Chapter 1
Hope in a time of global despair
Kaethe Weingarten
The straggly crab-apple tree on my neighborâs path is blooming. Tasteless, extravagantly expensive blueberries have replaced the small wooden crates of clementines on the front counter of my local grocery store. Itâs April. A survivor of three cancers, I have entered the arc of the year in which I hope I will live to eat clementines again.
Hope can be a wish, an expectation of something desired. I hope I live the six months until clementines reappear in the stores. This hope floats in the realm of feeling; I do nothing but note it.
Hope can also be a practice: it is achieved by taking action on behalf of oneâs desires or commitments. Last winter, unbeknownst to me, my partner froze a batch of clementines and we ate them like popsicles in July. âYou have lived to eat clementines again,â he said as we savored the cold, sweet, orange sections and the moment.
This chapter concerns hope as a practice. It is about doing hope with others (Weingarten 2000, 2003). This conceptualization arises out of my own need for a way of thinking about hope that can sustain both my supporters and me. Tested more than we would wish, I have generated ideas about hope that offer an alternative to those I have found in mainstream popular and academic sources.
Western ideas about hope originate with the foundational myth of Pandora, a beautiful young woman who was given as a gift to Epimetheus by Zeus. Two versions of the myth exist: one in which Pandoraâs adolescent curiosity leads her to open a jar filled with human miseries that she has been specifically instructed to leave alone and, horrified, she is only able to reseal the jar in time to keep hope inside; and another in which she opens a box and inadvertently lets out all the blessings known to humankind except hope. In both versions, two ideas are central. The first is that Zeus wants hope to be the responsibility of humans and second that hope exists inside one solitary object.
This latter idea corresponds with the common view that hope is a feeling, an achievement of one person alone. The same premise undergirds the principal empirical investigations of hope. For the last two decades, C. R. Snyder and his colleagues in the psychology department at the University of Kansas have studied the psychology of hope. Here is one item from their Adult Trait Hope Scale (Snyder et al. 1997): I meet the goals that I set for myself. The scale perfectly captures the individualistic view of hope. Each hope item is designed to measure peopleâs convictions that they can accomplish goals on their own. Now imagine an Adult Trait Hope Scale that is predicated on the notion that hope is something you do with others. Here is the same item revised to reflect that hope is the responsibility of the community: I can count on the support of others to help me meet my goals.
The view of hope expressed in the second version pivots the responsibility for its accomplishment away from the individual alone, who may or may not âfeelâ hope, to the individual in community. It reflects both a pragmatic and a philosophical point of view. Individuals are notoriously prone to despair. Pragmatically, expecting people to summon hope on their own when they feel most dispirited seems unwise, even cruel. Whatâs more, it may instantiate a fundamental misconception about the nature of human relatedness: we are not isolated, but rather intrinsically interdependent.
The Buddha expressed this as âthe one contains the allâ (Hanh 1999: 221). Indraâs net, hanging above the palace of the god Indra, provides a beautiful image of â and a metaphor for â human interrelatedness. The net is infinite in dimension and in the center of its every node rests a jewel, reflecting every other jewel in the net. This ancient wisdom finds contemporary expression in philosophy and science. For example, Alfred North Whitehead wrote in a lecture he delivered in 1926: âThe [people] are the primary units of the actual community . . . But each unit has in its nature a reference to every other member of the community, so that each other member of the community . . . is a microcosm representing in itself the entire all-inclusive universeâ (Whitehead 1926).
Today, neuroscientists have identified mirror neurons that fire in our brains when we observe actions performed by others (Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004). This is a physical manifestation of interrelatedness; our very own nerve cells empathically resonate with others by mimicking them. Neuroanatomically, I am what you do.
Hope tasks
From Indraâs net to neural nets we see expressions of human interconnectedness. What does this mean for hope? Simply put, we each have a role in its manifestation but our positions in relation to hope determine what we must do. Those who are hopeless and those who witness their despair have different tasks.
For some doing hope emerges out of the most intimate knowledge. I suffer severe and apparently intractable pain as a result of treatments for cancer. I move in and out of hopelessness. My husbandâs days and nights are filled with awareness of the ebb and flow of my pain. At night the shifting depth of his sleep reflects his ever-vigilant witness. By day, his constant wondering when he will get a call from me letting him know that my ability to sustain productive work has ended for the day is its measure. We both believe that hope is important and we know, achingly so, that what we must each do to accomplish it is not the same.
Hope, hopelessness and despair may touch our lives at far remove. The radio at dinnertime brings news of a flooded Chinese village, thousands dead, while we are setting the table for our meal. The morning paper contains a story about rape in Darfur as we are arguing with our partner about who will walk the dog. The gap between what we witness and what others suffer is staggering. Taking in what is happening in the world and registering the immensity of the gap may temporarily or chronically sap our reserves of hopefulness.
Hope and despair are unevenly distributed in our lives and on our planet. Some people, some groups of people, some nations, lack and need hope; others, hope intact or untested, are witnesses. For however long these circumstances obtain, they position us differently and call for different actions.
Hopeless, we must resist isolation. Witness to despair, we must refuse indifference. Neither is easy.
Peggy Penn, a psychotherapist and poet in New York, has worked for decades with people with chronic and severe illness, a group who are often hopeless (Penn 2001). She well knows the gravity of the pull toward isolation and the dangers of it. Before withdrawal, however, there is a struggle. The ill and unwell have an intense desire to share the details of the bodyâs betrayals but this is coupled with an equally immense fear that to do so as often as the body does betray would drive away the very audience we most want to stay. Penn names this a paradox. I live it as a bind.
Whether hopelessness derives from chronic illness or any other condition against which struggle seems insurmountable, the task is to resist the temptation to withdraw from others. The task is to resist isolation.
The witnessesâ task is a related one. In the face of calamities and tragedies that happen over and over again, in our homes and on our planet, we must reject indifference. Indifference exerts its own seductive pull, roping us in by our feeling, first, inadequate and then, overwhelmed. Recognizing these sticky strands is the first step of refusing indifference.
The tasks I am proposing are difficult. Mutually intertwined, they call for doing hope together, yet they donât concretize a way of doing so. Instead, they are an approach, an attitude. Coupled with concepts from Snyderâs group, a practice does emerge.
The practice of hope
Snyderâs group conceptualizes hope as a form of thinking that has three components, schematized as goal, waypower and willpower thinking. They write: âHope is a way of thinking in which a person has the perceived waypower and willpower to achieve goalsâ (Snyder et al. 1997: 7). I have already critiqued the individualistic orientation of their model, which is evident in this formulation. Willpower, or âagencyâ, the more technical term for it, implies that the motivation, determination and energy to achieve goals must be summoned from within, clearly a high hurdle for those who are truly hopeless and in desperate situations. Willpower conceptualized as a collective responsibility is attainable.
Waypower thinking, or, as the group also writes, pathways thinking, can also be reinterpreted as a collaborative enterprise. People who are discouraged can rarely summon the energy or creativity to see their goals clearly or imagine routes to them. Hopelessness itself often emerges in the context of blocked pathways to goals, which can engender confusion about the goals themselves. Despair is the conviction that nothing that one wants or wanted is within reach, whether love or security or clean water or health. Clarifying goals and identifying pathways toward them is part of the practice of doing hope; when we are hopeless others may have to help us do this.
But this is not necessarily simple. First, there is often a lot of trial and error to define goals and pathways that will succeed. Goals and pathways to them may have to replace each other at a rate one would never have expected or wanted. Second, life deals us circumstances in which we have to select goals and pathways we never thought we could accept. Yet, the practice of doing hope, of re-forming goals and cultivating pathways to them, stretches us, helping us sustain the very practice of doing hope.
My mother died decades ago. During her time of dying she was rarely hopeless, a gift that has continued to unfold in the lives of her children and grandchildren to this day. A writer, she wanted her experience with the medical care system to be of use to others. When she realized she had an incurable cancer, she was temporarily in despair. She turned to her oncologist, who suggested that she keep a journal â long before the days that people wrote illness memoirs. She did so until three months before her death (Weingarten 1978). Writing the journal provided a pathway toward a goal that was accessible to her, while there was no pathway toward the eminently preferred goal of staying alive.
I, who had wanted to grow old with my mother, at first wanted her to avail herself of any treatment that might extend her life. Ultimately, in the final hours of her life, I wished her dead. I saw that my hope for connection to my mother would forever be in my dreams and in my heart and never with the unconscious body lying inert in the hospital bed. In one excruciating 24-hour period my hope tumbled through four phases: please donât let her die became please donât let her suffer, which passed on to please let her die comfortably, which then morphed the most inconceivable hope into a conceivable one: let her die now. It was only after listening to Karl Tomm at a workshop 21 years later (Tomm 1997) that I fully acknowledged my thoughts and only in writing this chapter that I fully accepted them. Hope depends on pathways thinking to an achievable goal, whether that goal breaks our heart or not.
Hope as a practice of solving for pattern
This past summer I read a remarkable letter written by Jeffrey Sachs, Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He wrote the letter after visiting rural villages in Kenya that he described as âbeset by hunger, AIDS, and malaria,â with conditions far âgrimmerâ than any UN document conveys (Sachs 2004). He met with 200 villagers for three and a half hours to learn about their problems and to think with them about how their situation could improve.
The letter details terrible conditions that prevail in the community. Malaria is constant and AIDS prevalence is 30 percent or more. Virtually every household is taking care of a child orphaned by AIDS. Clean water is not always available. Few of the farmers can afford fertilizers for the soil, rainfall is inconsistent, and as a result food production is low. There is barely enough food to feed the villagers, much less to take to market.
Sachs observes that the villagers are clear on goals, but they lack access to the resources that would provide pathways to them. This is precisely what Sachs does have access to. In his letter, he frames his approach to the villagersâ problems in a manner consistent with the themes I have been addressing in this chapter. First, he is not indifferent to the villagersâ plight. Second, he operates from a premise of global interconnectedness. As an economist, he puts this in market terms: âThe remarkable point is that this village could be rescued . . . Survival depends on addressing a series of specific challenges . . . all of [which] can be met, with known, proven, reliable, and appropriate technologies and interventions . . . at a cost that is tiny for the world but too high for the villages themselvesâ (Sachs 2004: 5). How might a âglobal villageâ operate on this observation? Sachs suggests that rich and poor nations must make visible the multiple arrangements they have with each other. For instance, while Kenyaâs foreign investment need in rural areas is about $1 billion per year, donor support to Kenya is around $100 million. âAmazingly, Kenyaâs debt servicing to the rich world is around $600 million per year, much larger than the aid inflows! Kenyaâs budget is therefore still being drained by the international community, not bolstered by itâ (Sachs 2004: 8). Sachsâ analysis connects the villagersâ needs to the wider context of the international donorsâ debt servicing inflows. He recognizes that one solution to the rural villagersâ problems lies in increasing donorsâ outflows and decreasing their inflows from desperately poor peoples. Reading Sachsâ letter I was reminded of Wendell Berryâs term âsolving for pattern,â his apt phrase for developing solutions that do not make the problem worse and that do make improvements in harmony with the overall context within which problems are embedded (Berry 2002). Sachsâ genius is his ability to make connections between facts on the ground and those of the global market. He sees that pathways thinking is more constructive when linked to an understanding of the widest possible context within which problems are embedded and that solving for pattern is bound to be more effective if we look at the whole.
Questioning hope in therapy
As therapists, this is our challenge too. We try to understand the context of our clientsâ distress, communicate our empathy for their dilemmas and provide energy and direction for alternative ways of thinking about their situations. Good questions are a mainstay of our work. They produce fresh responses, which bring facets of the pattern into view that had been obscured. They contribute to conversation...
