The second strand of the concept of hope is philosophical thinking. This, of course, predates Christianity and the earliest consideration in fact comes from Greek myth, recorded in Hesiod’s Works and Days. Here, Pandora opens a large jar which released all kinds of evils into the world; only Hope remained to counterbalance them. Perhaps hope can sustain humans against all manner of evils.
On the other hand, I think it was Nietzsche who commented that perhaps Hope was left in the box because the Greeks felt it was the most dangerous of the evils. A friend commented to me once that of all things, the one thing he could not cope with was hope. Hope raises our expectations for a better future and, Nietzsche argued, prevented us from focussing on the here and now. This is, of course, among other things, a criticism of theological hope. If theological or religious hope, in the Christian tradition, is for an unspecified future happiness, then we can justify any suffering in the present.
The fact that a lot of work aimed at the relief of suffering in the present is based on Christian thought and action does not get a look in here, of course. The faith is so often presented as being one of ‘pie in the sky when you die’ that counterexamples tend to get drowned out. But Nietzsche's accusation and a large number of other observations, both empirical and philosophical have largely removed the category of hope from philosophical work. Hope is consigned to theology.
The problem, at least according to Neiman, is that philosophy has lost track of evil. The horrors of the Twentieth Century are such that philosophy cannot cope. The terrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima are more than our philosophies can bear. Previous writers, from Leibniz to Freud could grapple with evil. But, after the Second World War it is almost as if philosophy had to shrug and give up or move on to something that was potentially explicable.
An anchor for Neiman’s exploration of Evil in Modern Thought is Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is ostensibly an account of the trial of a Nazi official who was involved in creating and sustaining the Holocaust. While Neiman, in her afterword, observes that Arendt’s account of Eichmann was not based on full knowledge of the facts of his beliefs, the philosophical point is unchanged. Where Arendt writes of ‘the banality of evil’ she is, in fact, indicating that there might be some hope.
The idea is this: If evil comes about through lots of small decisions by people to do something – follow orders, conceal papers, sign documents without really reading or understanding them or considering the consequences and so on, then by changing those decisions, evil can be prevented in human terms. If evil is truly banal, then it is the small decisions of life which build up and become the great evils of the world.
In the history of philosophy, Neiman writes, there was in Enlightenment thought, a dissociation forming between natural and moral evil. Events like the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 could be seen as Providence, as an act of God, punishment for sins. If this road is not taken, and many Enlightenment thinkers did not do so, then natural evil is not evil at all, it is just something that happens. We might be able to explain storms and earthquakes, but the death and destruction dealt out are not evil, merely unfortunate.
Moral evil, on the other hand, is something which we cannot account for because it is inflicted by people on others. The Holocaust was a great moral evil, but there is in fact no calculus of evil. To say Auschwitz was a great moral evil (and it was) does not mean that the firebombing of Tokyo was not an evil. We hope that the latter was done with good intentions and the former was not. But whether intentions actually stack up like that is unclear.
Along these lines, then, we can see why hope has become philosophically unfashionable. Against the technological evil our times are capable of, such as the nuclear end of the world, philosophical hope has little to say. Our lives are not our own, in this sense. Our leaders, and those of other countries, hold the cards in the game of nuclear poker. Similarly, we feel disempowered and helpless in the face of climate change. Some of the leaders we elect, or who otherwise come to power, refuse to accept that climate change is a problem of will have any effect, or that it has such a significant effect as to warrant a change of policy and promise to their electors. Short term advantage outweighs even slightly longer-term catastrophe.
The hope in small things and activities is still alive, however. Things have changed. Public execution is outlawed in many countries; confessions extracted by torture are not accepted by many judicial systems. The fact that they still are in some is not cause for despair. The fact that women still earn less than men, or that people of colour are still discriminated against and so on are not reasons to despair either. The identification of such issues gives some hope for a better future.
Of course, climate change, increasingly violent storms, the emergence of new diseases and so on could be classified as natural evils. But the responsibility for climate change and these concomitant results thereof is human activity and human activity where the people who choose do have some idea of the choice and the evil route they are taking. A company that discharges industrial waste into a rive which will kill the fish knows that this is a possibility and that if found out will be subject to public humiliation, court proceedings and large fines. Attempting not to get found out is not a response in a moral sense, nor is switching operations to a country where the environmental rules and enforcement are more lax.
But experience shows that small changes can build up. A family decides to holiday in the UK rather than flying to Florida. Tons of carbon emissions are saved. One family holiday is not going to make a great deal of difference. But ten million a year over ten years might. Maybe, in a non-theological sense at least, hope is to be found, and perhaps only to be found, in small things.
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