I’m Tired of Talking About Hope

I cannot get away from it—it haunts me, showing up in my everyday life, my coursework, the organizing in which much of my extracurricular life has come to consist—and I am deeply, desperately tired of talking about it. I seem unable to prevent myself from going back to it again and again and again. Lounging on the too-rarely sun-soaked steps of Memorial Church, staring blankly at the bare ceiling of my dorm room as I pretend to draft an essay, caught up in conversation over plastic dining hall trays: my mind is relentlessly, unwillingly, drawn back to the seemingly-mundane topic—or question, rather—of hope.

I blame it on the collection of radical theory courses which have accumulated on my transcript. Katie Stockdale’s Hope Under Oppression, in particular, centers what it is to have and act with hope; to engage with the collective; to struggle and fight even with all the messy particularities of exactly what that means and aims towards. I have tried, failed, and failed again to manage a reprieve, to get those ideas out of my head. So, as a last resort, I’m writing about them. I claim no responsibility for the mind they end up in next—I hope they find more satisfaction in navigating them than I have.

Stockdale grounds her account in the varied notion of faith, specifically of the intrinsic, that which tethers you to the struggle, which renders all the evidence which points in the opposite direction not ignorable, but rather insubstantial. In Stockdale’s view, “intrinsic faith enables resilience not by changing the way the agent of faith relates to evidence but by rendering evidence irrelevant to one’s actions.” Faith, here, is not merely an idle longing, but an attachment that goes beyond, that demands more of you and of the world than either is capable of giving, but that we must strive towards achieving regardless. And this, then, requires practice, requires the solidarity bonds of the collective. Stockdale makes central the notion that this builds in a risk of dialogue, of a praxis which emerges from, is an embodiment of, and reinforces the faith which sustains us. It’s risky because we face the threat of being disappointed in every moment; it’s essential because we have no other option, because “to be human…[is] to reflect and act in concert with others.” In her view, if we hope, we must hope together. We must have faith not only in the deep-rooted rightness of the struggle and our role in it, but also in the collective, in this entity which—like the aims it strives towards—transcends us, shapes us in its image, relies on our commitment to function in community.

Stockdale tells us to be patient—a skill at which I have never even remotely excelled. Under her account of hope, we are to cultivate a resilience which transcends us—“us” used in a sense which marks both the individual within the collective and the collective as a whole entity in itself—which spans decades, millenia, continents and ways of being. There is an inheritance, then, to the struggle: of organizing, of drive and commitment, of reflexivity and a careful consideration of what it is to hope at all.

Organizing, to put it far too simply, is hard. There is no way to overstate that. Some might contend, in the face of its unceasing demands, that hope feels too flimsy, that there is not enough substance, enough power, held within hope itself to foster and then sustain a movement merely through its presence. I am inclined to agree—I don’t know that I trust, or feel secure in trusting, hope alone to get us that far.

We risk so much in hoping. And while Stockdale outlines how faith grounds us when all hope seems out of reach, when despair threatens to sink in, I find myself unsatisfied with her (lack of) answers regarding the pain and risk that faith leaves us open to. This resilience borne of faith and hope can, in its unwavering endurance, be painful—so painful. When the institutions we exist within turn against us, attempt to silence us, to punish us, for our refusal to be complicit in genocide, in oppression, in apartheid, it literally hurts to have hope.

Maybe I am asking too much of her, of hope—but then again, maybe that’s just it. I think we stumble when we conceive of hope as a thing which is worthy in itself. Movements are made not merely by hoping, but by doing, and while the moment in which we hope might be the moment in which we are most moved to act, it is not hope itself which drives that doing. When we hope, even when we do so well, there necessarily remains some uncertainty. It is simply untenable to expect our hoping, our faith, to attend to all the messy particularities of what it means to strive towards the realization of some emancipatory goal. The thing is, hope does not act on its own—and neither do we.

“There are countless parallels between hope and all those things which build and sustain a collective; chief of these collective-building efforts, in my view, is love.”

Emancipatory struggle is not a solitary effort, but necessarily both the product and the cultivator of the collective, in all its forms. There are countless parallels between hope and all those things which build and sustain a collective; chief of these collective-building efforts, in my view, is love.

It sounds gimmicky, I know—really, I get it—but we can see hints of it in Stockdale’s piece: she makes the claim that “people who have faith in humanity are thus committed to demonstrating the goodness of humanity… because they deeply believe in the intrinsic value of relating to others with love, kindness, and other virtues,” and that if one has “intrinsic faith in humanity, nothing people do can make me see other human beings as worthy of hatred and violence and unworthy of compassion and love.”

Self-oriented understandings don’t seem to pass this test; a possessive and selfish relationship between parent and child, wherein the latter is regarded only as a product of the former, not as a real being unto themselves, seems totally void of that faith and orientation of valuing. Approaching love as a site rife with the radical potential of going beyond our selves and attending to people as infinitely complex entities allows us to begin weaving love together with hope. Just as we hope for an outcome we are yet unable to make sense of (insofar as “liberation” varies widely depending upon subject position), we love what (and who) we are never able to truly, wholly, comprehend. This eternal striving to understand is rooted in the fact that everything and everyone we aim at loving, along with the concepts with which we strain to apprehend them, are ever-changing, forever in flux.

And there is so much love in a revolution. Every moment, every halting step towards our emancipatory vision is suffused with care for others, for the future, for the collective which makes up our present. To stand amidst peers at a protest; to spend weeks on weeks on weeks wholly occupied with the mundanities of organizing; to scream and fight and give everything you have, everything you are, to some world-altering battle; is to love, to attend to something wholly beyond ourselves. When we love, we imagine, and it is that intergenerational dream of a better world which forces our hope into action, our faith into movement, our selves into struggle.

I want so desperately to hope, and love has always helped me find my way back. I offer this not as a platitude, but as an opportunity for practice, however hope-full (-less? you tell me) it may seem.