“To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its
own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have
paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our
staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how
psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have
evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our
consciousness: hope.
“Hope — and the wise, effective action that can spring from
it — is the counterweight to the heavy sense of our own fragility. It is a
continual negotiation between optimism and despair, a continual negation of cynicism and naïveté. We hope precisely
because we are aware that terrible outcomes are always possible and often
probable, but that the choices we make can impact the outcomes.
“How to harness that uniquely human paradox in living more
empowered lives in even the most vulnerable-making circumstances is what the
great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich
Fromm (March 23,
1900–March 18, 1980) explores in the 1968 gem The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology, written in an era when both hope and fear were at a global
high, by a German Jew who had narrowly escaped a dismal fate by taking refuge
first in Switzerland and then in America when the Nazis seized power.
“In a sentiment he would later develop in contemplating the superior alternative to the parallel lazinesses of
optimism and pessimism, Fromm writes: ‘Hope is a decisive element in any attempt
to bring about social change in the direction of greater aliveness, awareness,
and reason. But the nature of hope is often misunderstood and confused with
attitudes that have nothing to do with hope and in fact are the very opposite.’
“Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene made his
poetic case for our sense of mortality as the wellspring of meaning in
our ephemeral lives, Fromm argues that our capacity for hope — which
has furnished the greatest achievements of our species — is rooted in our
vulnerable self-consciousness. Writing well before Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant unsexing of the universal pronoun,
Fromm (and all of his contemporaries and predecessors, male and female, trapped
in the linguistic convention of their time) may be forgiven for using man as shorthand
for the generalized human being:
“‘Man, lacking the instinctual equipment of the animal, is not as well
equipped for flight or for attack as animals are. He does not ‘know’
infallibly, as the salmon knows where to return to the river in order to spawn
its young and as many birds know where to go south in the winter and where to
return in the summer. His decisions are not made for him by instinct. He has to make them. He is faced with alternatives and there is a risk of
failure in every decision he makes. The price that man pays for consciousness
is insecurity. He can stand his insecurity by being aware and accepting the
human condition, and by the hope that he will not fail even though he has no
guarantee for success. He has no certainty; the only certain prediction he can
make is: I shall die.
“What
makes us human is not the fact of that elemental vulnerability, which we share
with all other living creatures, but the awareness of that fact — the way
existential uncertainty worms the consciousness capable of grasping it. But in
that singular fragility lies, also, our singular resilience as thinking,
feeling animals capable of foresight and of intelligent, sensitive
decision-making along the vectors of that foresight.
“Fromm writes: ‘Man is born as
a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find
principles of action and decision making which replace the principles of
instinct. He has to have a frame of orientation that permits him to organize a
consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has
to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but
also against another danger that is specifically human: that of becoming
insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger
of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind. The human
being, born under the conditions described here, would indeed go mad if he did
not find a frame of reference which permitted him to feel at home in the world
in some form and to escape the experience of utter helplessness,
disorientation, and uprootedness. There are many ways in which man can find a
solution to the task of staying alive and of remaining sane. Some are better
than others and some are worse. By ‘better’ is meant a way conducive to greater
strength, clarity, joy, independence; and by ‘worse’ the very opposite. But
more important than finding the better solution is finding some
solution that is viable.
“‘As we navigate our
own uncertain times together, may a thousand flowers of sanity bloom, each
valid so long as it is viable in buoying the human spirit it animates. And may
we remember the myriad terrors and uncertainties preceding our own, which have
served as unexpected awakenings from some of our most perilous civilizational
slumbers.’…
“[According to Fromm], ‘Only through full awareness of the danger
to life can this potential be mobilized for action capable of bringing about
drastic changes in our way of organizing society… One cannot think in terms of
percentages or probabilities as long as there is a real possibility — even a
slight one — that life will prevail.’…”
The above article is from Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. For newsletters, subscribe here — it's free.
The “Hope
Anchor” was given to me by Fr. Andrew Guljas who was my favorite teacher and
dear friend at Notre Dame High School in Niles, Illinois. It was the plaque
that hung in his room where we had many conversations. He gave it to me five years after I graduated; just before he left for
Chile in 1974.
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