Is Humanism Hopeless?
1. Humanists are Naturalists and Materialists
Humanism has no central defining set of principles or beliefs that all Humanists are required to sign up to. There is no Humanist creed or set of sacred scriptures that all Humanists are required to accept as authoritative. True, there have been up to eleven Humanist manifestos published since 1933 but none of these have been binding on individual Humanists and it's probable that many who identify as Humanist aren't even aware of their existence. Therefore it must be declared at the outset that this is not a definitive, orthodox, account of Humanist Hope or absence thereof. It's just one opinion and it's probable that some Humanists will disagree with some of what is said here. But this is no doubt due to the nature of Humanism—it's a loose cluster of beliefs, ideals, values, procedures, attitudes and commitments and not a systematic philosophy as such and certainly not a quasi-religion or atheistic form of faith.
However, having made these disclaimers there are some starting points that pretty well all modern Humanists would agree on.
Firstly, contemporary (secular) Humanists all reject the idea of any kind of supernatural domain superimposed onto the natural world and like to describe themselves as metaphysical naturalists. This means they believe that there exist no entities over and above the natural world as defined and studied by science.
Another term that Humanists would probably all sign up to is materialist—an unfortunately ambiguous term as it can mean someone who cares only for the acquisition of wealth and material possessions, a moral position that all Humanists would definitely reject.
Humanists assert that material nature is the only 'stuff' that exists in the universe, ie, there are no non-material, spiritual entities at work 'causing' or 'explaining' events. The only causation that we see in the universe comes from natural sources. Consequently, Humanists do not believe in any kind of objective, interventionist God, in the sense of a supernatural agent who brings about events miraculously or by providence. There is no benevolent guiding hand above and beyond nature looking after the welfare of human beings. Furthermore, there is no afterlife guaranteeing our continued personal existence following bodily death where we will be reunited with our loved ones and where undeserved suffering and injustice in this life will be compensated for and the wicked will get their comeuppance. No moral values, meaning or purpose are built into or underpin the universe.
2. Humanists are rationalists
On the positive side all Humanists all aspire to be rationalists. Rationalism for them means being willing to give 'reasons' for holding beliefs and a commitment to open, critical discussion of those reasons. Reason is not a special psychological faculty or mental organ alongside faith, intuition, emotion etc. So-called 'Faculty psychology' is a discredited theory that belongs to the 19th century. For Humanists reason is an ethical and procedural commitment that entails critically questioning and testing your beliefs. We also hold that while science is a model par excellence of the operation of reason, there are other valid areas of critical thinking that lie outside science and within the humanities: scholarship, ethical enquiry and aesthetics for instance.
3. Humanists reject reductionism
A popular caricature of Humanism is that in the absence of belief in a non-material soul we must inevitably take a reductionist view of the human person. It is said that for the Humanist, human beings must be seen as either beasts or robots and freedom, value, purpose, meaning and spirituality are mere illusions. But, reductionism is not an inevitable consequence of rejecting theism or supernatural reality.
The noosphere—the sphere of intercommunicating minds and persons—the zone of meaning, consciousness, values, persons and culture—is an emergent phenomenon within nature like the biosphere and sits on top of it. While not involving special spiritual substance or 'stuff' over and above matter, it is still 'real'. The noosphere comes about through novel and interesting arrangements of matter—it is not a physical 'thing' in itself any more than 'life' is a special substance over and above matter. For instance, while there is nothing more than matter involved in a football match—there is no spiritual essence or soul of the match, except in a metaphorical sense—a football match is more than just a material object or a simple collection of such objects moving about in space. A football match takes place within the social institution of football and has 'meaning' within human culture and that meaning is not reducible to mere matter in space although it is just as real.
4. No hope without religion?
Typically, religious believers hold that without a supernatural reality and a benevolent God overseeing the world there can be no hope for individual humans or humanity as a whole. In 2007 Pope Benedict said in his encyclical Spe Salvi:
A world without God is a world without hope.
And in the same year President Sarkozy, head of secular France, said:
A man who believes is a man who hopes; secular morality always risks exhausting itself because it is not backed up by a hope that fulfils man's aspiration for the infinite.
The challenge for the Humanist is therefore to show how a human being can have hope in a world devoid of ultimate purpose and inbuilt values and where his mortality is terminal.
5. Faith, Hope and Optimism
But before I offer my account of Humanist hope I want to clarify some key terms in this discussion: faith, hope and optimism. These words are often used interchangeably, loosely and without precision and so I am not offering hard and fast definitions. I just want to make some distinctions.
Faith, I want to say, is essentially trust and confidence in a person or agency. It is therefore interpersonal and 'transitive': faith is always faith 'in' a person (or quasi-person such as a corporate body). It is never free-floating. It also entails commitment to the object of faith and an an element of risk.
It is sometimes applied to inanimate objects by extension, say, in the statement, 'I have faith that my old car will get me to Scotland in time'. But this is a kind of extended anthropomorphic and metaphorical use of the word faith. The original meaning of the word is within the sphere of interpersonal relationships and transactions.
Faith is not a mode of belief in itself, ie, belief without good reasons or even against reason, as many theists and atheists both assert. Faith is based on prior beliefs about the object of faith but it is not entailed by them. Faith involves a judgement that the object of faith is worthy of having trust invested in it but the act of faith is a risk. Your judgement may be faulty, you may not have all the facts at your disposal, and your faith may be betrayed.
If you conduct a public opinion poll asking people if they believe in God, many will answer 'yes' but this hardly amounts to faith. They are just 'of the opinion' that God exists. It's a belief and no more. Belief is simply affirming the truth of a proposition and not in any way evaluating that truth or taking a stance. It is neutral in its attitude towards the object of belief.
Faith, while grounded in factual beliefs, goes further, and voluntarily makes a commitment of trust in a person or agency. Faith in God involves judgement that God, as you understand him, is trustworth and then taking a risk in the way you live your life, that God will fulfil his promises to you.
Hope is closely related to faith but while faith is about trust in a person, hope is focused simply on outcomes. Hope entails both desire for a specific outcome and a degree of expectation that it will come about. It is partly voluntary and partly rational. You can to a certain extent choose to hope for something but your hope has to be at least plausible and thus founded on reasons. For instance you can hope that aunt Flossie will leave you a large legacy in her will because ten years ago she said something about 'seeing you alright' when she dies. But when you hear she is currently on her deathbed and has declared to the family in no uncertain terms that you are a worthless ne'er-do- well who won't get a penny from her, hope in this case would be foolish and irrational.
Optimism, in contrast to faith and hope, has no specific focus. It is simply a general attitude that all or most outcomes will work out well in life. Like faith and hope, rational grounds can and should be given for optimism, and it can be defeated by reasons, but it has a larger voluntary component than faith and hope. The best argument for optimism is that a positive attitude and an expectation of success tends to be a good motivator of action, but more importantly, that excessive pessimism is most certainly a self-fulfilling prophecy and will lead almost inevitably to the very failure that is feared and expected.
Against this is the argument that excessive optimism can lead to wishful thinking and unrealistic expectations. Failure to plan for the worst outcome can be as disasterous
6. Madam Butterfly: an example of hope and faith
I think these ideas are well illustrated in the story of Madame Butterfly. In the eponymous opera the Japanese heroine has a love affair with Pinkerton, an officer in the US Navy, and becomes pregnant by him. He is posted back to America but promises Butterfly that he will return to marry her and be a father to their child. Butterfly has hope that the promised future will come about and she has faith in Pinkerton as a person. She also has a number of factual beliefs about Pinkerton—that he is in the US navy, that he is free to marry, that he has made a promise to return, that he is the biological father of their child etc. These beliefs do not logically entail her faith and hope but they provide a warrant for her voluntarity taking the risk of exercising faith and hope.
As it turns out, Butterfly is betrayed by Pinkerton who returns with an American wife and takes the child away. None of this renders Butterfly's faith and hope irrational. She had sound reasons at the time and the fact that things did not work out as she desired does not mean that she had made a mistake or that her judgement was faulty. Faith and hope are always risky and made in the face of incomplete information. If Butterfly continues to hope that Pinkerton will think better of his actions and return to her with the child, she could quite rightly be accused of holding out an irrational hope but this is a matter of judgement and not simply of logical calculation.
7. Is there a connection between hope and reason?
There is a cynical view of hope which tries to sever all connection with reason. As philosopher Alex Rosenberg puts it:
Hope is 90 per cent emotion and 10 per cent illusion. It shapes our lives, and even gives them subjective value. Illusions, like placebos, can be good for you. That's enough for atheism to work with.
It is no doubt true that an illusory hope can be comforting and even motivating. And given that the bad outcome will be the same whether you hope or not, it can be argued, along with François de La Rochefoucauld:
Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.
However, the Humanist should see this as a cynical and ignoble attitude. Even if things are going to turn out badly, s/he wants truth and clarity rather than comforting illusion. Happiness bought at the cost of self-delusion and loss of integrity is too high a price for the Humanist to pay. Furthermore, placing one's hope in comforting illusions can have tragic consequences leading to painful disappointment, despair and ultimate loss of faith so it may not always bring happiness in the end.
8. Reasons for Humanist hope
Humanists believe that hope is an important value in human life, indeed it is a species of happiness in its own right, and they should, as good rationalists, be able to give sound reasons for their hope. But Humanists have to face reality as it is and not as they would wish it to be. They have to bite the bullet where reasons for hope are weak and not invent spurious rationalisations.
While the faith of nineteenth century religious believers took a hard knock from the development of biblical criticism and the theory of evolution, many Victorian atheists took heart from these developments, along with 19th century technological progress generally. They came to believe that human beings would begin to slough-off outdated religious beliefs and superstition and that Progress (with a capital 'P' and the Perfectibility of Mankind (also with a capital 'P') was within sight. In the Twenty-first century, after two world wars, the threat of world-wide nuclear destruction, modern hi-tech terrorism and the threat of global warming (and the threat of those who deny it), such beliefs look somewhat naive. However, Humanists want to defend the view that some degree of optimism about the future of global humanity is justified.
In 1918 Bertrand Russell wrote:
A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought. ~ Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads To Freedom, 1918
This was written immediately after the Great War in his book Proposed Roads To Freedom and on the face of it seems quite counter-intuitive. But it is arguable it's the only hope the Humanist has.
Humanists reject the doctrine of Original Sin not because they believe people are, on the contrary, basically nice. They don't believe that humans are basically anything. It is nonsense to put any human being on a single continuum between good and evil. Some motives and acts are good and others evil and individuals are often a paradoxical mixture of the two.
Humanists have to acknowledge the grim reality that a lot of human beings can, a lot of the time, be evil, selfish, violent, malevolent, vengeful, sadistic and oppressive. But some of them, some of the time, can also be rational, compassionate, sympathetic, self-controlled, forgiving and altruistic. Not a lot of the time, that's true, but enough on which to base a rational hope for humanity. It's not a strong hope, but hope is not about guaranteed outcomes, only about possible and desired outcomes.
This is succinctly expressed in the popular inspirational poem 'Sometimes':
Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.~ Sheenagh Pugh
9. Stephen Pinker's: 'The Better Angels of our nature'
That's the argument for hope from fragile human virtue but I think there is also some empirical evidence on which to ground our hope too.
In his contraversial 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker provides a wealth of detailed quantitative data to support his counter-intuitive thesis that physical violence has been in decline over millennia over the whole world and that the present is probably the most peaceful time in the history of the human species. We kill each other still, but much less frequently than before.
The decline in violence, Pinker argues, is enormous in magnitude, visible on both long and short time scales, and found in many domains, including military conflict, homicide, genocide, torture, criminal justice and treatment of children, homosexuals, animals and racial and ethnic minorities.
Pinker argues that the 65 years since World War II really are among the most peaceful in human history, judged by the percentage of the globe wracked by violence and the percentage of the population dying by human hands. He takes as a critical barometer of violence the rate of homicide deaths per 100,000 citizens.
Pinker identifies five "historical forces" that have favoured what he calls our "our peaceable motives" and "have driven the multiple declines in violence".
They are:
1. The Leviathan — the rise of the modern nation-state and judiciary with its monopoly on the legitimate use of force, which can defuse the temptation to make exploitative attacks and inhibits the impulse for revenge.
2. Commerce — the rise of technological progress allowing the exchange of goods and services over longer distances and larger groups of trading partners, so that other people become more valuable alive than dead.
3. Feminization — increasing respect for the interests and values of women.
4. Cosmopolitanism — the rise of forces such as literacy, mobility and mass media, which can prompt people to take the perspectives of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy.
5 . The Escalator of Reason — an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs, which can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.
10. Does religious hope look better than Humanist hope?
While all this is fine for humanity as a whole or for future generations of humans, what of hope for the individual? Religion can provide hope in an afterlife (even a blissful afterlife for some), but Humanism can offer no such comfort. When you are dead you are gone for ever and you lose everything that was once valuable to you. This mortal life is not a rehearsal or test for the real thing that comes later on.
In the UK, in the year 2000, eight-year Victoria Climbiés was tortured and murdered by her guardians. While the public enquiry after the court case may have some positive results for children in the future and prevent some of them suffering a similar fate, it does nothing for Victoria herself. We are naturally repelled by the suffering and waste of this child's life. Our fundamental moral intuition is that such undeserved suffering should be compensated for in some way in a future existence. In like manner we also feel that it's fundamentally unjust that someone like the UK paedophile Jimmy Saville should have escaped punishment after the terrible crimes he had committed.
The Humanist is compelled to bite the bullet here and admit that while tragedy is not a feature of everyone's life it will be a reality of many lives—far too many. Some perpetrators will die unpunished for their crimes and victims will never receive compensation for their undeserved pain and suffering. In contrast, for the religious believer there can be no such thing as genuine tragedy as all undeserved suffering will be redeemed and made good in the afterlife and the wicked will receive their just deserts.
It has to be admitted that from a purely schematic point of view religious hope looks attractive and offers much more comfort and meaning than the Humanist's. However, it can be argued that religious hope, based on an afterlife, only looks coherent when you squint hard and view it from a distance. When examined in close- focus and analysed a religious after-life does not offer authentic hope at all.
11. Religious hope fails
11.1 Resurrection of the body
The first problem with the religious (more specifically Christian) doctrine of the afterlife is that it is not really clear in what it consists and how it guarantees continuity of identity; for the hope entertained here is for the survival of an individual who must continue to be 'me' throughout for the hope to mean anything.
The New Testament and the historical creeds seem to suggest that resurrection of the body, after the pattern of Christ's resurrection, will be the way it happens. In much Christian art the schema appears to be that the individual dies and goes to sleep in the grave to be awakened at the Last Judgement when the quick and the dead will be judged together and the sheep separated from the goats.
This is problematic in the face of modern biological science as we now know that the body is a continuous flow of energy and matter and not a static object. So the body is more like a process than a thing. When we die the body decomposes and its matter is dispersed throughout the environment. If the physical body is not continuous in some way it's difficult to see how it can preserve personal identity.
The idea that the resurrected body will be a new body through which the self can be expressed is also problematic as such a being seems to be more like a copy of me than a continuation of the 'me' who is alive and kicking now. And what kind of interest can I reasonably have in the destiny of this copy as it's clearly a different person from me? Without bodily continuity it is difficult to see how identity can be preserved and transmitted from one state of existence to another.
11.2 The discarnate soul
Of course, most Christians in the pew nowadays don't really believe in the resurrection of the body (even though they confess it when reciting the creed) but rather a version of the classical Greek idea of an immortal discarnate soul that lives on after the demise of the body. However, this also creates problems of continuity of identity for how can an object that has no individuating properties at all and no extension in space be differentiated from any other soul? Again, how can that soul be 'me' in the sense that I have an interest now in what happens to it in the future?
11.3 The need for justice
What we really want from the afterlife is a guarantee that we are living in a morally structured universe. We need justice to be done—the guilty punished and innocent victims compensated. However, three essential features of justice are that it should be proportionate, timely and understood. The problem here is that any punishment is not necessarily known and understood by the subjects (unless they are Christian believers) and will often be separated from the originating sins by many years. Furthermore, as the afterlife goes on eternally any punishment or reward will be way out of proportion to the guilt incurred which must, by the nature of human mortality, be finite.
The Christian gospel asserts that salvation will only be available to those who have faith in Christ. This creates further problems for justice in the Christian schema as it seems unfair to condemn those who, through no fault of their own, never knew of Christ, either because they were born before Him, born into a non-Christian culture that the gospel had not yet penetrated or who died as babies not yet having the cognitive capacity to exercise belief and faith.
Theologians have struggled with this difficulty for two millennia and have come up with a range of answers that try to reconcile our intuitive sense of justice with the apparently unfairly exclusive claims of Christian salvation. The liberal theologian will fall back on his belief in the ultimate justice and benevolence of God and invoke mystery. He will say something along the lines that the universe is structured with a grain that ensures that love and justice will triumph in the end. A very vague, minimalist and unspecified hope you have to admit!
11.4 Reincarnation and Karma
I've always felt that reincarnation and karma provide the most satisfactory solution to both the problem of evil and the problem of ensuring universal justice. It explains and justifies why suffering exists—it is punishment for sins committed in this or a previous life—and it ensures that the punishment fits the crime and that it is proportionate. Karma avoids the difficulty of the disproportionality of Christian hell as in the long run everyone gets just what they deserve.
However, as in the case of resurrection of the body, karma hits the problem of how continuity of identity can be guaranteed such that what a person in a subsequent life suffers is somehow the just consequence of wrongdoings in this current life. In the case of Buddhism the problem of continuity of identity is exacerbated as Buddhism denies that there is any such thing as a persistent self (see the Anicca and Anatta doctrines). In the same way that Christianity hits the buffers over the Problem of Evil, Buddhism hits them over the Problem of Rebirth.
In addition to failing to guarantee continuity of identity the theory of karma contravenes two universally accepted principles of justice:
(1) That the punishment should closely follow the crime in time. There should never be a huge gap between the commission of the crime and the application of the punishment but with karma there could be centuries between crime and punishment.
(2) That the perpetrator should understand the reason they are being punished otherwise they cannot repent and reform. In the case of reincarnation memory is normally wiped out on birth into a new life so the sufferer has no knowledge of why they are suffering.
Followers of the Dharmic religions might object at this point that talk of 'crime', 'sin', 'justice' and 'punishment' are inappropriate importations from Abrahamic religions with their judicial view of ethics and values (ie, God as legislator and judge). The Dharma follower will say that karma is an impersonal law of cause and effect not statute law.
The difficulty here is that making a distinction between good and bad intentions and actions is not something that can be done by an unconscious and impersonal natural process. It requires the judgement of a self-conscious agent (ie, a person) as values only exist within the community of interconnected minds. So, in the end, the theory of karma fails too, even though it has some attractive features.
11.5 Post-mortem existence cannot be a worthwhile life
But what of the nature of the afterlife itself? It is arguab that any kind of eternal post-mortem life could not only fail to guarantee a continuity of identity but also cannot provide a worthwhile form of existence.
11.6 Eternal life would be tedious
The idea that a life that went on interminably would be intolerably tedious is explored in Bernard Williams' article on the Makropulos Affair (based on the Janáček opera of the same name). Mortal life consists of living towards a temporal horizon where projects and periods of life have a beginning, middle and an end. Take away that horizon and temporal structure and you have nothing that looks like human life any more or instantiates anything humanly worthwhile or valuable. Eventually, life will become repetitive and pointless and a numbing weltschmerz must inevitably set in.
11.7 Perhaps our desires would change
In response it could be argued that in this new world one's affects and desires would be radically changed so that one would be happy in this eternal existence whatever form it took. But this misses the point. I am evaluating that possible future state from my perspective of here and now and I really don't like the prospect of that kind of existence. For instance, it is no comfort to be told that in ten years time I will be suffering senile dementia but that I will be warm, comfortable, well fed and well looked after and feel happy in my existence. That would not be a life that I recognise as my own or would desire. It would not fill me with hope however ecstatically happy you could guarantee I would be.
11.8 Eternity as the 'eternal now'
An alternative parry sometimes made to the idea that eternal life would be tedious is to claim that 'eternity' does not mean 'for-ever -and-ever- without-end' but rather means life outside or beyond the passing of time. However, this doesn't solve the problem either as to be living in the 'eternal now' would be to be frozen in stasis where nothing at all is happening. A life consists of events occurring in temporal succession and consciousness of changing states. Change can only happen over time and within time. Without time one would be frozen in a single moment that would amount to a kind of eternal sleep which would be indistinguishable from non-existence.
11.9 Eternal life more than just post-mortem existence
Yet another response, mainly made by liberal and radical theologians, is to say that when the New Testament talks about 'eternal life' it is not talking crudely about life going on for ever and ever but a quality of life that believers can enjoy here and now. I am sure they are right that 'eternal life' on the lips of Jesus in the Gospels indeed does mean more than interminable existence after death, but it's also clear from the texts that it does not mean less than that. To argue that the New Testament does not offer a hope of some kind of post-mortem existence is sheer sophistry.
11.10 Eternal life cannot be a worthwhile life
By its very nature life in heaven must be perfect: free of evil, imperfection, conflict, pain and suffering of all kinds. Suffering on earth can be tolerable just because we know that it will end some day. Nothing lasts forever. But in heaven the prospect of suffering, say, a paralysis that is never cured would be unthinkable. That really would be hell. Heaven must therefore be perfect in all possible ways in order to guarantee happiness. However, in such a world there would be no risk. Consequently, there could be no genuine achievement of anything worthwhile as there could never be the real possibility of failure or loss. Life in heaven must therefore be bland and in the end uninteresting and unfulfilling. It would be like a virtual reality game where suffering, if it exists at all, is no worse than the disappointment of losing a round of a game; where you can always reboot and start again and who wants to spend eternity playing a simulation of real life?
11.11 Only mortal life can have worth
The religious hope based on an afterlife therefore fails to deliver on three counts.
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It cannot give a coherent account of how it can be 'me' who lives on to enjoy this future life and therefore have an interest in its fate.
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It cannot guarantee justice in the afterlife.
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And if it can be shown that there is a continuity between 'me' now and 'me' in the promised future state, it cannot show how that form of life is one I would value from my current perspective or would contain anything humanly worthwhile. Furthermore, if my own identity cannot be guaranteed, neither can that of my loved-ones and one of the key attractions of life after death is that we will continue our significant relationships into eternity.
The Humanist fully embraces human mortality and accepts that contingency, change, chance and time are the only conditions under which any kind of human life can be lived—worthwhile or otherwise. The risk of tragedy and unfulfilled hope is thus the price we pay for the possibility of realising any human values at all. We have to think of value, risk and suffering as necessary trade-offs.
12. No atheists in foxholes
It is sometimes argued that 'there are no atheists in foxholes' meaning that when a person is faced with the imminent prospect of their own mortality they tend to embrace the hopes offered by religion. Fear drives them to faith. However, experience does not seem to bear this out. Those who care for the terminally ill in hospices concur that it is not the convinced atheist who dies anxiously and without hope but rather the person who has never in their life reflected on death and the Big Questions. The people without convictions of any kind, either religious or atheist, and who are uncertain about the future, are the ones who tend to suffer the most anxiety.
Humanist funerals have become increasingly popular over recent years but in them no mention is ever made of the hope of post-mortem existence. While those present are obviously sad about their loss, the focus is on celebrating the life that was lived and the happy memories we have of the deceased. They live on in our memories, the legacy of their work and the effect that they had on family, friends and colleagues. These 'immortality surrogates' seem to be enough and there is no sense that human mortality is a depressing business.
13. Can we hope too much?
The final question we must address is whether hope is always an unqualified good. Can we hope too much and is it possible to live without hope?
Hope is a combination of desire and expectation for something uncertain and not guaranteed. All a hope needs to be sustained is a want and the belief that it might possibly come to pass.
Hope is a good insofar as it motivates us to persevere in order to obtain what we desire. When hope is too weak it leads to passivity and fatalism. We feel we are at the end of the road and now 'all we can do is hope'. On the other hand too much hope can lead to self-deception interfering with our ability to assess and deal wisely with reality. Therefore we need to find the realistic balance between insufficient hope which leaves us passive and unmotivated and too much hope which leads to self-deception or painful disappointment when hope is not fulfilled.
What we need to do is to hope but without too much anticipation. For instance, being hopeful about a job interview doesn't mean you have to convince yourself that things will turn out exactly as you'd like. You should try to suspend judgement about the outcome. All that's required is believing that what you want can happen, not that it definitely will.
If we don't allow thoughts of potential success to fuel our desire then when we fail to get the job we have applied for, we can simply accept we did not get what we wanted. But if our desire and belief are welded together, each feeding the other, we are left hanging onto a hope which could lift us to joy or dash us against the rocks.
To live without hope is therefore to pull off the trick of desiring and anticipating at the same time, without them becoming one thing. It's a subtle distinction.... Maintaining it frees us from being hostages to fortune, since if how we feel is not intimately bound up with our expectations, we are less vulnerable if they are unmet. It is easier to live with unsatisfied desires and unfulfilled expectations than under the heavy weight of crushed hopes (from an article by Humanist philosopher Julian Baggini)
Finally, I leave you with the words of Sam Harris:
Hope and fear are completely natural responses to uncertainty. But they are two sides of the same coin: if we would be free of fear, we must let go of hope. Easier said than done, of course. But it is possible. And being without hope is by no means synonymous with despair. Rather, it's tranquillity.**