Last Thor's Day, the subject was prayer. Today the subject is prayer's big sister, hope. The two are sisters because they're two sides of the same phenomenon. It's just that the hoper need never assume the position or plead to a deity. Hope is the big sister because she shows her face far more often. She's on battlefields, at political stumps, in courtrooms, in voting booths, at ballparks, in airplanes, on get-well cards, in hospitals, at racetracks, wherever boy meets girl, on stock exchanges around the world, and on the highway when you see an approaching cop car. Hope is ubiquitous.
Hope is also bigger in its consequences. It diminishes our humanity far more than prayer. A quote that I cited in a blog comment last week sums it up:
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.What stone-hearted son of Satan, you may ask, could write such a thing? It was Friedrich Nietzsche, who was never one to mince words. Your next question is probably, You don't seriously believe that, do you? C'mon, worst of all evils? I have to give a shifty answer to that one: in some contexts, no, I don't agree, but in the context that Nietzsche was really addressing, I do. I'll explain the "no" first, just to get it out of the way.
When we hope for something that could realistically happen without any action on our part, I have no quarrel with it. Some examples:
I hope this plane won't crash on the way to Denver. (Air disasters are very rare.)These are everyday hopes that give us no reason to think the hopers have disengaged from reality. However, consider these hopes:
I hope you have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. (Many people do.)
I hope the Niners make it to the playoffs this year. (Seems probable; they did last year.)
I hope the climate-change doomsayers are wrong. (Have you tried reading, thinking, and coming to an informed opinion?)And, of course, there's the Gold Medal Winner:
I hope Cindy will drop the restraining order when I explain how much I love her. (Seek medical help.)
I hope I win the lottery. (It's a bitch to think about your goals and make a plan.)
I hope I won't regret not buying health insurance for me and my family. (It's OK—you all have magical lives!)
I hope we find ways to feed the billions of people we keep adding to the world population. (Like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but on a bigger scale.)
I hope God answers my prayers. (An irrational wish that a mythical being will listen to a cacophony of requests and grant yours.)It is irrational hope that Nietzsche wrote about, the kind that's a mindless game of "it will all work out." To which many would sadly add "in this life or the next." So long as we indulge in this evasion, we deflect responsible action and prolong the torments of man. And what of the personal cost of hoping our troubles away? To me it means living one's life at great risk, like a boat adrift on a river, always at the mercy of the current.
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Copyright © 2012 by Ken Marks
Some faithful believe God does answer all prayers (hope) . Its just that sometimes he says NO!
ReplyDeleteYes, Sharon, they do, don't they? Of course, from my point of view (and I guess from Ken's also), such believers are simply rationalizing their frequent experiences of things' not turning out as specified in their prayers.
DeleteA practice of believers to accommodate that is to pray that "God's will be done," but that seems tantamount to resigning oneself to accept and live with everything as it turns out.
Such believers are relatively easy for various religious demagogues (such as Pat Robertson) to herd into line (by telling them what God's will is). And that's a problem for the rest of us. (Wikipedia: "A demagogue is a political leader who appeals to the emotions, prejudices, and ignorance of the poorer and less-educated classes in order to gain power.")
If god says no, as he did to innocent people trapped in planes about to be crashed into the World Trade Center 11 years ago, to cite a timely example, do the faithful think we should draw any conclusions from that?
DeleteGood article Ken !
ReplyDeleteI don't see Hope as ever being bad. I see self-delusion as being bad. A delusional person will likely have delusional hopes and dreams. It's not Hope's fault that the dude's crazy.
ReplyDeleteSelf-delusion is certainly a bad thing, but much of irrational hope is not delusional. Rather, it's an evasion, as the piece says. It's a passive substitute for saying, "This is a concern. How can I be engaged in the solution or in preventing the worst?" Avoiding that way of living is a subtraction from living.
Delete"You've got to have hope, son. It goes with the territory" Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller.
ReplyDeleteMost of the people I work with on social justice issues operate with a hope that what they are doing will change society. I'd guess that much of mainstream opinion considers that irrational, but historically that's where positive change originates, not from being sensible. And that hope is often faith based, which I have my doubts about, but it moves them to action.
I suspect that Sharon would agree with Martin Luther King Jr.- "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."