requiring courage and incessant struggle in order to make possible our hope for a better world.

We have a need to struggle because we have to base our hopes on the structures of our present realities; on the reality that whatever brutalized socio-political regime we allowed to exist we ironically had constructed in the first place.

Our present reality, therefore, primarily motivates our hope for a changed future.

True, ill-begotten systems can be formidably hard to change. But they also present grounds for hope.

As such, in the here and now, our biggest challenge is to imaginatively find out what those necessary grounds are for the future we want and need.

We will encounter numerous difficulties along the way in finding out those grounds but we do owe it to ourselves to find out.

Anyway, perhaps we can start by first being keenly aware that whatever lamentable future we may face would certainly be the handiwork of a rapacious ruling minority.

A minority that, as a general rule, believes that the only commendable form of change is one that seeks to preserve the status quo.

This minority will nonetheless placate us that they too hold high hopes. Yet their melodious hopes end up more or less as nothing but a continuation of our woeful, brutalized present.