We don’t find room for hope, we make it

In times like these, it’s hard to see hope as much more than sentimentalism or empty-headed optimism.

We can’t expect technology to magically solve our problems. Photo by Ivan Radic on Wikimedia Commons

Two years ago, I was speaking about parenting and climate change with a leading academic. We were discussing the morality of bringing new children into the world in an era of climate change. Some philosophers, known as anti-natalists, believe it is wrong to bring children into the world when it’s likely they will experience more pain than pleasure. Other people – including philosophers, environmentalists and economists – believe the additional carbon impact that new lives pose on the planet makes reproduction morally unjustifiable.

The argument is unsettling – particularly if, like me, you’re a parent. There will come a day, the academic told me, when some children will look to their parents and ask, ‘why did you make me?’ If predictions about the direction of the planet are correct, might it be, as leading anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar argues in his book of the same name, better never to have been?

Looking for hope (in all the wrong places)

I don’t want to dwell on the intricacies of this argument. Suffice to say, I’m not convinced by them. However, I think they’re revealing because they are, on one level, extremely plausible and relatable. We are living in perhaps the first generation in history who cannot guarantee their children a better life than we have lived. There isn’t a great deal of evidence to ground our hope for the future.

Moreover, those who do hope for changes to climate change too often put their eggs in the wrong basket. Some focus on population control, which, among other issues, is unlikely to have much of an effect, because wealthy people – the major emitters – are already less likely to have kids and developing nations with higher birth rates are responsible for about 10% of global emissions.

Others look to technology. One self-described ‘optimist’ I met at a conference a couple of years ago talked hopefully about how geoengineering would solve climate change. His belief was that by releasing some aerosols into the atmosphere, we could cool the climate to adjust for climate change. Problem solved!

Unfortunately, this is the sort of solution that is too good to be true. Setting aside the likely unforeseeable effects this would have on the global system, it would solve nothing. Without changing our lifestyle, economies and emissions, cooling the climate by manipulating the atmosphere would be a short-term fix. Unfortunately, so often we prefer technological solutions over other more effective strategies for exactly this reason: because they promise (usually falsely) to free us from the burden of genuinely difficult work.

Which brings us to hope. In 2020, the calendar equivalent to a dumpster fire, hope is hard work. Whether it’s rising authoritarianism around the world (thankfully, enjoying at least a momentary setback in the USA), the climate emergency, a global pandemic, systemic injustice or the insatiable commodification of every aspect of our lives and selves, there aren’t many pieces of evidence to give rational ground to hopefulness. In times like these, it’s hard to see hope as much more than sentimentalism or empty-headed optimism.

However, despite this, I’d argue that there is still room for hope. Indeed, I’d argue that hope – properly understood – is an inevitable consequence of understanding what it means to be human. The medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that hope is a desire for a future good that is difficult, but not impossible to obtain. Where things are easily obtained, hope is redundant. Where things are impossible, hope is futile.

This is worth bearing in mind because the way we think about hope when we ask a question like ‘is there any room for hope left?’ is non-specific. Usually, our hope has content attached to it. Tonight, I’m hoping Joe Biden wins Nevada and holds Arizona. I’m hoping it doesn’t rain for my brother’s wedding tomorrow, and that my kids sleep through the night.

At the same time, I’m also hopeful in a more general sense – I believe that the future will be good, and I need to be hopeful because there’s no guarantee it will be so. Ensuring the future is good will be difficult.

The reason I believe the future will be good is because, in part, I believe in free will. I think that humans have the capacity to act contrary to the range of forces that encourage them to act in one way or another. We have evolutionary instincts that drive us toward self-interest, social norms that at times encourage individualist, capitalistic, patriarchal and colonial tendencies, coercive powers that require us to behave in some ways under pain of punishment… and yet, the ultimate choice whether to comply with those forces or not is ours.

Because of this, no matter how bleak the situation, there is always the possibility that we’re one choice away from a slightly better future. The good is always within arm’s reach.

Hope, technology and the death of ambition

Of course, if it were easy to overcome these forces, I wouldn’t need to hope for a better future. I could simply expect it. In reality though, these forces are deeply entrenched and difficult to resist. Whilst a belief in free will means a general, non-specific hope is logical, it doesn’t do much to help make a hopeful future more likely.  

What it does do is tell us where to invest our energy if we want to make our hope more reasonable. If we can work to neutralise, or indeed reverse the forces that drive people away from choices that reward hope, we make it less difficult to achieve the kinds of things we’re hoping for. Ironically, we make that hope redundant by making it so easy to create a future that’s better than our current life that it’s basically guaranteed.

Let me be clear though. Articulating the structure and grounding of hope in this way should not make us believe the task is simple. In fact, I think recognising the sheer enormity of the task at hand could lead reasonable people to despair. And it’s here that I want to turn my attention to technology, and the role it might play both in giving reasons for hope and undermining those reasons.

In the late nineteenth century, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche published his philosophical novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It details the journeys and beliefs of the quasi-prophet Zarathustra, who Nietzsche considered to be the first “immoralist”, in that he turned traditional morality on his head.

In one of the more famous passages, Zarathustra, having spent a decade in solitude and contemplation atop a mountain, decides to return to the world to share his wisdom. He seeks out a crowd of people to provide them with another way to live – a path to greatness. Each could live as a superman – an Ubermensch – the person who has chosen their own values and lives according to their own rules rather than subscribing to polite social conventions and traditional morality.

In an attempt to persuade them to walk this path with him, Zarathustra paints them a picture of the very worst of humanity: the last man.

"The time has come for man to set himself a goal. The time has come for man to plant the seed of his highest hope,” says Zarathustra. “"I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. "Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star... Behold, I show you the last man.”

In the last man, Nietzsche has Zarathustra describe a life of total nihilism. Humanity without ambition; without any reason to hope because they are perfectly comfortable with things as they are. The last man seeks comfort at the expense of all else. There are no leaders and no followers – both are too difficult. Nobody is particularly wise, funny or curious. Nobody is distinct in any meaningful way. Each person moves through each day, littered with momentary pleasures and pains, living in moderation and mediocrity, comfortable in their lot. To his shock, the crowd tell Zarathustra he can keep his ubermensch and give them the last man.

Few of us would consider the last man someone we aspire to be. And yet what defines the last man is that through the continual satisfaction of simple desires, more complex ambitions fade into obscurity. And this returns us to the illusory promise of technology – offering false short-cuts and easy payoffs for hard work.

Elsewhere, I’ve written about the way modern technology uses convenience and comfort as ‘trust lubricant’.

“Technology and tech companies have enjoyed a disproportionately high level of trust for a simple reason: they make our lives easier. The convenience we receive by interacting with technology means we’re likely to continue to engage with them, even when there are very good reasons not to.”

Ask yourself: do you trust Facebook? Now, do you have a Facebook account? My answers, in order, are ‘no’ and ‘yes’. The best explanation of this, to me, is that despite being manifestly opposed to what Facebook does, it makes my life slightly more convenient to have an account than not.

Pain is not always a problem

I’ve sat in rooms with plenty of design teams, thinking about products they’re planning to develop. Usually, these products are targeted at a particular ‘pain point’ for their users. Baked into their methodology is an assumption that pain is bad. Not all pain, however, is a problem.

A case in point is the SNOO Baby Crib: a cot that uses machine learning to optimise white noise volume, rocking speed and a range of other variables to ensure that babies (and parents) get the best sleep possible. “Exhaustion,” the tagline reads, “is optional”. The SNOO caters to the base need of every parent – sleep – but does so without considering whether the pain of losing sleep is actually a problem. Indeed, the act of rocking a newborn child to sleep has a range of functions – including developing biological attachment and parental virtues like patience.

This isn’t a criticism of the makers or owners of the SNOO. I’m sure it’s genuinely beneficial for many families, and buying or wanting one doesn’t make you a worse parent. The point is that technological development is laden with – and implants – value judgements. When exhaustion is optional, suddenly, the exhausted parents is made to question the meaningfulness of their exhaustion, simply by virtue of the SNOO’s existence. Why suffer when there’s a product that means you don’t have to?

Sometimes, because the suffering brings with it benefits that aren’t easily replaced. The project of alleviating all pain and discomfort is one we court at our own peril. In doing so, we make ourselves less equipped with what’s difficult – that is, less likely to achieve the things we hope for. We bring ourselves closer to the anaesthetised comfort of Nietzsche’s last man, for whom hope is unnecessary because we would never aspire to anything difficult – or worthwhile.

Technology does not need to play this role. Rather than being the anaesthetic, it could be part of a more powerful, difficult cure. Instead of accommodating our every desire, we could harness technology’s potential to drive us toward virtue. At present, technology often dulls the parts of us that give rise to agency, autonomy and choice – the pillars of free will (and thus of hope). But when technology nudges us toward the better angels of our nature, we notice. For example, Twitter now prompts people to read articles before retweeting them, giving people an opportunity to pause and consider their role in spreading (mis)information and outrage.

The Canadian futurist Marshall McLuhan said that “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” Technology has the ability to prompt us to contemplate. At present, it more often dulls those senses of contemplation.

Technology is not our saviour

However, we should also be somewhat skeptical of McLuhan’s claim. Technology critics, academics and activists who come from oppressed communities. For example, racial minorities, queer groups and groups representing the interests of women have been undertaking the kind of contemplation McLuhan so optimistically champions, to no avail. Their voices remain as unheeded as their observations are prescient. For them, despite their crucial work and constant warnings, the harms of technology can still be inevitable.

For this reason, we should not consider technology to be a miraculous arbiter of hope. Doing so is cultivating the very same nihilism I’ve just spent paragraphs warning against. There is no app to cure systemic injustice, no invention alone can alleviate wealth inequality and global poverty. Equally, population control and geoengineering won't save the planet. They're a quick fix. For our hope to be grounded in a genuine, plausible belief that the future will be better, we need to address the full range of material forces that undermine their agency – political, economic, cultural and technological. 

We don’t find room for hope. We make it. By clearing away the clutter than prevents us from having space for it. Hope is built through conscious action; it’s earned by achieving results that are challenging and it’s justified when we have reason to believe we can rise to the challenge.

I still believe we’re capable of rising to the challenge. Like Nietzsche, I think humanity has enough chaos to give birth to a star. And it’s because of that potential that I still see a twinkle of hope. The question for all of us - particularly for those who design, develop and sell the technologies that mediate our lives - is whether that twinkle grows brighter or dulls. Cater to peoples’ basest desires, laziest instincts and hedonistic inclinations and we’ll snuff that light out. But if we can encourage, empower and drive people to extend themselves, there’s very little we couldn’t hope to achieve.