The Character of Hope

By Joel Bryant

"When we transcend the common we offend the shallow. We also encourage the curious to adventure."

What is the character of hope? What is it based on and fed by? Only as we inquire can we determine the qualities that comprise. Moreover in doing so we might further determine its legitimacy and limits, if such exists. Inevitably any discussion of abstractions raises more questions than answers. Yet such an inquiry is crucial to our understanding of hope's character, and is therefore worthy of our interest. Two areas especially intrigue. These aren't exhaustive but they are sufficient for our inquiry. Along with the faculty of reason, hope is the singular quality most shared by rational creatures. It is not the exclusive property of a particular race, culture or class. All of us have hope and its offshoot - -hopes. All of us envision the day when time grants what labor hasn't. Even if it doesn't, however, hope as a quality remains.

Specific to each, this desire is common to all. For example, the pregnant mother hopes to deliver a healthy baby. The recently discharged worker hopes to find a better job. These are only two hopes that haunt the human heart. Thousands, perhaps millions more exist. Still, however, these desires represent kinds of hope and therefore don't diminish its quality when they are crushed. Characteristically, as a quality hope transcends its temporal roots and existential disappointments. Its presence, persistence, even, prevails universally.

Different people can hope for different things, receiving or being denied them accordingly without imperiling the quality or integrity of hope. Nor can someone (or something) be rightly called hopeless. This person may be disappointed or disillusioned but he is not hopeless. In this regard, hope seems to be as inalienable as is ourright to and regard for freedom, being bequeathed at birth. We can no more deny it as we can ourselves. What intrigues are the claims of those who claim to be hopeless. Any person that claims such lacks self-knowledge and doesn't understand the character of hope.

Any policy founded upon this premise perverts and deceives. Any insistence of such subverts the right use of resources. It also retards personal autonomy. What people need are opportunities, from which hope expands accordingly. They need new ends and worthwhile aims toward which their hope can be directed when thwarted or revised when misguided. Many of these desires are products of a person's peculiar value or social system. Gradually, routinely, his hopes expand to include (and express) cultural, racial and class interests. Rightly developed, they comprise concern for all things human. When this happens hope comes to define an age and herald a new era in human history.

Such hope is expensive and expansive, transcending itself in the quest for truth. In this regard, hope reveals its second quality -its autonomy. Like the heart, hope has reasons that only it knows, and is thus capable of honoring these. Maybe that's why we so often feel frustrated personally 'Tis then that hope heralds its excellence, and transcends the individual in its quest for the universal. In rejecting its autonomy we seek to deny its integrity. We can, and should still have hopes; but we should not let these mar its character. Otherwise our ignorance will curse what hope has yet to create --a good for us that is good for all-- which is something that our hopes often thwart.

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