In her December 16th, 2016 farewell interview from the White House with Oprah Winfrey (tickered by CBS with the message “Leaving with Hope,”) Michelle Obama spoke eloquently, quite to the contrary, about the experience of hopelessness.
In the key section of the interview, Winfrey asks, “given that the election and the administration was about hope, do you think you achieved it? If so why?” In reply, the First Lady says “Yes, I do,” and then darkens visibly, and answers further by way of a sort of demonstration: “We feel the difference now. See, now, we’re feeling what not having hope feels like, you know.” She then goes on immediately to begin to characterize what hope is, namely that it is something necessary, that it is a concept, and not just a slogan “to get votes.” To further underscore its necessity, she also asks, rhetorically, “what do you do if you don’t have it?” And she intensifies this still further, asking, “What do you give your kids if you can’t give them hope?” Following this, she asserts that one has to have hope in order to believe in the future, in the things that we are building, so that our children can feel like their work and thus their lives, are not in vain. She concludes with the disturbing question, “What do we do if we don’t have hope, Oprah?”
The particular experience of hopelessness that the First Lady attempts to describe is not captured in any way, shape, or form by the oft heard response to so called ‘liberal tears,’ namely the hurled insistence that we should ‘just get over it’ because ‘we lost.’
The remarkable pathos of this interview should be taken quite seriously. Michelle Obama is speaking to something profound that has not been grasped by the belligerent red state adherents of Donald Trump. The particular experience of hopelessness that the First Lady attempts to describe is not captured in any way, shape, or form by the oft heard response to so called “liberal tears” namely the hurled insistence that we should “just get over it” because “we lost” and that we all need to “toughen up, buttercup.”
But the issue has nothing to do with being sore losers of an election, and nothing to do with over sensitivity. The issue is that despite the fact that we live in a modern democratic republic, and our institutions all reflect modern values and extol modern virtues, it is nonetheless a fact that approximately half the country are not at all modern persons, and the hard-won fight of four centuries to move beyond medievalism, monarchism, and theocracy means nothing to them. The attitude that this plurality of Americans bear toward our most cherished political values matches precisely their attitude toward science; they enjoy its benefits and effects, while holding in contempt it’s methods and all other aspects of its self-understanding.
For the modern person, hope is invested in democratic ideals and values in a way similar to Christian hope, and so similarly functions, as the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel has written about hope with a big H, like a ‘memory of the future.’
What then, do modern persons hope for, as opposed to their pre-modern neighbors? What does it have to do with faith in the perfectibility of our basic institutions? And what does it mean, as Michelle Obama herself asks, when the hope of modern persons is lost?
Ancient Hope, Christian Hope, Modern Hope
While it is reasonable to say that all hope is hope for happiness, and that happiness generally involves an absence of pain, it is also clearly the case that there is “hope with a small h” and “hope with a big H” and hope with a big H has largely meant different things at different times, even where the limit experience of human being is a constant. For example, all people everywhere have yearned for an end to suffering, to wickedness, to evil, or to sin. In antiquity, the wish that virtue and happiness should coincide (so that the wicked should not be rewarded and the righteous trampled) gave rise to a certain kind of philosophical politics, or to stoicism. In the Christian middle ages, hope for happiness was directed toward resurrection, for salvation and the afterlife.
In his blog post “What is the Biblical or Christian Definition of Hope?” Kansas Pastor Jack Wellman writes that “Hope is not ‘I hope my team wins the super bowl, or I hope I get a raise,” and goes on to say, “to have a Biblical hope is to have a sure anchor of the soul, not hoping for rain because the forecast says there is a sixty percent chance of rain…”. He calls this human hope as opposed to biblical hope, and further says that the Christian has a hope that is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The difference between “every day hopes” and hope comes out in times of great trial, when the “I hope” is directed toward a plea for salvation. For the Christian, we have this hope, the pastor writes, because Jesus was raised from the dead, and as a result we know that “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the sound of the trumpet of God.” Handel’s Messiah tells us the rest: “The trumpet shall sound! And the dead shall be raised; incorruptible!”
For modern people, hope is also something more than mere wishful thinking about everyday things, “the hope with the little h;” modern hope is kindred to the hope of the faithful in that it also has the depth and fervor of qualitative inwardness. But for the modern, hope is projected onto the future in the form of a belief in all manner of modern utopias (e.g., freedom as autonomy realized through ever more rational institutions—a vision of the highest good; or perhaps the Marxist hope for freedom through emancipation and the classless society, or even the liberal utopia of Star Trek (as discussed in Steve Heikkila’s IDT piece, “So Much for the United Federation of Planets”).
For the modern person, hope is invested in democratic ideals and values in a way similar to Christian hope, and so similarly functions, as the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel has written about hope with a big H, like a “memory of the future.” As impossible as it may be for the belligerent red state Trump supporter to accept, Modernist utopias focus modern hope and orient and motivate moral action in the same way that Christian hope for salvation does for the believer. The great trial that illuminates Hope, as opposed to mere everyday hopes, is the experience of modernity itself “on endless trial,” our continual modern high wire act, where we collectively, in the modern age, seek to emerge into maturity, to overcome our apparently endless potential for barbarism.
For modern persons, the hope for the perfectibility of our institutions, the idea that we might someday realize a universal dispensation of freedom as autonomy for all members of our species, is simply incompatible with the idea that a person such as Trump could be elected the president of the United States.
From Hope to Despair
In Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, Gabriel Marcel asks the question, what then does it mean to despair? The answer he provides is that despair is “capitulation before a certain fate laid down by our judgment” and that as capitulation, it is to disarm, of one’s own volition, and to renounce the idea of remaining oneself.” The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States evokes this sort of hopelessness in Michelle Obama, and indeed in millions upon millions of Americans who consider themselves modern persons.
For modern persons, the hope for the perfectibility of our institutions, the idea that we might someday realize a universal dispensation of freedom as autonomy for all members of our species, is simply incompatible with the idea that a person such as Trump, so thoroughly corrosive to all our core democratic values and institutions and traditions, could be elected the president of the United States. Like chess players who can see several moves ahead on the gameboard, people who invest their hope in the values embodied in democratic institutions see quite clearly where the rise of Trump leads (to be honest, I can’t bear to innumerate the mounting evidence). It leads precisely nowhere. Michelle Obama’s question, “What do we do if we don’t have hope, Oprah?” resolves to the question asked in relation to Walter Benjamin’s shock at the persistence of barbarism in the 20th century: What does the fact of barbarism on our times mean for our hopes for the future, given that we still want to regard ourselves as modern persons?
In Modernity and Despair: What Should We Hope For? Philosopher and blogger Joshua Miller observes that the modern world produces a certain kind of despair because the primary sources of hope are “technological development and the institutional efforts of technocrats.” Miller says that we expect that our modern institutions will deliver on the hope for progress – the supreme court, the justice department, Silicon Valley. As a result, hope becomes separated from moral action. While it is true that in many ways we live in the world prophesied by Max Weber (a rationalized society where progress, assuming there is any, is achieved in increments by professionals only through bureaucratic action) there might yet be a chance for what Miller calls “the progressives view of progress” the view that insists that developments that render us passive cannot be progressive ones, and that “We” must work together to achieve our hoped-for goals.
Whatever the prospects for renewing our collective passion for and commitment to the ideals embedded in democratic republican institutions now that they have been sacrificed at the altar of the electoral college, the entire tragedy in the realm of the ethical is completely lost on Trump. Here is what Trump told an Alabama audience: “I assume [the first lady] was talking about the past and not the future…I believe there is tremendous hope, and beyond hope we have such potential. This country has such potential.”
It’s hard not to think that the potential Trump sees “beyond hope” is more akin to winning the super bowl than realizing universal respect for persons on the terrain of human history. That there are always opportunities is not in doubt; what is doubtful is whether any of it has anything more to do with being a free country. Of course, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with his hope. He has the best hope. Really first rate. It’s gonna be huuuuge.
