On the
unquestionable limits of hope, and how we might respond to them.
Toward the
beginning of The Two Towers (2002),
the second film in Peter Jackson’s Lord
of the Rings trilogy, a new character, the banished Rohirrim warrior Éomer,
warns three of our returning heroes, “Do not
trust to hope. It has forsaken these lands.” On the specific question he is
addressing—whether Merry and Pippin, the two hobbits for whom these three
characters are searching, are still alive—Éomer is proven wrong by subsequent
events. That, and many other details of the film’s arc, might suggest that he
is likewise wrong more generally, that the forces for good can and should still
trust to hope to carry them through. But I don’t believe it’s anywhere near
that simple. For one thing, the events of the film and the trilogy as a whole
take a terrible toll on those forces for good—lives lost and others forever
changed, cities abandoned and destroyed, and so on. And for another, whatever
victories good does achieve by the film and trilogy’s end cannot necessarily be
attributed to hope, but rather to a desperate refusal to surrender even when
all hope seems lost.
Is that
the same thing, or at least a distinction without a significant difference? Perhaps—certainly
something must inspire us to continue even when we feel that there is no hope,
and maybe we thus would have to call that inspiration a secret, desperate,
unyielding hope nonetheless. But on the other hand, if continuing to struggle
in the absence of hope is defined as simply another form of hope, then we risk
reducing the idea to one of those empty signifiers that means everything and
nothing. So let’s call that source of unyielding struggle something different:
perseverance, resilience, stubbornness, pride. It’s not a bad thing by any
means, and can even comprise something to admire and emulate—there are few
situations where surrendering the fight and giving in to the worst is the right
decision—but it is a desperate one, a last resort, a perspective that we must
resist as much as possible (since it can very easily lead to despair, to cynicism,
to a sense that both the fight itself and what we’re fighting for don’t
ultimately matter, and more). Which is to say, while the absence of hope does
not necessarily imply a giving in to the worst—there’s a spectrum in between
those two extremes—it’s a lot closer to that than we should want to go unless
we have no other choice.
Which
leads me, to put my cards on the table, to right now. To a presidential
election in which one campaign has relied almost entirely on lies, perhaps to
appeal to a base in which a majority
of registered voters believe the current president to have been born in another
country. To a world in which a war
between Israel and Iran—a war which would almost certainly involve
numerous other nations, the U.S. among them—seems at times almost unavoidable.
To a future where, by virtually every meaningful measure and analysis, many of the worst effects of global climate change
have become almost a certainty. Those are just a few of the many
reasons why it feels as if we American Studiers, we Americans, we humans must
heed Éomer’s advice and stop trusting to hope. But there’s another option, and
it’s at the core of my new book project: that we should find hope by engaging
with the darkest histories and realities. Fortunately for us, we have some
pretty great models for doing so, in the powerfully realistic yet ultimately hopeful
novels that I’ll be reading in that book. To paraphrase the final section of Obama’s DNC speech, they
give me hope.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one
more chance: what do you think? Texts, takes, thoughts on hope in America for
that weekend post?
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