The Audacity of Hope™

[blindpig]

anaxarchos
02-15-2008, 01:51 AM

The Audacity of Hope™

Yea, the phrase is trivial and empty and meaningless, but operating under the idea that even the trivial and empty means something in the present society, let's take a quick peek. What the hell is "Hope™"? Let's crawl into the way-back machine and go way way back... before the spiritual rebirth of Hope™ in the modern era, before the early Catholic resurrection ("Faith, Hope, and Charity") and go all the way back to the Greeks, with whom almost everything starts (and not just the good "everything", either). What, dear Greeks, is Hope™?

Well, according to Greek myth, Hope™ was the greatest of the evils contained in Pandora's Box. When Pandora loosed these evils upon the world, Zeus suddenly had a change of heart. He decided, charitably, that Hope™, the most powerful of all the evils, could be kept from humanity. At his instigation, Pandora slammed shut the lid of the box when all but Hope™ had escaped.

Only Hope was left within her unbreakable house,
she remained under the lip of the jar, and did not
fly away. Before [she could], Pandora replaced the
lid of the jar. This was the will of aegis-bearing
Zeus the Cloudgatherer.
Hesiod

Alas, without Hope™, humanity was immediately reduced to despair and rebellion in the face of the other evils. Reluctantly, Zeus bid Pandora to return to the box and release Hope™. And as this worst of plagues was loosed upon the earth, it was accompanied by universal jubilation and relief... because it made the other evils tolerable through the possibility that their reign might be ended, not by the actions of humans themselves, but by the intervention of others, or the action of the fates themselves. Hope™ was the final excuse, worthy of the Gods themselves, for failing to act in one's own behalf.

Hope. Pandora brought the jar with the evils and opened it. It was the gods' gift to man, on the outside a beautiful, enticing gift, called the "lucky jar." Then all the evils, those lively, winged beings, flew out of it. Since that time, they roam around and do harm to men by day and night. One single evil had not yet slipped out of the jar. As Zeus had wished, Pandora slammed the top down and it remained inside. So now man has the lucky jar in his house forever and thinks the world of the treasure. It is at his service; he reaches for it when he fancies it. For he does not know that that jar which Pandora brought was the jar of evils, and he takes the remaining evil for the greatest worldly good--it is hope, for Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man's torment.
Friedrich Nietzsche

It's just a footnote, but interesting, no?

BTW, the Audacity of Hope™ is an oxymoron on the face of it, according to the Greeks. Ain't no "audacity" in it. It is the stuff of denial and cowardice - two other escapees from the box.

Just sayin'...


https://poshmark.com/listing/Pandoras-box $185
(Replaced image & caption. bp)

[blindpig]

chlamor
02-15-2008, 08:46 AM
Hope is flailing about like apologetic and weak people who have been down so long and have accepted that condition as part of their natural situation and it can only be altered through some divine, magical intervention in this case to be delivered by the the post-modern political pablum platitudinal company man Obama.

Reposted this here where you will find a real small tight club of hopeful morons:
http://www.peopleforchange.net/index.ph ... opic=33810 (http://www.peopleforchange.net/index.ph ... opic=33810)

[blindpig]

anaxarchos
02-15-2008, 11:15 AM

Hope is flailing about like apologetic and weak people who have been down so long and have accepted that condition as part of their natural situation and it can only be altered through some divine, magical intervention in this case to be delivered by the the post-modern political pablum platitudinal company man Obama.

Reposted this here where you will find a real small tight club of hopeful morons:
http://www.peopleforchange.net/index.ph ... opic=33810 (http://www.peopleforchange.net/index.ph ... opic=33810)

Well, I certainly hope™ it makes them feel better. Here is some pop science to go along with my pop music:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magaz ... ref=slogin (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magaz ... ref=slogin)


Hope Can Be Worse Than Hopelessness
New York Times Magazine
By MARINA KRAKOVSKY
Published: December 9, 2007

People often display a remarkable ability to adapt to adversity, bouncing back to their usual levels of happiness despite extreme hardships. But people don’t always rebound, and scientists have long wondered what factors might account for the difference. In a talk at Harvard in September, a team of researchers suggested that one obstacle to emotional recovery, oddly enough, is hope — the belief that your current hardship is temporary.

The Greeks personified hope as the Goddess Elpis (Spes for the Romans), sister of Sleep and Death and the daughter of Nyx, the Goddess of the night. In turn, Elpis was the mother of Rumor.

Here are the next lines from Hesiod's Works and Days.

[Lines 148-163] And now attend, while I at large relate,
And trace, the various Turns of human State.

Soon as the deathless Gods were born, and Man,
A mortal Race, with Voice edu'd, began,
The heavenly Powers from High their work behold,
And the first Age they style an Age of Gold.
Men spent a Life like Gods in Saturn's Reign,
Nor felt their Mind a Care, nor Body Pain;
The fields, as yet untilled, their Fruits afford,
And fill a sumptuous, and enevied, Board.
From Labour free they all Delights enjoy,
Nor could the Ills of Time and Peace destroy;
They die, or rather seem to die, they seem
From hence transporting in a pleasing Dream.
Thus, crowned with Happiness their every Day,
Serer, and joyful, passed their Lives away.



Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
"Prometheus : Yes, I caused mortals to cease foreseeing their doom (moros).
Chorus : Of what sort was the cure that you found for this affliction?
Prometheus : I caused blind hopes (elpides) to dwell within their breasts.
Chorus : A great benefit was this you gave to mortals."
.

[blindpig]

chlamor
02-15-2008, 09:01 PM

Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.

To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women’s shelters in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but another was her false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.

Does anyone really believe that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we ask nicely? If only we get a Democrat in the White House, things will be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They are already not okay, and they’re getting worse. Rapidly.

But it isn’t only false hopes that keep those who go along enchained. It is hope itself. Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that makes its way into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our protection against despair (which must be avoided at all costs). How can we continue if we do not have hope?

We’ve all been taught that hope in some future condition—like hope in some future heaven—is and must be our refuge in current sorrow. I’m sure you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one’s misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.

More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn’t believe—or maybe you would—how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

I’m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don’t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they’ve assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.

I do not hope coho salmon survive. I will do whatever it takes to make sure the dominant culture doesn’t drive them extinct. If coho want to leave us because they don’t like how they’re being treated—and who could blame them?—I will say goodbye, and I will miss them, but if they do not want to leave, I will not allow civilization to kill them off.

When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to “hope” at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes.

When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.

<snip>

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/ ... ticle/170/ (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/ ... ticle/170/)

[blindpig]

blindpig
04-01-2011, 03:15 PM

Kick cause good mythology resonates.
Something for our new readers.

[blindpig]

meganmonkey
04-02-2011, 11:30 PM

Kick cause good mythology resonates.
Something for our new readers.

Good call. I don't know that I ever read all of this. Resonates, indeed.