The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(8)

“Have you ever lost hope in the future of humanity?” I asked, knowing that hopelessness can be both deeply personal and also sweepingly global, especially as so many things seemed to be moving in the wrong direction.

“Sometimes, I think, ‘Well, why on Earth do I feel hopeful?’ Because the problems facing the planet are huge. And if I analyze them carefully, they do sometimes seem absolutely impossible to solve. So why do I feel hopeful? Partly, because I’m obstinate. I just won’t give in. But it’s partly also because we cannot accurately predict what the future might bring. We simply can’t. No one can know how it will all turn out.”

Somehow, hearing how Jane’s hope had been tested and questioned made it more inspiring and, even in a strange way, more trustworthy.

Yet I wondered why some people bounce back faster than others from grief or heartbreak. Was there any science that could explain hope and why some people have more of it than others, and perhaps how all of us can have it when we need it?





Can Science Explain Hope?



When Jane and I agreed to work on a book about hope, I did some research into the relatively new field of hope studies. I was surprised to learn that hope is quite different from wishing or fantasizing. Hope leads to future success in a way that wishful thinking does not. While both involve thinking about the future with rich imagery, only hope sparks us to take action directed toward the hoped-for goal—something I would hear Jane emphasize repeatedly during our subsequent meetings.

When we focus on the future, we do one of three things. We fantasize, which involves big dreams that are mostly for fun and entertainment; we dwell, which involves focusing on all the bad stuff that might happen—this was the official pastime of my hometown—or we hope, which involves envisioning the future while recognizing the inevitability of challenges. Interestingly, more hopeful people actually anticipate setbacks along the way and work to remove them. I was learning that hope wasn’t just a Pollyanna avoidance of the problems but a way of engaging with them. And yet I always imagined that hopeful and optimistic people are just born that way and wanted to know if Jane agreed.

“Aren’t some people just more hopeful or more optimistic than others?”

“Well, maybe,” Jane said, “but hope and optimism are not the same thing.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I haven’t got the faintest idea,” she said with a laugh.

I waited, knowing Jane loved scientific inquiry and debate. I could see she was considering the difference.

“Well, I guess a person either is or isn’t an optimist. It’s a disposition or a philosophy of life. As an optimist, you can just have the feeling, ‘Oh, it’ll be all right.’ It’s the opposite of a pessimist, who says, ‘Oh, that’s never going to work.’ Hope, on the other hand, is a stubborn determination to do all you can to make it work. And hope is something we can cultivate. It can change over the course of our lifetime. Of course, someone with an optimistic nature is far more likely to be hopeful because they see a glass as half full rather than half empty!”

“Do our genes,” I asked, “determine whether we are an optimist or a pessimist?”

“From all I’ve read,” Jane said, “there is evidence that an optimistic personality may be partly the result of genetic inheritance, but this can surely be overruled by environmental factors—just as those born without a genetic tendency toward optimism can develop a more optimistic and self-reliant outlook. It certainly points to the importance of a child’s environment and early education. A supportive family background can have a major effect—I know I was really lucky with mine, especially my mother. But how do we know that I would have been less optimistic with a less supportive family? I remember reading somewhere that a pair of identical twins, brought up in different backgrounds, still showed similar personalities. But as I said, it’s also true that the environment can affect the expression of genes.”

“Have you heard the joke about the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?” I asked. “The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears the optimist is right.”

Jane laughed. “We don’t really know how it will all turn out, do we? And we can’t just think that we can do nothing and everything will work out for the best.”

Jane’s pragmatic view made me think of a conversation I had had with Desmond Tutu, who had endured so many tragic reversals and so much adversity in the struggle to free South Africa from the racist apartheid regime.

I recalled to Jane, “Archbishop Tutu once told me that optimism can quickly turn to pessimism when the circumstances change. Hope, he explained, is a much deeper source of strength, practically unshakable. When a journalist once asked Tutu why he was optimistic, he said he was not optimistic, he was a ‘prisoner of hope,’ quoting the biblical prophet Zechariah. He said hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”

“Yes,” Jane said. “Hope does not deny all the difficulty and all the danger that exists, but it is not stopped by them. There is a lot of darkness, but our actions create the light.”

“So it seems we can shift our perspective to see the light and also to work to create more of it.”

Jane nodded. “It is important to take action and realize that we can make a difference, and this will encourage others to take action, and then we realize we are not alone and our cumulative actions truly make an even greater difference. That is how we spread the light. And this, of course, makes us all ever more hopeful.”