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0:01:18 We live in a culture obsessed with hope.
0:01:23 Trained to believe that keeping the faith is the key to sustaining success.
0:01:25 You’ve heard this before.
0:01:30 The sun will come out tomorrow, and when it does, we’ll take the sunny side of the street.
0:01:35 And as long as we don’t stop believing, what a wonderful world this will be.
0:01:37 That’s nice.
0:01:39 But, just hear me out.
0:01:46 What if the path to a better world isn’t through blind hope?
0:01:54 What if what the world needs now is a particular kind of hope, balanced with a little clear-eyed pessimism?
0:01:59 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:04 Today’s guest is Mara van der Lute.
0:02:10 She’s a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and the author of Hopeful Pessimism.
0:02:21 It’s a quietly radical invitation to rethink the stories we tell ourselves about hope, despair, and what it means to live with dignity in a breaking world.
0:02:27 For van der Lute, despair is not always the enemy, and hope is not always a virtue.
0:02:39 Instead, she argues that the fuel we need to drive forward, to have the courage to be activists, to make change, to fix a broken future, is pessimism.
0:02:48 Mara van der Lute, welcome to the show.
0:02:50 Thank you for having me.
0:02:51 I’m glad you’re here.
0:02:58 I have been called a pessimist many times, and I’ve always recoiled a little.
0:03:04 Because usually when people say that, it’s a soft insult.
0:03:08 It means you’re, you know, pathologically negative.
0:03:11 And that pisses me off.
0:03:18 Because if you’re not blindly optimistic, or if you’re just being honest about the world, as best you can be,
0:03:24 that doesn’t mean you’re a hopeless pessimist, but that is the way a lot of people think.
0:03:29 And that seems to be what you’re trying to dispel in this book.
0:03:32 Is that a fair characterization?
0:03:34 Yes, I think so.
0:03:38 I think I’ve noticed similar things as you have as well.
0:03:48 That when someone is called a pessimist, or when we talk about pessimism, it tends to be an insult or an accusation of some sorts.
0:03:56 Similarly, when people call themselves an optimist, it’s like the kindest way to pay yourself a compliment without outright doing it.
0:03:58 It’s sort of, well, I’m an optimist, so that’s my virtue.
0:04:02 And people don’t say the same thing about pessimism.
0:04:05 I do think there are different kinds of pessimism.
0:04:15 And I think prefacing it with a kind of hopeful pessimism is maybe a way of dispelling some of that anxiety that people feel around the term.
0:04:20 I’ve always struggled with cynicism a bit, and I suppose that’s a cousin of pessimism.
0:04:23 Yeah, I think so.
0:04:34 I think cynicism, nihilism, defeatism, fatalism, those are all the ones that we should be rightly a bit more cautious towards.
0:04:38 But those are not, they can go together with pessimism, but they don’t necessarily have to.
0:04:52 I was going to ask you what you think most people get wrong about pessimism, but is it kind of what you’re saying now, that it gets confused with passivity and resignation?
0:04:55 Yeah, I think that’s probably the main thing.
0:05:04 The book comes a lot out of concern over climate change and the way the climate change debate gets carried out in particular.
0:05:09 But even outside of that, I think there’s often an assumption that there’s just two options.
0:05:16 Either you’re optimistic about the future and you’ll do what you can to make it better, or you’re pessimistic and you’ve already given up.
0:05:20 And I think that’s way too easy.
0:05:31 A lot of people who would call themselves pessimists, they might think, for instance, that the future is likely to get worse or that there are very bad things happening in the world.
0:05:37 So it might be a certain vision of reality now or of the future that’s quite pessimistic.
0:05:39 It might be quite dark, quite bleak.
0:05:41 That doesn’t mean we’re not going to do anything about it.
0:05:45 It might make us all the more committed to work for change.
0:05:54 And I think there have been examples of what I call hopeful pessimists or activistic pessimists, both in the past, but they also exist today.
0:05:57 Well, there’s a lot of nuance here, right?
0:05:58 I mean, these things exist on a continuum.
0:06:14 And part of the problem is this moral binary, is the phrase you use in the book, where optimism is framed as courage and pessimism as despair or defeatism, where optimism is good, pessimism is bad.
0:06:17 Where does that framing come from?
0:06:21 Is that a legacy of enlightenment thought or some other period of thought?
0:06:24 Or has it always been framed this way?
0:06:31 I think, in part, some of the dichotomy really comes from the first inception of these terms.
0:06:37 But that’s, and that’s early 18th century, and that’s in the context of the problem of evil.
0:06:41 And so how could a good God have created a world full of suffering?
0:06:42 Is life worth living?
0:06:45 Do the goods of life outweigh the benefits?
0:06:52 And that has to do rather with what I call value-oriented optimism and pessimism.
0:06:57 So that’s more about the value of reality, what life is ultimately like.
0:07:04 And only later do the terms get used in a more future-oriented way, which is how we tend to use them today.
0:07:07 So about expectations about the future.
0:07:14 And I think the sort of the tendency that there’s this binary or that there’s this dichotomy, that it’s really an existential choice.
0:07:19 You’re going to be either one or the other, and there’s going to be a moral failure on the other side.
0:07:27 I think that comes into being quite early in the debate, but it shifts meaning over time as these terms also shift in meaning.
0:07:35 I do believe that in the course of the 20th century, when we really start seeing optimism and pessimism being used in these future-oriented ways,
0:07:47 so as expectations about the future, I think very early you get this comfort with pessimism, as well as this enthusiasm for optimism,
0:07:51 as if optimism is naturally a kind of virtue that we have.
0:07:55 There’s another kind of extreme pessimism.
0:08:01 It’s the person who is certain about what’s going to happen and believes not just that it might go badly,
0:08:05 but that it absolutely will go badly.
0:08:10 I mean, is what I’m talking about here not really pessimism to you?
0:08:14 Is this more like fatalism or even nihilism?
0:08:17 Yes.
0:08:20 So I think it exists on the same spectrum.
0:08:27 But as soon as someone says, well, this will certainly happen, or things are bound to get worse,
0:08:34 I would say that that’s no longer pessimism, that’s something like fatalism or nihilism or defeatism.
0:08:40 That’s one of the other, the related, the siblings on the spectrum, so to speak.
0:08:46 In the pessimist tradition, people like Schopenhauer, they would not have espoused something like that at all.
0:08:51 They say, you know, the pessimist withholds certain expectations about the future.
0:08:55 We don’t have that kind of certainty because of the kinds of beings we are.
0:08:57 So I would say I’m with you.
0:08:58 I think that’s very problematic.
0:09:04 And that’s one of the things that I’m most concerned to kind of dispel or to counter in the book.
0:09:09 And when it comes to fatalism, there can be both pessimistic and optimistic kinds as well.
0:09:13 What would an optimistic fatalism look like?
0:09:14 I’ve never even thought of that.
0:09:22 Well, a pessimistic fatalist would say something like, well, things are bound to get worse, so we may as well give up.
0:09:23 There’s nothing we can do.
0:09:23 Yeah.
0:09:33 An optimistic fatalist, more subtly, would say something like, it’s all going to be fine, technology will save us, humanity is going to solve this problem for us.
0:09:40 And that also means, well, if there’s a problem, it’s not necessarily a problem for me, because things are going to work out in the end.
0:09:41 Things are going to be fine.
0:09:53 That’s also a kind of closing off of the future in actually quite a problematic, but maybe even more nefarious way, because it often assumes a kind of fatalism that it doesn’t wear on its sleeves.
0:09:57 It doesn’t pronounce itself as the kind of fatalism that actually it implies.
0:10:00 That just sounds like blind hope to me.
0:10:02 Well, maybe it is.
0:10:07 Maybe you could call it blind hope, but it does declare itself as a kind of optimism.
0:10:24 If pessimism defined in the fatalistic mode is something like being certain that things are going to get worse, then the optimism that stands counter to it would be the kind of attitude that believes, well, things are definitely going to get better in the end.
0:10:27 I would be fine with also calling that a blind hope.
0:10:31 That’s same, perhaps, as the other kind is maybe a sort of blind despair.
0:10:32 That’s all fine.
0:10:35 These terms can coexist together.
0:10:45 But I think those are important modes and thought processes to also recognize, because I think they’re equally dangerous and important to dispel.
0:10:57 I do want to talk more about the dangers of hope, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here, because I do want to linger a little bit more.
0:11:09 I do want to talk more on pessimism, and I’m very intrigued by this argument that pessimism actually makes room for action, because in your words, it expects nothing.
0:11:22 Why do you think this is a better approach than acting in the hope or even the expectation of success?
0:11:32 I’m wondering, what possible harm is there in expecting to succeed and expecting that things will go the way you want them to go?
0:11:35 Why isn’t that just as motivating?
0:11:48 Well, I want to be a bit cautious there, because I’m also in the book, I’m very careful to say, if that’s the drive behind your activism and it works for you, fine, do that.
0:11:49 Be an optimistic activist.
0:11:52 Be driven by that sort of expectation.
0:11:55 But I do want to make a case for the other kind as well.
0:11:58 And there’s several reasons for that.
0:12:03 I think there can be a risk with the expectation-driven or optimistic activism.
0:12:21 And the risk there is that if our activism hinges on a kind of expectation or a kind of prognosis or an achievable outcome, if that outcome is not just defeated temporarily, but really shattered as it might be.
0:12:27 Say that, for instance, a certain president is elected and climate change funding gets cut drastically.
0:12:28 Hypothetically.
0:12:30 Or, you know, that might happen.
0:12:37 Or consider there might be a number of ways where suddenly we’re confronted with a dashing of our expectations.
0:12:40 And the question is, what do we do then?
0:12:45 Should we then have other either success stories or prognoses?
0:12:48 I think we can do that.
0:12:51 And a lot of journalism tries to offer that.
0:12:54 And to some extent, that can be inspiring.
0:13:01 But again, it also makes it very vulnerable to being cut down by that sort of shattering of very high expectations.
0:13:05 And that’s something that you can see some historic evidence for.
0:13:15 And the question is then, so if we imagine a sort of darker timeframe or something that has happened where it becomes very difficult to see our way forward,
0:13:20 is there also a different kind of hope that might sustain us or a different kind of motivation?
0:13:23 And that I think we can find that.
0:13:35 But it has to do rather with being focused or oriented on things like values, things that we know that we hold dear, as well as this openness of the future.
0:13:55 And aside from that, I think there is also a risk that narratives which say that activists have to be optimistic, place maybe too much of a psychological burdens on not just activists, but anyone who is concerned about how things are going to also espouse a sort of psychological mode that we might not feel.
0:14:01 Yeah, we’re definitely going to get there because I want to ask about that in this specific context of the climate movement.
0:14:05 But you did mention a second ago, historical evidence.
0:14:15 Did you have examples in mind of this sort of pessimistic activism that serves as a good example for what you have in mind here?
0:14:21 Yeah, so you can get several examples and they’re slightly on different scales.
0:14:33 One of the hopeful pessimists, as I call them, that I use as an example in the book is Albert Camus, so the existentialist philosopher, though he didn’t call himself that.
0:14:33 My hero.
0:14:49 As a fascinating thinker who, not just in his philosophical writings, but also in his novels, but also in his personal commitment, his decision to join the resistance in the course of the Second World War,
0:15:04 the kinds of formulations that he gives for his activism is very explicitly not driven by optimism, but by a kind of pessimism that’s both about the world as it is now, but also about the future.
0:15:17 And it’s not, it doesn’t hinge on expectation, but on the kinds of certainty that we might have in otherwise uncertain times has to do with things like values, things that we know we are committed towards.
0:15:36 And I think that’s, for instance, in the novel, The Plague, which everyone was reading during COVID, but should reread now in the light of climate change, is very much about what do we know, what are the values we know we hold dear, and then deciding what to do, regardless of the consequences which are out of our, out of our hands.
0:15:40 You know, Camus has that line, I don’t remember it exactly.
0:15:53 This may have been in his notebooks, or in one of his articles for combat, but he says something like, you know, I’m pessimistic about the world, but optimistic about humankind.
0:15:57 And I was never quite sure what to make of that.
0:16:03 I think I have a better understanding of it after reading your book, but I don’t know, what does that mean to you?
0:16:18 When he says, I’m an optimist about humankind, it’s about having a positive belief in the potential of humanity, even if the world is a very bad place or if we think that things are going to be pretty bad.
0:16:24 So it’s actually, it’s an articulation of a kind of hope, even in the darkest circumstances, I think.
0:16:28 Do you ever worry about falling into the trap of nihilism?
0:16:29 You know what I mean?
0:16:36 Believing there’s no realistic chance of success isn’t the same as believing there’s no point in doing anything at all.
0:16:47 But you can definitely see how one can lead to the other without any, I don’t know, philosophical guardrails.
0:16:50 That’s an interesting question.
0:17:01 I think you do see that happen in a lot of the literature on, for instance, on pessimism, where there can be a kind of temptation to go into it and then keep going.
0:17:13 And then everything becomes not just uncertain, but there can be a tendency to only see the wound in everything and to only see the dark side of everything.
0:17:21 And I think that’s a temptation that exists on both sides when we try to unsee another part of existence.
0:17:33 I don’t think I’ve ever been tempted to go all the way into, not that I have anything against nihilists, they can be great people, but I don’t think I’ve gone quite as far as that.
0:17:45 However, there can be a tendency when you’re really researching the pessimistic literature, it’s full of the dark matters, the suffering and the pain and the grief.
0:17:47 And it tells you, look at this, look at this.
0:17:51 And at some point you think, OK, well, yes, I’ve looked at this.
0:17:53 But then you also have to see the other side.
0:18:07 So I think being open to both sides of existence is part of what the challenge is, not just for not only for I think for both for optimists and pessimists and anyone who is on any any gradation of those of those two.
0:18:21 And I think actually where I find myself now, and maybe that’s why the book is called Hopeful Pessimism, is trying to negotiate a way of seeing seeing these two sides of reality without ever unseeing the other side.
0:18:24 It’s about living in that tension, right?
0:18:25 I think so, yeah.
0:18:25 Yeah.
0:18:29 And well, first off, I’m going to take a bold stance against the nihilist here.
0:18:32 So I will, I will, I just want to be clear.
0:18:37 I am, I am against the nihilist, but I respect your, I respect your neutrality.
0:18:39 Well, let’s talk a little bit.
0:18:40 I think, yeah.
0:18:41 Now go ahead, please, no, please go ahead.
0:18:51 Well, I was, I was going to say sometimes there can be people who are philosophically nihilists, but then in their practical lives are just as, as ethical and
0:18:55 warm-hearted people as, as, as others.
0:18:56 So fair enough.
0:18:57 I see your concern.
0:19:03 I want to talk a little bit more about hope too, which is the other part of this equation.
0:19:09 And just as there are different ways to be pessimistic, you also describe different ways to be hopeful.
0:19:12 You talk about green hope and blue hope.
0:19:19 What’s the difference and which form of hope do you find most useful?
0:19:20 Yeah.
0:19:30 So I found myself researching the history of hope and hope today gets framed in these very positive ways, right?
0:19:35 You see it everywhere, not just in climate change, but also in political rhetoric.
0:19:42 Everyone wants to be the hopeful candidate or have the agenda of hope, no matter where on the political spectrum you are.
0:19:45 At some point I thought that’s, that’s really interesting.
0:19:55 But if you look into the, into the history of philosophy, you actually see that, for instance, for instance, the ancient philosophers were actually very critical, very skeptical about hope.
0:20:01 Because hope can also lead us to, we might not be hoping for the right things.
0:20:03 What if we’re hoping for something really bad to happen?
0:20:04 Is that necessarily a virtue?
0:20:08 Might it also distort our expectations about the future?
0:20:11 There’s a risk maybe of hoping falsely or blindly.
0:20:15 So the ancients were really worried about hope, which I found really interesting.
0:20:27 And then I kept finding in various authors from Tolkien to Vaclav Havel, the Czech politician and writer, that sometimes people were talking about two kinds of hope.
0:20:32 And sometimes they do that in slightly different ways.
0:20:36 But I thought there seems to be something there because there are these different modes of hope.
0:20:39 I ended up calling them green hope and blue.
0:20:44 If you think about a color spectrum, the distinction is gradual.
0:20:46 So there can be, you can also go back and forth.
0:20:48 There can be bluish green and greenish blue.
0:20:51 But sometimes we have just blue and green.
0:20:51 Okay.
0:21:02 So my idea of green hope is one where you see a narrative that makes hope about the, it’s more, it’s closer to optimism.
0:21:09 It’s about the achievability of success, concrete outcomes, things that we think are pretty likely to happen.
0:21:11 So we feel good about this.
0:21:12 It’s achievable.
0:21:13 We can do this.
0:21:14 Therefore, we are hopeful.
0:21:22 And as I said before, there’s maybe, that can be fine when things are actually going our way, when we’ve got the wind in our sails.
0:21:25 But what if we don’t and things are actually looking pretty grim?
0:21:28 Is there a different kind of hope that can sustain us?
0:21:37 And that’s what I ended up calling blue hope, which is oriented not on certainty or expectation, but rather on the openness of the future.
0:21:39 We don’t know what’s going to happen.
0:21:46 So that could be for worse, but also for better, as well as this sense of commitment to our values.
0:21:56 So even if certain things, if there’s a lot of uncertainty, we might still know what we want to put our efforts towards and what we can be committed to.
0:22:05 Is there some point at which hope becomes a lie we tell ourselves in order to avoid facing reality?
0:22:14 And if there is a point at which that is the case, do you think it’s a moral failure, almost, to keep holding on to hope?
0:22:29 I’d want to be cautious about calling anything a moral failure, be it optimism or pessimism or any kind of hope, unless we become judgmental about the experience of others.
0:22:39 I think, again, I think, again, it depends on what kind of hope we are talking about.
0:22:42 I think there can be a risk in hope.
0:22:56 There are forms of bad hope where, yeah, there can be something at least adjacent to a lie or a moral failure when people don’t think through what the hope entails or what it means.
0:23:09 So say that you had a CEO of a fossil fuel company saying, well, I hope climate change gets much worse than it already is because it’s going to be good for me.
0:23:16 So I hope things are going to get worse because they’re going to be better for me.
0:23:19 We wouldn’t call that admirable.
0:23:25 They might be hoping, but that hope is actually, that would be a kind of moral failure because they’re hoping for the wrong thing.
0:23:30 So hope needs to be oriented towards something worthwhile, towards something good.
0:23:42 But similarly, say that you had some billionaires saying, oh, I’m really concerned about climate change and I hope things will get better while parking their private jet at Davos or, you know, not doing nothing to change it.
0:23:48 Then we’d say, well, you’re not hoping in the right way because you shouldn’t be just hoping you should be doing something.
0:23:53 So I think to be hopeful isn’t necessarily a virtue or it isn’t necessarily a good thing.
0:23:58 It depends, like, what does that hope mean and what does it, what does it call us to do?
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0:28:25 So let’s go back to the climate movement.
0:28:26 All right.
0:28:29 It’s a big part of the book, as it should be.
0:28:36 Do you see this movement, such as it is, as hopefully pessimistic in the way you define it?
0:28:40 And I do realize the climate movement isn’t some monolithic thing.
0:28:49 But broadly speaking, do you feel like the climate movement is guided by the principles of hopeful pessimism?
0:28:57 Well, as you said, I think we have to be very cautious in not generalizing about the climate
0:29:01 movement, if there is even, to the extent that there is such a thing, and I wouldn’t want
0:29:02 to speak for it.
0:29:06 But I think there are a lot of hopeful pessimists in the climate movement.
0:29:16 And I think a lot of the tendencies that you see from some of the most vocal people and figureheads
0:29:24 in the movement, like Greta Thunberg, but also many others, the way that they frame their activism
0:29:30 shows signs of being something very close to or having affinity with a kind of hopeful pessimism.
0:29:37 But you also see this tendency, especially from outside voices, to say, well, no, you have to be
0:29:44 cautious with not being too desperate or too pessimistic or too anxious about the future, because that’s
0:29:46 not going to help you moving forward.
0:29:50 And actually, I think, as a lot of people in the climate movement have rightfully pointed
0:29:57 out, who’s to say, actually, there are a lot of people who are very concerned or even, you
0:29:59 know, are angry or sad or desperate.
0:30:04 There’s a lot of dark emotions in the climate movement that have clearly been very fueling to
0:30:10 sustain a movement, even across a variety of quashed hopes and expectations.
0:30:13 Can you say a bit more about Greta?
0:30:19 I mean, she’s such a contemporary example and someone I think almost everyone knows or has
0:30:19 heard of.
0:30:27 What makes her climate activism hopefully pessimistic to you?
0:30:30 I say hope in a very specific way here.
0:30:36 So I think it’s hopeful in the sense that it believes the future to be open and will strive
0:30:40 for change and be activistic in this forward-looking way.
0:30:46 But at the same time, one thing I find fascinating about Greta Thunberg is that she has been very
0:30:50 critical about the hope narrative in climate debate.
0:30:56 When politicians say we have to be hopeful or we are hopeful, that often it can be a sort of
0:30:57 reason for doing nothing.
0:31:03 So we’ll say, yeah, there’s hope for change and things will go on as they have before.
0:31:13 And actually, I think the room that she has given to negative emotions such as anger and sadness
0:31:20 and grief, even despair at some moments, people have said to her, that’s not going to sustain
0:31:21 your movement.
0:31:23 And she said, well, it kind of did.
0:31:31 That is, we didn’t give promises about or positive stories about, I don’t know, happy
0:31:37 images or things that are going to make people feel hopeful in this uplifting, optimistic sense.
0:31:43 Actually, we confronted people with the bleak facts and said there’s a reason for urgency.
0:31:48 And that’s actually something that did drive the movement, even if it wasn’t always sufficient
0:31:52 to bring, for instance, politicians and decision makers on board.
0:31:58 Do you think it’s a burden for people to hope that we can solve the climate problem?
0:32:03 Or is it just a problem when we demand hope as a condition of action?
0:32:06 The latter.
0:32:12 I think it’s, it can be fine to, there are so many kinds of hope and ways to be hopeful as
0:32:13 well as desperate, right?
0:32:17 I think it’s fine to be hopeful in whatever way and it’s fine to be desperate in whatever
0:32:25 way as well, as long as we still keep focusing on moving towards what we believe has to be
0:32:31 done, because that’s not up to what we think is hopeful or desperate or what our emotional
0:32:32 responses are.
0:32:39 That’s, that’s a calling of, of, of the world for us to commit to certain values.
0:32:45 We have to do certain things and I think it can be a relief, yeah, a relief of a kind
0:32:52 of burden to, to realize in the end, we just have to do what needs to be done and that can
0:32:54 be hopeful or pessimistic or hopefully pessimistic.
0:32:59 That can be a variety of ways of, of doing that.
0:33:06 And there’s just something deflating about insisting that people feign optimism or pretend to believe
0:33:10 things they don’t believe, like, like everything’s going to work out, you know, just for the very
0:33:12 simple reason that it’s dishonest.
0:33:18 And when people are forced into dishonesty, all you’re left with is just a kind of moral
0:33:19 performance.
0:33:22 And that’s not, that’s not productive.
0:33:22 Absolutely.
0:33:23 No.
0:33:28 And I do think that that is a burden and it’s been documented as a, as a burden as well, because
0:33:32 you can’t keep holding certain emotions.
0:33:37 If you feel that things are, um, if you feel these darker emotions or you feel this concern
0:33:43 or anger or grief and you’re not able or not allowed, or you have to hold them back.
0:33:44 Yeah.
0:33:49 There’s, there seems to be something dishonest in it, but it’s also not psychologically sustainable.
0:33:51 It’s not good for us.
0:33:54 There has to be room for having those sorts of feelings and expressing them.
0:34:00 And, um, but in a way that’s conducive to our, our flourishing and our commitment at
0:34:00 the same time.
0:34:07 And I think one thing that’s been really interesting about the climate movement is that it has increasingly
0:34:12 tried to give room and give voice to those sorts of, uh, to those sorts of emotions.
0:34:15 And I think Greta Thunberg has been very important in, in doing that.
0:34:20 We also say that, that hope can harden into cruel optimism.
0:34:26 And that phrase is striking because again, we don’t usually think of hope as a burden.
0:34:31 We think of it as the thing that gets us through, but what you’re describing is something different.
0:34:37 It’s what we’ve just been talking about that, that forced hope that people are expected to
0:34:40 project, which is dishonest and I think unhelpful.
0:34:43 But what do you think makes it cruel?
0:34:54 Cruelty comes exactly when it becomes judgmental or it becomes something that we force on other
0:34:54 people.
0:35:00 So when there’s this, this assumption that, oh no, you have to be, you have to be hopeful
0:35:06 or you have to be optimistic because otherwise that is a moral failing, failing, or that you’re
0:35:12 not sufficiently in control of yourself or that it’s unpowerful or uncourageous.
0:35:22 That then becomes a form of not necessarily intentional cruelty, but the cruel aspect of it is that you
0:35:29 might find yourself experiencing these darker emotions because you are encountering a reality
0:35:36 that has this darkness to it, that is either desperate or makes you angry or makes you want
0:35:40 to cry or there is something about reality that triggers these emotions.
0:35:45 So you’re, you’re responding appropriately, but already having to bear that burden, you then
0:35:52 also have to bear the burden of either hiding those emotions or expressing contrary emotions,
0:36:02 such as being outwardly optimistic or joyful or lighthearted or having uplifting narratives.
0:36:07 And there’s something, as you said earlier, there’s something dishonest about it, but that also, it just
0:36:08 makes the burden worse.
0:36:12 It’s kind of having, burdening the already burdened with another burden.
0:36:16 And there seems to be something, um, not quite right about that.
0:36:22 As we’ve been saying, you know, being hopefully pessimistic means living in this tension and that
0:36:30 means living alongside despair and grief and anger and not repressing these feelings or telling
0:36:33 yourself a story that makes them go away.
0:36:41 Do you ever think that’s just a hard ask for most people, that most of us just want to feel
0:36:48 secure about the future and that maybe a false hope is preferable to an authentic doubt?
0:36:53 I don’t think so.
0:36:57 So I don’t, I’m not saying that everyone has to be in a state of constant despair.
0:36:58 Yeah, no, I don’t mean that.
0:36:59 I don’t mean that.
0:37:05 I, no, I mean, I, I would read that book if it were written, but I don’t think that
0:37:07 that is, that would be a hard, that would be a hard ask.
0:37:08 Yeah.
0:37:15 In the end, it’s much more, all I’m saying is that, hey, it’s okay to be, to feel those
0:37:19 things or to be pessimistic, um, from time to time.
0:37:22 That’s not something that you have to push away.
0:37:27 And it’s also not something that you’d have to be dishonest about or not express to other
0:37:28 people.
0:37:34 And then I also, I think a lot of people do exist with these realities.
0:37:42 Everyone encounters grief or pain or death, um, at least, you know, at, at, at some point
0:37:43 in our lives.
0:37:50 And if we don’t express that, it just means, it doesn’t mean that we’re not experiencing
0:37:50 these things.
0:37:55 It just means that we’re not talking about them or that we’re not being honest to ourselves
0:37:57 or to other people about them.
0:38:03 So I also, I definitely also think there can be narratives and stories of, um, of love
0:38:06 and joy and joy and wonder about the world as well.
0:38:13 But as you said, these things can exist alongside each other and existing in that tension, I
0:38:19 think will, will only deepen our capacity for human flourishing, not deflated.
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0:42:16 Do you ever think of hopeful pessimism as almost like a secular counterpart to religious
0:42:17 faith?
0:42:24 And I’m asking because, you know, people who are religious often have this deep faith that
0:42:30 this will all make sense in the end, that the moral arithmetic will balance out either
0:42:35 in this life or the next one, and many of them will tell you that they couldn’t imagine
0:42:42 getting through life without this faith, which I can understand even if I don’t share it.
0:42:48 And I feel like your book isn’t exactly a secular alternative to this, but it is taking this aspect
0:42:56 of faith seriously and saying we can find meaning and dignity in a very different and, I guess,
0:42:58 more honest way.
0:43:01 There’s definitely aspects of that there.
0:43:09 When I was thinking about these two kinds of hope, part of why I came up with new terms
0:43:15 for them, so the blue hope and the green hope, is because you do often in a lot of religious
0:43:18 literature see different kinds of hope.
0:43:22 And one is more the secular sort of hope, and the other is more the religious kind of hope
0:43:23 or faith.
0:43:30 So there is going to be something that sustains us, even if the usual hope, the everyday hope
0:43:32 fails, so the hope that’s based on expectation.
0:43:37 Once those expectations fail us, there’s going to be this other reality that will sustain us.
0:43:43 So I’m trying to find a version of that that will work for both religious and non-religious people.
0:43:53 And I think we can find it in this form of hope that doesn’t hinge on achievable outcomes or of our
0:43:59 expectations about the future, but is more about, well, we can know some things for certain, and that’s the things
0:44:05 that we value in life or that we feel are worth fighting for, worth committing to.
0:44:10 It is a kind of faith, in a way, even if it’s not, it doesn’t expect anything.
0:44:14 That’s why some people have spoken of hope without expectancy.
0:44:17 And I think that comes quite close.
0:44:23 I wouldn’t want to say it’s the same thing as faith, but it might perform a similar kind of sustaining
0:44:25 function, a sort of hope beyond hope.
0:44:31 But that’s sort of the problem with religious faith, right, is that it does come with this certainty
0:44:37 about the future and what it will all amount to, right?
0:44:41 It’s a story about who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going.
0:44:48 And that seems at odds with, like, the sort of core tenet of pessimism, which is maintaining
0:44:55 contact with that uncertainty and never looking away from it, never pretending like you do have
0:44:58 clarity or certainty about the future.
0:45:03 Yeah, so there is, they’re definitely not exactly the same thing.
0:45:09 Although I think even for religious hope or faith, sometimes it’s not always quite so clear-cut.
0:45:11 It’s faith, not certainty.
0:45:24 It’s not, there is often still a grasping or putting oneself towards something without knowing for certain
0:45:26 what is going to come back.
0:45:36 So there is, the faith element has an open-endedness to it that still has a sort of kind of affinity to the hope of hopeful pessimism.
0:45:37 But yeah, they’re definitely not the same.
0:45:38 It’s such a good point.
0:45:52 And I think the best of faith, the best of religion, is the kind that does stay in touch with that faith and doesn’t harden into the sort of certainty we’re talking about.
0:45:54 And that happens quite a bit too.
0:45:55 But that’s not…
0:45:57 It keeps the openness and the open-endedness alive.
0:45:59 Let’s go back to Kimu.
0:46:03 There’s this line that’s frequently attributed to him.
0:46:09 I’m not sure if he’s the one who actually wrote it, but certainly it reflects his general philosophy.
0:46:13 And I was thinking about the sentiment while reading your book.
0:46:22 The line is, the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
0:46:23 I love that.
0:46:34 And I was thinking about it while reading your book because so much of it is about what it means to keep acting after we’ve let go of the usual justifications.
0:46:37 And the usual justification is success.
0:46:41 Our culture justifies everything through success.
0:46:51 If we do what we’ve been talking about and abandon the idea that our actions are justified by their success, what’s our compass?
0:46:55 What words do we use in place of success or progress?
0:46:57 It’s such a good question.
0:47:10 It’s also a big question for me as just a philosopher, thinking my ideas to answer, because it is really about how do we move forward as humanity, right?
0:47:11 I couldn’t answer it.
0:47:14 No, I’m still going to try.
0:47:20 I think, because I do think it really depends on the context.
0:47:27 I’m not saying that we can never, it is good to think about, sometimes it is appropriate to think about, well, what are our prognoses?
0:47:31 And we do want to think about possible outcomes.
0:47:36 We don’t want to, it will be silly not to, we want things to get better.
0:47:39 So sometimes you do have to think, well, what’s the, what’s the best way forward?
0:47:41 What are the achievable outcomes?
0:47:47 And we have to listen to prognoses of what climate scientists tell us and then plot our best way forward.
0:48:04 But it’s more about, ultimately, the reason why we want to act in certain ways isn’t premised on whether that’s going to work or not, or it’s not prognoses oriented in that sort of way.
0:48:25 And ultimately, even if we don’t know what’s going to happen or if those efforts fail us, especially in a case such as climate change, where every incremental change in degrees of warming is going to have huge amounts of difference in the amount of suffering of future generations and even people living now.
0:48:35 We have to, what will then sustain us, what will move us forward, what is ultimately going to drive our commitment?
0:48:54 And I think we already have the answer to that when we think about, if you’re asking about what kind of words that we would use, it’s things like value or duty or justice or goodness, compassion, things that have been such a part of our moral language.
0:48:57 So we already know how to, how to work with them, how to deal with them.
0:49:09 And that’s sort of the idea of being committed to a cause is, has been sustaining to people who had no certainty of outcome.
0:49:14 And that’s how a lot of political and social change has happened.
0:49:21 Sometimes we just don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, but we know what’s right to do and to commit towards.
0:49:24 And I think that’s something worth reminding ourselves of.
0:49:37 So maybe alongside the very natural language of prognoses and outcomes and expectation, that could also be this reminder that, yeah, but we’re going to do what we can nonetheless.
0:49:50 I guess we often think of hope as the opposite of despair, but do you think it’s commitment, is commitment actually the opposite of despair?
0:49:56 Staying committed with the world, that’s the antidote to despair, not hope.
0:50:01 I mean, I have ideas about despair.
0:50:06 I’m not sure that despair is always, always a bad thing.
0:50:10 But I think the kind of despair that you’re talking about is like resignation, right?
0:50:12 Or giving up, that sort of despair.
0:50:17 Yeah, I think commitment is the better antidote.
0:50:20 And sometimes when people say hope, that’s what they mean, right?
0:50:24 It can mean a lot of different things.
0:50:32 But I think if we remember things like commitment, and that’s such also a life-affirming thing to say.
0:50:38 So it’s when you’re committed to something or when you commit yourself to something, you’re doing something.
0:50:42 But also you’re putting something of yourself at stake if you’re using the word rightly.
0:50:45 So it also means that you’re going to act in certain ways.
0:50:53 And that’s why I love it when Cornel West says things like, if you say that you’re hopeful, well, what does it demand of you?
0:50:55 What does it ask of you?
0:50:56 What does it cost you?
0:50:59 So that it’s not just a turn of phrase.
0:51:07 So yes, I think I’d be, I like the idea of commitment as the antidote of that sort of resignation or despair.
0:51:11 Let me push on something you said, because you said despair isn’t always a bad thing.
0:51:16 And I wonder when it’s a good thing or useful thing.
0:51:19 Yeah, so I’m always distinguishing things.
0:51:23 So as I’ve got different kinds of hope, I’ve got different kinds of despair as well.
0:51:29 I think despair is often used in different ways.
0:51:36 So when it means something like passivity or giving up or resignation, that’s one form of despair.
0:51:41 So sometimes when a person despairs, it means they’ve given up.
0:51:46 But say that someone were to come to you and say, I’m desperate.
0:51:52 That could also be a plea for help or a recognition that we can’t go on in this way.
0:51:59 Interestingly, there have been movements or there have been voices of desperate resistance as well.
0:52:02 And I think you see a lot of despair in the climate movement.
0:52:07 Rebecca Solnit has this phrase about hope, that hope should shove you out the door.
0:52:10 And I think sometimes the same thing is true for despair.
0:52:13 Sometimes despair also shoves people out the door.
0:52:21 So when you think, oh, I am in despair or I’m desperate, or this is a desperate situation, that demands something from us.
0:52:24 So I don’t think all kinds of despair are necessarily deflating.
0:52:31 And to the extent that it is an emotional response to, say, a desperate situation, it doesn’t have to be.
0:52:38 I don’t want to say I’d recommend it to anyone, but I also think it’s not necessarily something that we should shy away from.
0:52:41 Well, it’s all very Camus-ian, again, right?
0:52:41 Yes.
0:52:48 I guess just like anger, despair can be, in your words, that call to action, right?
0:52:49 And that’s ultimately the test.
0:52:50 What do you do?
0:52:52 Do you answer that call or do you not?
0:53:06 And for Camus, as you know, the foundation of community, the foundation of a human world, really, is when we collectively say, no, this is not okay.
0:53:08 And that very act is affirmative.
0:53:11 It affirms the values that are actually being defended.
0:53:16 And to the extent they can ever be real, that’s what makes them real.
0:53:25 I feel that there’s such potential for Camus being reread in the light of climate change and other political crises of the moment.
0:53:31 Not that he was perfect in any way, but some of the things that he says in the writing and exploring the tension.
0:53:48 And then, yeah, having that idea that this is what it means to say no or to commit ourselves to a certain cause is, I think, deeply inspiring, but also will resonate with many people, especially in times as we live in today.
0:53:54 I want to close out with, um, with a sigh.
0:53:59 No, I’m sure Beth will edit that out.
0:53:59 No, no.
0:54:03 Um, there’s just, there’s just so much in my head.
0:54:12 Um, there’s so many lines and passages in the book that, um, that really landed with me and, you know, they’re appropriately highlighted.
0:54:19 Um, but I decided I just wanted to close out by reading one of my favorites.
0:54:21 And now I’m quoting you.
0:54:24 If anything, the pessimists have taught me this.
0:54:29 With eyes full of that darkness, there can still be that strange, shattering openness.
0:54:31 Like a door cracked open.
0:54:33 For the good to make its entry into life.
0:54:38 Since all things are uncertain, so too is the future.
0:54:44 And so there is always the possibility of change for better as there is for worse.
0:54:50 That feels like a nice capsule statement of really the whole thesis of the book.
0:54:53 I’m glad to hear that that resonated.
0:54:58 And, um, yeah, I still, that’s the thing that the pessimists have taught me.
0:55:02 And I hope that it will be of value to other people as well.
0:55:04 I think it will be.
0:55:06 It certainly was to me.
0:55:10 Once again, the book is called Hopeful Pessimism.
0:55:14 Mara van der Lute, this was a pleasure.
0:55:15 Thank you.
0:55:17 Thank you so much for having me.
0:55:25 All right.
0:55:27 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:55:42 You know, optimism and pessimism are themes we revisit on the show because, like a lot of you, I’m constantly waging a battle in my own mind to not be too pessimistic or too cynical.
0:55:54 And this episode was helpful because it breaks through that binary and gives a new perspective on how to live constructively with both of these emotions.
0:56:03 Anyway, we’ve been overwhelmed by the number of voicemails and emails that we’ve received in recent weeks.
0:56:04 Please keep them coming.
0:56:06 I read all of them.
0:56:08 My team reads all of them.
0:56:10 Your notes help us make a better show.
0:56:12 And I want to know what you thought of this one.
0:56:22 So drop us a line at the gray area at vox.com or leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749.
0:56:29 And once you’re finished with that, please go ahead, rate, and review, and subscribe to the podcast.
0:56:40 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:56:43 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
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0:01:18 We live in a culture obsessed with hope.
0:01:23 Trained to believe that keeping the faith is the key to sustaining success.
0:01:25 You’ve heard this before.
0:01:30 The sun will come out tomorrow, and when it does, we’ll take the sunny side of the street.
0:01:35 And as long as we don’t stop believing, what a wonderful world this will be.
0:01:37 That’s nice.
0:01:39 But, just hear me out.
0:01:46 What if the path to a better world isn’t through blind hope?
0:01:54 What if what the world needs now is a particular kind of hope, balanced with a little clear-eyed pessimism?
0:01:59 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:04 Today’s guest is Mara van der Lute.
0:02:10 She’s a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and the author of Hopeful Pessimism.
0:02:21 It’s a quietly radical invitation to rethink the stories we tell ourselves about hope, despair, and what it means to live with dignity in a breaking world.
0:02:27 For van der Lute, despair is not always the enemy, and hope is not always a virtue.
0:02:39 Instead, she argues that the fuel we need to drive forward, to have the courage to be activists, to make change, to fix a broken future, is pessimism.
0:02:48 Mara van der Lute, welcome to the show.
0:02:50 Thank you for having me.
0:02:51 I’m glad you’re here.
0:02:58 I have been called a pessimist many times, and I’ve always recoiled a little.
0:03:04 Because usually when people say that, it’s a soft insult.
0:03:08 It means you’re, you know, pathologically negative.
0:03:11 And that pisses me off.
0:03:18 Because if you’re not blindly optimistic, or if you’re just being honest about the world, as best you can be,
0:03:24 that doesn’t mean you’re a hopeless pessimist, but that is the way a lot of people think.
0:03:29 And that seems to be what you’re trying to dispel in this book.
0:03:32 Is that a fair characterization?
0:03:34 Yes, I think so.
0:03:38 I think I’ve noticed similar things as you have as well.
0:03:48 That when someone is called a pessimist, or when we talk about pessimism, it tends to be an insult or an accusation of some sorts.
0:03:56 Similarly, when people call themselves an optimist, it’s like the kindest way to pay yourself a compliment without outright doing it.
0:03:58 It’s sort of, well, I’m an optimist, so that’s my virtue.
0:04:02 And people don’t say the same thing about pessimism.
0:04:05 I do think there are different kinds of pessimism.
0:04:15 And I think prefacing it with a kind of hopeful pessimism is maybe a way of dispelling some of that anxiety that people feel around the term.
0:04:20 I’ve always struggled with cynicism a bit, and I suppose that’s a cousin of pessimism.
0:04:23 Yeah, I think so.
0:04:34 I think cynicism, nihilism, defeatism, fatalism, those are all the ones that we should be rightly a bit more cautious towards.
0:04:38 But those are not, they can go together with pessimism, but they don’t necessarily have to.
0:04:52 I was going to ask you what you think most people get wrong about pessimism, but is it kind of what you’re saying now, that it gets confused with passivity and resignation?
0:04:55 Yeah, I think that’s probably the main thing.
0:05:04 The book comes a lot out of concern over climate change and the way the climate change debate gets carried out in particular.
0:05:09 But even outside of that, I think there’s often an assumption that there’s just two options.
0:05:16 Either you’re optimistic about the future and you’ll do what you can to make it better, or you’re pessimistic and you’ve already given up.
0:05:20 And I think that’s way too easy.
0:05:31 A lot of people who would call themselves pessimists, they might think, for instance, that the future is likely to get worse or that there are very bad things happening in the world.
0:05:37 So it might be a certain vision of reality now or of the future that’s quite pessimistic.
0:05:39 It might be quite dark, quite bleak.
0:05:41 That doesn’t mean we’re not going to do anything about it.
0:05:45 It might make us all the more committed to work for change.
0:05:54 And I think there have been examples of what I call hopeful pessimists or activistic pessimists, both in the past, but they also exist today.
0:05:57 Well, there’s a lot of nuance here, right?
0:05:58 I mean, these things exist on a continuum.
0:06:14 And part of the problem is this moral binary, is the phrase you use in the book, where optimism is framed as courage and pessimism as despair or defeatism, where optimism is good, pessimism is bad.
0:06:17 Where does that framing come from?
0:06:21 Is that a legacy of enlightenment thought or some other period of thought?
0:06:24 Or has it always been framed this way?
0:06:31 I think, in part, some of the dichotomy really comes from the first inception of these terms.
0:06:37 But that’s, and that’s early 18th century, and that’s in the context of the problem of evil.
0:06:41 And so how could a good God have created a world full of suffering?
0:06:42 Is life worth living?
0:06:45 Do the goods of life outweigh the benefits?
0:06:52 And that has to do rather with what I call value-oriented optimism and pessimism.
0:06:57 So that’s more about the value of reality, what life is ultimately like.
0:07:04 And only later do the terms get used in a more future-oriented way, which is how we tend to use them today.
0:07:07 So about expectations about the future.
0:07:14 And I think the sort of the tendency that there’s this binary or that there’s this dichotomy, that it’s really an existential choice.
0:07:19 You’re going to be either one or the other, and there’s going to be a moral failure on the other side.
0:07:27 I think that comes into being quite early in the debate, but it shifts meaning over time as these terms also shift in meaning.
0:07:35 I do believe that in the course of the 20th century, when we really start seeing optimism and pessimism being used in these future-oriented ways,
0:07:47 so as expectations about the future, I think very early you get this comfort with pessimism, as well as this enthusiasm for optimism,
0:07:51 as if optimism is naturally a kind of virtue that we have.
0:07:55 There’s another kind of extreme pessimism.
0:08:01 It’s the person who is certain about what’s going to happen and believes not just that it might go badly,
0:08:05 but that it absolutely will go badly.
0:08:10 I mean, is what I’m talking about here not really pessimism to you?
0:08:14 Is this more like fatalism or even nihilism?
0:08:17 Yes.
0:08:20 So I think it exists on the same spectrum.
0:08:27 But as soon as someone says, well, this will certainly happen, or things are bound to get worse,
0:08:34 I would say that that’s no longer pessimism, that’s something like fatalism or nihilism or defeatism.
0:08:40 That’s one of the other, the related, the siblings on the spectrum, so to speak.
0:08:46 In the pessimist tradition, people like Schopenhauer, they would not have espoused something like that at all.
0:08:51 They say, you know, the pessimist withholds certain expectations about the future.
0:08:55 We don’t have that kind of certainty because of the kinds of beings we are.
0:08:57 So I would say I’m with you.
0:08:58 I think that’s very problematic.
0:09:04 And that’s one of the things that I’m most concerned to kind of dispel or to counter in the book.
0:09:09 And when it comes to fatalism, there can be both pessimistic and optimistic kinds as well.
0:09:13 What would an optimistic fatalism look like?
0:09:14 I’ve never even thought of that.
0:09:22 Well, a pessimistic fatalist would say something like, well, things are bound to get worse, so we may as well give up.
0:09:23 There’s nothing we can do.
0:09:23 Yeah.
0:09:33 An optimistic fatalist, more subtly, would say something like, it’s all going to be fine, technology will save us, humanity is going to solve this problem for us.
0:09:40 And that also means, well, if there’s a problem, it’s not necessarily a problem for me, because things are going to work out in the end.
0:09:41 Things are going to be fine.
0:09:53 That’s also a kind of closing off of the future in actually quite a problematic, but maybe even more nefarious way, because it often assumes a kind of fatalism that it doesn’t wear on its sleeves.
0:09:57 It doesn’t pronounce itself as the kind of fatalism that actually it implies.
0:10:00 That just sounds like blind hope to me.
0:10:02 Well, maybe it is.
0:10:07 Maybe you could call it blind hope, but it does declare itself as a kind of optimism.
0:10:24 If pessimism defined in the fatalistic mode is something like being certain that things are going to get worse, then the optimism that stands counter to it would be the kind of attitude that believes, well, things are definitely going to get better in the end.
0:10:27 I would be fine with also calling that a blind hope.
0:10:31 That’s same, perhaps, as the other kind is maybe a sort of blind despair.
0:10:32 That’s all fine.
0:10:35 These terms can coexist together.
0:10:45 But I think those are important modes and thought processes to also recognize, because I think they’re equally dangerous and important to dispel.
0:10:57 I do want to talk more about the dangers of hope, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here, because I do want to linger a little bit more.
0:11:09 I do want to talk more on pessimism, and I’m very intrigued by this argument that pessimism actually makes room for action, because in your words, it expects nothing.
0:11:22 Why do you think this is a better approach than acting in the hope or even the expectation of success?
0:11:32 I’m wondering, what possible harm is there in expecting to succeed and expecting that things will go the way you want them to go?
0:11:35 Why isn’t that just as motivating?
0:11:48 Well, I want to be a bit cautious there, because I’m also in the book, I’m very careful to say, if that’s the drive behind your activism and it works for you, fine, do that.
0:11:49 Be an optimistic activist.
0:11:52 Be driven by that sort of expectation.
0:11:55 But I do want to make a case for the other kind as well.
0:11:58 And there’s several reasons for that.
0:12:03 I think there can be a risk with the expectation-driven or optimistic activism.
0:12:21 And the risk there is that if our activism hinges on a kind of expectation or a kind of prognosis or an achievable outcome, if that outcome is not just defeated temporarily, but really shattered as it might be.
0:12:27 Say that, for instance, a certain president is elected and climate change funding gets cut drastically.
0:12:28 Hypothetically.
0:12:30 Or, you know, that might happen.
0:12:37 Or consider there might be a number of ways where suddenly we’re confronted with a dashing of our expectations.
0:12:40 And the question is, what do we do then?
0:12:45 Should we then have other either success stories or prognoses?
0:12:48 I think we can do that.
0:12:51 And a lot of journalism tries to offer that.
0:12:54 And to some extent, that can be inspiring.
0:13:01 But again, it also makes it very vulnerable to being cut down by that sort of shattering of very high expectations.
0:13:05 And that’s something that you can see some historic evidence for.
0:13:15 And the question is then, so if we imagine a sort of darker timeframe or something that has happened where it becomes very difficult to see our way forward,
0:13:20 is there also a different kind of hope that might sustain us or a different kind of motivation?
0:13:23 And that I think we can find that.
0:13:35 But it has to do rather with being focused or oriented on things like values, things that we know that we hold dear, as well as this openness of the future.
0:13:55 And aside from that, I think there is also a risk that narratives which say that activists have to be optimistic, place maybe too much of a psychological burdens on not just activists, but anyone who is concerned about how things are going to also espouse a sort of psychological mode that we might not feel.
0:14:01 Yeah, we’re definitely going to get there because I want to ask about that in this specific context of the climate movement.
0:14:05 But you did mention a second ago, historical evidence.
0:14:15 Did you have examples in mind of this sort of pessimistic activism that serves as a good example for what you have in mind here?
0:14:21 Yeah, so you can get several examples and they’re slightly on different scales.
0:14:33 One of the hopeful pessimists, as I call them, that I use as an example in the book is Albert Camus, so the existentialist philosopher, though he didn’t call himself that.
0:14:33 My hero.
0:14:49 As a fascinating thinker who, not just in his philosophical writings, but also in his novels, but also in his personal commitment, his decision to join the resistance in the course of the Second World War,
0:15:04 the kinds of formulations that he gives for his activism is very explicitly not driven by optimism, but by a kind of pessimism that’s both about the world as it is now, but also about the future.
0:15:17 And it’s not, it doesn’t hinge on expectation, but on the kinds of certainty that we might have in otherwise uncertain times has to do with things like values, things that we know we are committed towards.
0:15:36 And I think that’s, for instance, in the novel, The Plague, which everyone was reading during COVID, but should reread now in the light of climate change, is very much about what do we know, what are the values we know we hold dear, and then deciding what to do, regardless of the consequences which are out of our, out of our hands.
0:15:40 You know, Camus has that line, I don’t remember it exactly.
0:15:53 This may have been in his notebooks, or in one of his articles for combat, but he says something like, you know, I’m pessimistic about the world, but optimistic about humankind.
0:15:57 And I was never quite sure what to make of that.
0:16:03 I think I have a better understanding of it after reading your book, but I don’t know, what does that mean to you?
0:16:18 When he says, I’m an optimist about humankind, it’s about having a positive belief in the potential of humanity, even if the world is a very bad place or if we think that things are going to be pretty bad.
0:16:24 So it’s actually, it’s an articulation of a kind of hope, even in the darkest circumstances, I think.
0:16:28 Do you ever worry about falling into the trap of nihilism?
0:16:29 You know what I mean?
0:16:36 Believing there’s no realistic chance of success isn’t the same as believing there’s no point in doing anything at all.
0:16:47 But you can definitely see how one can lead to the other without any, I don’t know, philosophical guardrails.
0:16:50 That’s an interesting question.
0:17:01 I think you do see that happen in a lot of the literature on, for instance, on pessimism, where there can be a kind of temptation to go into it and then keep going.
0:17:13 And then everything becomes not just uncertain, but there can be a tendency to only see the wound in everything and to only see the dark side of everything.
0:17:21 And I think that’s a temptation that exists on both sides when we try to unsee another part of existence.
0:17:33 I don’t think I’ve ever been tempted to go all the way into, not that I have anything against nihilists, they can be great people, but I don’t think I’ve gone quite as far as that.
0:17:45 However, there can be a tendency when you’re really researching the pessimistic literature, it’s full of the dark matters, the suffering and the pain and the grief.
0:17:47 And it tells you, look at this, look at this.
0:17:51 And at some point you think, OK, well, yes, I’ve looked at this.
0:17:53 But then you also have to see the other side.
0:18:07 So I think being open to both sides of existence is part of what the challenge is, not just for not only for I think for both for optimists and pessimists and anyone who is on any any gradation of those of those two.
0:18:21 And I think actually where I find myself now, and maybe that’s why the book is called Hopeful Pessimism, is trying to negotiate a way of seeing seeing these two sides of reality without ever unseeing the other side.
0:18:24 It’s about living in that tension, right?
0:18:25 I think so, yeah.
0:18:25 Yeah.
0:18:29 And well, first off, I’m going to take a bold stance against the nihilist here.
0:18:32 So I will, I will, I just want to be clear.
0:18:37 I am, I am against the nihilist, but I respect your, I respect your neutrality.
0:18:39 Well, let’s talk a little bit.
0:18:40 I think, yeah.
0:18:41 Now go ahead, please, no, please go ahead.
0:18:51 Well, I was, I was going to say sometimes there can be people who are philosophically nihilists, but then in their practical lives are just as, as ethical and
0:18:55 warm-hearted people as, as, as others.
0:18:56 So fair enough.
0:18:57 I see your concern.
0:19:03 I want to talk a little bit more about hope too, which is the other part of this equation.
0:19:09 And just as there are different ways to be pessimistic, you also describe different ways to be hopeful.
0:19:12 You talk about green hope and blue hope.
0:19:19 What’s the difference and which form of hope do you find most useful?
0:19:20 Yeah.
0:19:30 So I found myself researching the history of hope and hope today gets framed in these very positive ways, right?
0:19:35 You see it everywhere, not just in climate change, but also in political rhetoric.
0:19:42 Everyone wants to be the hopeful candidate or have the agenda of hope, no matter where on the political spectrum you are.
0:19:45 At some point I thought that’s, that’s really interesting.
0:19:55 But if you look into the, into the history of philosophy, you actually see that, for instance, for instance, the ancient philosophers were actually very critical, very skeptical about hope.
0:20:01 Because hope can also lead us to, we might not be hoping for the right things.
0:20:03 What if we’re hoping for something really bad to happen?
0:20:04 Is that necessarily a virtue?
0:20:08 Might it also distort our expectations about the future?
0:20:11 There’s a risk maybe of hoping falsely or blindly.
0:20:15 So the ancients were really worried about hope, which I found really interesting.
0:20:27 And then I kept finding in various authors from Tolkien to Vaclav Havel, the Czech politician and writer, that sometimes people were talking about two kinds of hope.
0:20:32 And sometimes they do that in slightly different ways.
0:20:36 But I thought there seems to be something there because there are these different modes of hope.
0:20:39 I ended up calling them green hope and blue.
0:20:44 If you think about a color spectrum, the distinction is gradual.
0:20:46 So there can be, you can also go back and forth.
0:20:48 There can be bluish green and greenish blue.
0:20:51 But sometimes we have just blue and green.
0:20:51 Okay.
0:21:02 So my idea of green hope is one where you see a narrative that makes hope about the, it’s more, it’s closer to optimism.
0:21:09 It’s about the achievability of success, concrete outcomes, things that we think are pretty likely to happen.
0:21:11 So we feel good about this.
0:21:12 It’s achievable.
0:21:13 We can do this.
0:21:14 Therefore, we are hopeful.
0:21:22 And as I said before, there’s maybe, that can be fine when things are actually going our way, when we’ve got the wind in our sails.
0:21:25 But what if we don’t and things are actually looking pretty grim?
0:21:28 Is there a different kind of hope that can sustain us?
0:21:37 And that’s what I ended up calling blue hope, which is oriented not on certainty or expectation, but rather on the openness of the future.
0:21:39 We don’t know what’s going to happen.
0:21:46 So that could be for worse, but also for better, as well as this sense of commitment to our values.
0:21:56 So even if certain things, if there’s a lot of uncertainty, we might still know what we want to put our efforts towards and what we can be committed to.
0:22:05 Is there some point at which hope becomes a lie we tell ourselves in order to avoid facing reality?
0:22:14 And if there is a point at which that is the case, do you think it’s a moral failure, almost, to keep holding on to hope?
0:22:29 I’d want to be cautious about calling anything a moral failure, be it optimism or pessimism or any kind of hope, unless we become judgmental about the experience of others.
0:22:39 I think, again, I think, again, it depends on what kind of hope we are talking about.
0:22:42 I think there can be a risk in hope.
0:22:56 There are forms of bad hope where, yeah, there can be something at least adjacent to a lie or a moral failure when people don’t think through what the hope entails or what it means.
0:23:09 So say that you had a CEO of a fossil fuel company saying, well, I hope climate change gets much worse than it already is because it’s going to be good for me.
0:23:16 So I hope things are going to get worse because they’re going to be better for me.
0:23:19 We wouldn’t call that admirable.
0:23:25 They might be hoping, but that hope is actually, that would be a kind of moral failure because they’re hoping for the wrong thing.
0:23:30 So hope needs to be oriented towards something worthwhile, towards something good.
0:23:42 But similarly, say that you had some billionaires saying, oh, I’m really concerned about climate change and I hope things will get better while parking their private jet at Davos or, you know, not doing nothing to change it.
0:23:48 Then we’d say, well, you’re not hoping in the right way because you shouldn’t be just hoping you should be doing something.
0:23:53 So I think to be hopeful isn’t necessarily a virtue or it isn’t necessarily a good thing.
0:23:58 It depends, like, what does that hope mean and what does it, what does it call us to do?
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0:28:25 So let’s go back to the climate movement.
0:28:26 All right.
0:28:29 It’s a big part of the book, as it should be.
0:28:36 Do you see this movement, such as it is, as hopefully pessimistic in the way you define it?
0:28:40 And I do realize the climate movement isn’t some monolithic thing.
0:28:49 But broadly speaking, do you feel like the climate movement is guided by the principles of hopeful pessimism?
0:28:57 Well, as you said, I think we have to be very cautious in not generalizing about the climate
0:29:01 movement, if there is even, to the extent that there is such a thing, and I wouldn’t want
0:29:02 to speak for it.
0:29:06 But I think there are a lot of hopeful pessimists in the climate movement.
0:29:16 And I think a lot of the tendencies that you see from some of the most vocal people and figureheads
0:29:24 in the movement, like Greta Thunberg, but also many others, the way that they frame their activism
0:29:30 shows signs of being something very close to or having affinity with a kind of hopeful pessimism.
0:29:37 But you also see this tendency, especially from outside voices, to say, well, no, you have to be
0:29:44 cautious with not being too desperate or too pessimistic or too anxious about the future, because that’s
0:29:46 not going to help you moving forward.
0:29:50 And actually, I think, as a lot of people in the climate movement have rightfully pointed
0:29:57 out, who’s to say, actually, there are a lot of people who are very concerned or even, you
0:29:59 know, are angry or sad or desperate.
0:30:04 There’s a lot of dark emotions in the climate movement that have clearly been very fueling to
0:30:10 sustain a movement, even across a variety of quashed hopes and expectations.
0:30:13 Can you say a bit more about Greta?
0:30:19 I mean, she’s such a contemporary example and someone I think almost everyone knows or has
0:30:19 heard of.
0:30:27 What makes her climate activism hopefully pessimistic to you?
0:30:30 I say hope in a very specific way here.
0:30:36 So I think it’s hopeful in the sense that it believes the future to be open and will strive
0:30:40 for change and be activistic in this forward-looking way.
0:30:46 But at the same time, one thing I find fascinating about Greta Thunberg is that she has been very
0:30:50 critical about the hope narrative in climate debate.
0:30:56 When politicians say we have to be hopeful or we are hopeful, that often it can be a sort of
0:30:57 reason for doing nothing.
0:31:03 So we’ll say, yeah, there’s hope for change and things will go on as they have before.
0:31:13 And actually, I think the room that she has given to negative emotions such as anger and sadness
0:31:20 and grief, even despair at some moments, people have said to her, that’s not going to sustain
0:31:21 your movement.
0:31:23 And she said, well, it kind of did.
0:31:31 That is, we didn’t give promises about or positive stories about, I don’t know, happy
0:31:37 images or things that are going to make people feel hopeful in this uplifting, optimistic sense.
0:31:43 Actually, we confronted people with the bleak facts and said there’s a reason for urgency.
0:31:48 And that’s actually something that did drive the movement, even if it wasn’t always sufficient
0:31:52 to bring, for instance, politicians and decision makers on board.
0:31:58 Do you think it’s a burden for people to hope that we can solve the climate problem?
0:32:03 Or is it just a problem when we demand hope as a condition of action?
0:32:06 The latter.
0:32:12 I think it’s, it can be fine to, there are so many kinds of hope and ways to be hopeful as
0:32:13 well as desperate, right?
0:32:17 I think it’s fine to be hopeful in whatever way and it’s fine to be desperate in whatever
0:32:25 way as well, as long as we still keep focusing on moving towards what we believe has to be
0:32:31 done, because that’s not up to what we think is hopeful or desperate or what our emotional
0:32:32 responses are.
0:32:39 That’s, that’s a calling of, of, of the world for us to commit to certain values.
0:32:45 We have to do certain things and I think it can be a relief, yeah, a relief of a kind
0:32:52 of burden to, to realize in the end, we just have to do what needs to be done and that can
0:32:54 be hopeful or pessimistic or hopefully pessimistic.
0:32:59 That can be a variety of ways of, of doing that.
0:33:06 And there’s just something deflating about insisting that people feign optimism or pretend to believe
0:33:10 things they don’t believe, like, like everything’s going to work out, you know, just for the very
0:33:12 simple reason that it’s dishonest.
0:33:18 And when people are forced into dishonesty, all you’re left with is just a kind of moral
0:33:19 performance.
0:33:22 And that’s not, that’s not productive.
0:33:22 Absolutely.
0:33:23 No.
0:33:28 And I do think that that is a burden and it’s been documented as a, as a burden as well, because
0:33:32 you can’t keep holding certain emotions.
0:33:37 If you feel that things are, um, if you feel these darker emotions or you feel this concern
0:33:43 or anger or grief and you’re not able or not allowed, or you have to hold them back.
0:33:44 Yeah.
0:33:49 There’s, there seems to be something dishonest in it, but it’s also not psychologically sustainable.
0:33:51 It’s not good for us.
0:33:54 There has to be room for having those sorts of feelings and expressing them.
0:34:00 And, um, but in a way that’s conducive to our, our flourishing and our commitment at
0:34:00 the same time.
0:34:07 And I think one thing that’s been really interesting about the climate movement is that it has increasingly
0:34:12 tried to give room and give voice to those sorts of, uh, to those sorts of emotions.
0:34:15 And I think Greta Thunberg has been very important in, in doing that.
0:34:20 We also say that, that hope can harden into cruel optimism.
0:34:26 And that phrase is striking because again, we don’t usually think of hope as a burden.
0:34:31 We think of it as the thing that gets us through, but what you’re describing is something different.
0:34:37 It’s what we’ve just been talking about that, that forced hope that people are expected to
0:34:40 project, which is dishonest and I think unhelpful.
0:34:43 But what do you think makes it cruel?
0:34:54 Cruelty comes exactly when it becomes judgmental or it becomes something that we force on other
0:34:54 people.
0:35:00 So when there’s this, this assumption that, oh no, you have to be, you have to be hopeful
0:35:06 or you have to be optimistic because otherwise that is a moral failing, failing, or that you’re
0:35:12 not sufficiently in control of yourself or that it’s unpowerful or uncourageous.
0:35:22 That then becomes a form of not necessarily intentional cruelty, but the cruel aspect of it is that you
0:35:29 might find yourself experiencing these darker emotions because you are encountering a reality
0:35:36 that has this darkness to it, that is either desperate or makes you angry or makes you want
0:35:40 to cry or there is something about reality that triggers these emotions.
0:35:45 So you’re, you’re responding appropriately, but already having to bear that burden, you then
0:35:52 also have to bear the burden of either hiding those emotions or expressing contrary emotions,
0:36:02 such as being outwardly optimistic or joyful or lighthearted or having uplifting narratives.
0:36:07 And there’s something, as you said earlier, there’s something dishonest about it, but that also, it just
0:36:08 makes the burden worse.
0:36:12 It’s kind of having, burdening the already burdened with another burden.
0:36:16 And there seems to be something, um, not quite right about that.
0:36:22 As we’ve been saying, you know, being hopefully pessimistic means living in this tension and that
0:36:30 means living alongside despair and grief and anger and not repressing these feelings or telling
0:36:33 yourself a story that makes them go away.
0:36:41 Do you ever think that’s just a hard ask for most people, that most of us just want to feel
0:36:48 secure about the future and that maybe a false hope is preferable to an authentic doubt?
0:36:53 I don’t think so.
0:36:57 So I don’t, I’m not saying that everyone has to be in a state of constant despair.
0:36:58 Yeah, no, I don’t mean that.
0:36:59 I don’t mean that.
0:37:05 I, no, I mean, I, I would read that book if it were written, but I don’t think that
0:37:07 that is, that would be a hard, that would be a hard ask.
0:37:08 Yeah.
0:37:15 In the end, it’s much more, all I’m saying is that, hey, it’s okay to be, to feel those
0:37:19 things or to be pessimistic, um, from time to time.
0:37:22 That’s not something that you have to push away.
0:37:27 And it’s also not something that you’d have to be dishonest about or not express to other
0:37:28 people.
0:37:34 And then I also, I think a lot of people do exist with these realities.
0:37:42 Everyone encounters grief or pain or death, um, at least, you know, at, at, at some point
0:37:43 in our lives.
0:37:50 And if we don’t express that, it just means, it doesn’t mean that we’re not experiencing
0:37:50 these things.
0:37:55 It just means that we’re not talking about them or that we’re not being honest to ourselves
0:37:57 or to other people about them.
0:38:03 So I also, I definitely also think there can be narratives and stories of, um, of love
0:38:06 and joy and joy and wonder about the world as well.
0:38:13 But as you said, these things can exist alongside each other and existing in that tension, I
0:38:19 think will, will only deepen our capacity for human flourishing, not deflated.
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0:42:16 Do you ever think of hopeful pessimism as almost like a secular counterpart to religious
0:42:17 faith?
0:42:24 And I’m asking because, you know, people who are religious often have this deep faith that
0:42:30 this will all make sense in the end, that the moral arithmetic will balance out either
0:42:35 in this life or the next one, and many of them will tell you that they couldn’t imagine
0:42:42 getting through life without this faith, which I can understand even if I don’t share it.
0:42:48 And I feel like your book isn’t exactly a secular alternative to this, but it is taking this aspect
0:42:56 of faith seriously and saying we can find meaning and dignity in a very different and, I guess,
0:42:58 more honest way.
0:43:01 There’s definitely aspects of that there.
0:43:09 When I was thinking about these two kinds of hope, part of why I came up with new terms
0:43:15 for them, so the blue hope and the green hope, is because you do often in a lot of religious
0:43:18 literature see different kinds of hope.
0:43:22 And one is more the secular sort of hope, and the other is more the religious kind of hope
0:43:23 or faith.
0:43:30 So there is going to be something that sustains us, even if the usual hope, the everyday hope
0:43:32 fails, so the hope that’s based on expectation.
0:43:37 Once those expectations fail us, there’s going to be this other reality that will sustain us.
0:43:43 So I’m trying to find a version of that that will work for both religious and non-religious people.
0:43:53 And I think we can find it in this form of hope that doesn’t hinge on achievable outcomes or of our
0:43:59 expectations about the future, but is more about, well, we can know some things for certain, and that’s the things
0:44:05 that we value in life or that we feel are worth fighting for, worth committing to.
0:44:10 It is a kind of faith, in a way, even if it’s not, it doesn’t expect anything.
0:44:14 That’s why some people have spoken of hope without expectancy.
0:44:17 And I think that comes quite close.
0:44:23 I wouldn’t want to say it’s the same thing as faith, but it might perform a similar kind of sustaining
0:44:25 function, a sort of hope beyond hope.
0:44:31 But that’s sort of the problem with religious faith, right, is that it does come with this certainty
0:44:37 about the future and what it will all amount to, right?
0:44:41 It’s a story about who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going.
0:44:48 And that seems at odds with, like, the sort of core tenet of pessimism, which is maintaining
0:44:55 contact with that uncertainty and never looking away from it, never pretending like you do have
0:44:58 clarity or certainty about the future.
0:45:03 Yeah, so there is, they’re definitely not exactly the same thing.
0:45:09 Although I think even for religious hope or faith, sometimes it’s not always quite so clear-cut.
0:45:11 It’s faith, not certainty.
0:45:24 It’s not, there is often still a grasping or putting oneself towards something without knowing for certain
0:45:26 what is going to come back.
0:45:36 So there is, the faith element has an open-endedness to it that still has a sort of kind of affinity to the hope of hopeful pessimism.
0:45:37 But yeah, they’re definitely not the same.
0:45:38 It’s such a good point.
0:45:52 And I think the best of faith, the best of religion, is the kind that does stay in touch with that faith and doesn’t harden into the sort of certainty we’re talking about.
0:45:54 And that happens quite a bit too.
0:45:55 But that’s not…
0:45:57 It keeps the openness and the open-endedness alive.
0:45:59 Let’s go back to Kimu.
0:46:03 There’s this line that’s frequently attributed to him.
0:46:09 I’m not sure if he’s the one who actually wrote it, but certainly it reflects his general philosophy.
0:46:13 And I was thinking about the sentiment while reading your book.
0:46:22 The line is, the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
0:46:23 I love that.
0:46:34 And I was thinking about it while reading your book because so much of it is about what it means to keep acting after we’ve let go of the usual justifications.
0:46:37 And the usual justification is success.
0:46:41 Our culture justifies everything through success.
0:46:51 If we do what we’ve been talking about and abandon the idea that our actions are justified by their success, what’s our compass?
0:46:55 What words do we use in place of success or progress?
0:46:57 It’s such a good question.
0:47:10 It’s also a big question for me as just a philosopher, thinking my ideas to answer, because it is really about how do we move forward as humanity, right?
0:47:11 I couldn’t answer it.
0:47:14 No, I’m still going to try.
0:47:20 I think, because I do think it really depends on the context.
0:47:27 I’m not saying that we can never, it is good to think about, sometimes it is appropriate to think about, well, what are our prognoses?
0:47:31 And we do want to think about possible outcomes.
0:47:36 We don’t want to, it will be silly not to, we want things to get better.
0:47:39 So sometimes you do have to think, well, what’s the, what’s the best way forward?
0:47:41 What are the achievable outcomes?
0:47:47 And we have to listen to prognoses of what climate scientists tell us and then plot our best way forward.
0:48:04 But it’s more about, ultimately, the reason why we want to act in certain ways isn’t premised on whether that’s going to work or not, or it’s not prognoses oriented in that sort of way.
0:48:25 And ultimately, even if we don’t know what’s going to happen or if those efforts fail us, especially in a case such as climate change, where every incremental change in degrees of warming is going to have huge amounts of difference in the amount of suffering of future generations and even people living now.
0:48:35 We have to, what will then sustain us, what will move us forward, what is ultimately going to drive our commitment?
0:48:54 And I think we already have the answer to that when we think about, if you’re asking about what kind of words that we would use, it’s things like value or duty or justice or goodness, compassion, things that have been such a part of our moral language.
0:48:57 So we already know how to, how to work with them, how to deal with them.
0:49:09 And that’s sort of the idea of being committed to a cause is, has been sustaining to people who had no certainty of outcome.
0:49:14 And that’s how a lot of political and social change has happened.
0:49:21 Sometimes we just don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, but we know what’s right to do and to commit towards.
0:49:24 And I think that’s something worth reminding ourselves of.
0:49:37 So maybe alongside the very natural language of prognoses and outcomes and expectation, that could also be this reminder that, yeah, but we’re going to do what we can nonetheless.
0:49:50 I guess we often think of hope as the opposite of despair, but do you think it’s commitment, is commitment actually the opposite of despair?
0:49:56 Staying committed with the world, that’s the antidote to despair, not hope.
0:50:01 I mean, I have ideas about despair.
0:50:06 I’m not sure that despair is always, always a bad thing.
0:50:10 But I think the kind of despair that you’re talking about is like resignation, right?
0:50:12 Or giving up, that sort of despair.
0:50:17 Yeah, I think commitment is the better antidote.
0:50:20 And sometimes when people say hope, that’s what they mean, right?
0:50:24 It can mean a lot of different things.
0:50:32 But I think if we remember things like commitment, and that’s such also a life-affirming thing to say.
0:50:38 So it’s when you’re committed to something or when you commit yourself to something, you’re doing something.
0:50:42 But also you’re putting something of yourself at stake if you’re using the word rightly.
0:50:45 So it also means that you’re going to act in certain ways.
0:50:53 And that’s why I love it when Cornel West says things like, if you say that you’re hopeful, well, what does it demand of you?
0:50:55 What does it ask of you?
0:50:56 What does it cost you?
0:50:59 So that it’s not just a turn of phrase.
0:51:07 So yes, I think I’d be, I like the idea of commitment as the antidote of that sort of resignation or despair.
0:51:11 Let me push on something you said, because you said despair isn’t always a bad thing.
0:51:16 And I wonder when it’s a good thing or useful thing.
0:51:19 Yeah, so I’m always distinguishing things.
0:51:23 So as I’ve got different kinds of hope, I’ve got different kinds of despair as well.
0:51:29 I think despair is often used in different ways.
0:51:36 So when it means something like passivity or giving up or resignation, that’s one form of despair.
0:51:41 So sometimes when a person despairs, it means they’ve given up.
0:51:46 But say that someone were to come to you and say, I’m desperate.
0:51:52 That could also be a plea for help or a recognition that we can’t go on in this way.
0:51:59 Interestingly, there have been movements or there have been voices of desperate resistance as well.
0:52:02 And I think you see a lot of despair in the climate movement.
0:52:07 Rebecca Solnit has this phrase about hope, that hope should shove you out the door.
0:52:10 And I think sometimes the same thing is true for despair.
0:52:13 Sometimes despair also shoves people out the door.
0:52:21 So when you think, oh, I am in despair or I’m desperate, or this is a desperate situation, that demands something from us.
0:52:24 So I don’t think all kinds of despair are necessarily deflating.
0:52:31 And to the extent that it is an emotional response to, say, a desperate situation, it doesn’t have to be.
0:52:38 I don’t want to say I’d recommend it to anyone, but I also think it’s not necessarily something that we should shy away from.
0:52:41 Well, it’s all very Camus-ian, again, right?
0:52:41 Yes.
0:52:48 I guess just like anger, despair can be, in your words, that call to action, right?
0:52:49 And that’s ultimately the test.
0:52:50 What do you do?
0:52:52 Do you answer that call or do you not?
0:53:06 And for Camus, as you know, the foundation of community, the foundation of a human world, really, is when we collectively say, no, this is not okay.
0:53:08 And that very act is affirmative.
0:53:11 It affirms the values that are actually being defended.
0:53:16 And to the extent they can ever be real, that’s what makes them real.
0:53:25 I feel that there’s such potential for Camus being reread in the light of climate change and other political crises of the moment.
0:53:31 Not that he was perfect in any way, but some of the things that he says in the writing and exploring the tension.
0:53:48 And then, yeah, having that idea that this is what it means to say no or to commit ourselves to a certain cause is, I think, deeply inspiring, but also will resonate with many people, especially in times as we live in today.
0:53:54 I want to close out with, um, with a sigh.
0:53:59 No, I’m sure Beth will edit that out.
0:53:59 No, no.
0:54:03 Um, there’s just, there’s just so much in my head.
0:54:12 Um, there’s so many lines and passages in the book that, um, that really landed with me and, you know, they’re appropriately highlighted.
0:54:19 Um, but I decided I just wanted to close out by reading one of my favorites.
0:54:21 And now I’m quoting you.
0:54:24 If anything, the pessimists have taught me this.
0:54:29 With eyes full of that darkness, there can still be that strange, shattering openness.
0:54:31 Like a door cracked open.
0:54:33 For the good to make its entry into life.
0:54:38 Since all things are uncertain, so too is the future.
0:54:44 And so there is always the possibility of change for better as there is for worse.
0:54:50 That feels like a nice capsule statement of really the whole thesis of the book.
0:54:53 I’m glad to hear that that resonated.
0:54:58 And, um, yeah, I still, that’s the thing that the pessimists have taught me.
0:55:02 And I hope that it will be of value to other people as well.
0:55:04 I think it will be.
0:55:06 It certainly was to me.
0:55:10 Once again, the book is called Hopeful Pessimism.
0:55:14 Mara van der Lute, this was a pleasure.
0:55:15 Thank you.
0:55:17 Thank you so much for having me.
0:55:25 All right.
0:55:27 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:55:42 You know, optimism and pessimism are themes we revisit on the show because, like a lot of you, I’m constantly waging a battle in my own mind to not be too pessimistic or too cynical.
0:55:54 And this episode was helpful because it breaks through that binary and gives a new perspective on how to live constructively with both of these emotions.
0:56:03 Anyway, we’ve been overwhelmed by the number of voicemails and emails that we’ve received in recent weeks.
0:56:04 Please keep them coming.
0:56:06 I read all of them.
0:56:08 My team reads all of them.
0:56:10 Your notes help us make a better show.
0:56:12 And I want to know what you thought of this one.
0:56:22 So drop us a line at the gray area at vox.com or leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749.
0:56:29 And once you’re finished with that, please go ahead, rate, and review, and subscribe to the podcast.
0:56:40 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
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0:56:44 Listen and subscribe.
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We live in a culture obsessed with hope. We are trained to believe that being hopeful is the key to success. Stay positive. The sun will come out tomorrow. Keep the faith. But maintaining that kind of blind hope is hard. When our hopes are dashed, we often feel defeated.
In a world that’s filled with lots of dark clouds and very few silver linings, perhaps we need a better way to balance our hope and our pessimism.
In today’s episode, Sean interviews philosopher Mara van der Lugt about her new book Hopeful Pessimism. The two talk about how to sustain hope when you’re feeling pessimistic, the pitfalls of blind hope, and what the climate movement can teach us about staying motivated when success is unlikely.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Mara van der Lugt, lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews and author of Hopeful Pessimism.
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