Hard Hope

Hope is an inescapable feature of human agency. In a paper on the art of good hope, Victoria McGeer argues from this point to a definition of hoping well. Her argument that hope is a necessary feature of agency is a developmental one. Children learn to engage their environment and develop agency through exercising their powers in progressively more complicated imitation games with parents and caregivers (106). These interactions enable children to disengage from their immediate appetites and direct their concern toward the future. Think of a mother encouraging a child to imitate her body movements to play with a toy, or calming him when distressed through first, mirroring distressed facial expressions, then modulating those expressions to ease the child. Through this "parental scaffolding" children experience and overcome limitations to their capacities to eventually discover they capable of effecting meaningful change in the world - that they are agents (105-8). Because of this process, hope is a "deeply social phenomenon" - the actions of others enable one to take a positive and constructive, hopeful stance toward the future (108). McGeer suggests that to hope well, we need the scaffolding of others first, then we need to scaffold ourselves and provide scaffolding to others in support of positive future-oriented goals (108).

She beautifully describes the experience of hope as the "energizing sense that one can, through effortful interaction with a suitably responsive world, enhance one's own powers to live more capably, more expansively, more richly in that world despite the many challenges it presents. Thus, from its earliest beginnings, human agency is structured in terms of future promise and infused with the energy of hope" (108).

Hope is in this way necessary for the development of agency. However, it's less clear in McGeer's argument that it's necessary for the maintenance of agency, or a necessary feature of skillful agency in the stricter sense. (On reading the introduction, I had expected an argument of the latter kind, on say, conceptual and atemporal grounds.) If hope is only necessary for the development of agency, that leaves open that it might be discarded once the requisite level of skilled agency is achieved. So, the claim that "to be a full-blown intentional agent [...] is to be an agent that hopes" as McGeer suggests, is not quite correct on her account: to be a full-blown intentional agent is to be an agent that has hoped. It seems a stronger claim was intended than the developmental argument can support.

Nevertheless, she provides us with rich examples (drawn from Eliot's Middlemarch) of how to hope well in her discussion of responsive hope (as well as how to hope poorly, in the aptly described cases of wishful and willful hope). But I'm interested in how to hope well in the sort of cases she doesn't address: cases of oppression, perhaps, or severe limitation, when the world is not suitably responsive to our efforts, whether for physical, social, or political reasons. Put differently, early human development seems to provide us with an ideal case of hope - others enable us, the world is responsive, and the future is promising - but what do we do when the world is unresponsive and the future unpromising? What of the energy of hope here?

It seems to me that in these circumstances the nature of good hope – skillful, virtuous hope – is revealed in more clarity. I suggest that here, we can identify four additional features of skillful hoping. In the face of an unresponsive world and an unpromising future, the hopeful person does not give up on the object of their hope as they look for features of the world that might respond to their efforts. In this way, skillful hope not only entails care for others (while it excludes irresponsibility, self-deception, and ego fragility - as McGeer points out), it demands both perseverance and attention to the world – that one attend to the human, political, cultural, and natural environment in which agency is exercised. One must observe and understand the arena in which one is acting to carry out their actions effectively (think, e.g., of conducting a resistance movement in a city under siege, or engaging in high stakes diplomacy).

Further, in these circumstances hope is both creative and collaborative (it requires community). It demands creativity to discern new opportunities for agency in undiscovered places. On the surface, this might sound like attention, but attention discerns facts, whereas creativity discerns possibilities. On the point of collaboration, McGeer's discussion of bidirectional dependency and scaffolding is insightful: "scaffolded individuals must have the sense that through such scaffolding, their legacy is supported by others with the kind of respect and acknowledgement that enables and encourages them to energize supporting others with their own hopeful energy in turn. Thus, in effective peer scaffolding, individuals are naturally drawn into a kind of community of mutually responsive hope in which each person's hopes become partly invested in the hopeful agency of others and vice versa" (118). Mutual dependency and scaffolding is necessary to sustain hope. Collaboration, however, goes further than this, because it directly engages with others by creating and pursuing shared goals, rather than merely supporting another in pursuit of an independent goal. Hope in these circumstances seems to be directed toward goals shared by humankind. What goals all humans (do, should?) share is another question, but I imagine we could establish a few (the UN would appear to have made a good start).

Each of these qualities are necessary conditions for the maintenance and proper function, in addition to the development, of human agency. It is for these reasons that hope is a deep feature of human agency - it engages fundamental dispositions on which skillful agency is built. This argument can be developed further, but for now I'll claim it's uncontroversial that perseverance, attention, creativity, and collaboration are necessary for skillful agency of any kind. If this is true, then hope really is an inescapable feature of human agency and "to be a full-blown intentional agent - to be a creature with a rich profile of intentional and emotional states and capacities - is to be an agent that hopes" (101). I suggest this provides an argument stronger than the developmental one to support McGeer's greater claim.

A final note, when confronted with oppression and severe limitation, to be able to hope – that is to sustain hope for change in the face of oppression and overwhelmingly negative evidence – I'd like to suggest that it's rational to believe in a collaborative agency that transcends the merely material world. I’m thinking of belief in divine agency, and I mean rational in the practical or pragmatic sense: if one (a) believes in a divine agency that cooperates with human effort to achieve good in the midst of circumstances under which that seems impossible, and (b) that enhances one’s ability to persevere and attend to the world in a way that is creative and collaborative, then (c) this contributes to skillful hoping, as well as to the maintenance and proper function of human agency, so (d) it's a good thing for an agent to believe in this sort of divine agency – one should believe in this to hope well (the sense of should, in this case, lies somewhere between may and must). In this way, skillful hope (or perhaps maximally skillful hope) tends not to see the world as temporally or causally closed, but chooses to instead see it as radically open to possibilities for good that exceed human imagination.

*Examples will help the argument above; if anyone reads this, I welcome suggestions: please post them as comments. I may add examples later. In any case, this is an outline for a more complete argument and the aim is to provide a preliminary sketch of skillful hope under hard circumstances.