John Robson: Why Hope Is Superior to Optimism

Reading almost any newspaper not carefully edited to conceal the news, on almost any topic, will elicit a howl of dismay. The situation is grim and getting grimmer. Yet I frequently call to march to victory. Am I a fool?
It has been suggested. But a critical difference in how we approach the status quo, Ronald Reagan’s “Latin for ‘the mess we’re in,’” is between optimism and hope. Optimism is a psychological condition and generally fatuous. Hope is a theological virtue.
There’s no need to pile up aphorisms like Damon Runyon’s “all life is six to five against.” Or “Murphy was an optimist.” And arguably Runyon as well. Everybody knows that, as playwright Tom Stoppard put it, “If life was a bet you wouldn’t take it.” Except people keep doing so, and only end up sorry it wasn’t longer.
History looks like an even worse bet. We’ve been going to perdition in a handbasket, from Iron Age marauders to the fall of Rome to religious wars to totalitarianism and postmodernism. I cannot count the number of times the lights were clearly going out for the last time.
After Hamas kidnapped and brutally murdered all those people last October, there’s a general strike in Israel against… their government for fighting back. Newspapers say the hostages were “found dead,” as in the 1930s they reserved their venom for Churchill not Hitler, and lauded Stalin shamelessly.
Terrible, right? Except we did get Magna Carta and the American Revolution, ended slavery, and won both World Wars and the Cold War. The light still shines because something keeps going very right in ghastly situations.
Well, victory. Churchill continued, “You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. … You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: it is victory.”
Thirty-six years later, as Jimmy Carter became president, Reagan offered prospective staffer Richard Allen his alternative theory of the Cold War: “We win and they lose.” For such ideas the Gipper was often called a simpleton, or much worse. But he knew there was something fundamentally positive and friendly about a universe superficially unbearably bleak.
In such a world, the most realistic fable would be Beowulf’s “the hero fights against impossible odds and dies” in Harry Lee Poe’s apt summary. Instead, it’s “The Lord of the Rings” in which, Poe explains, C.S. Lewis for once got Tolkien to abandon life-stinks-then-you-die for “the struggle, against all odds to the end of the world for the great prize that ends in victory and a return to home as a changed person … a story of hope rather than despair.”
Again, if the quest to destroy the One Ring were a bet, you wouldn’t take it. But “LOTR” is the greatest novel ever written because St. George did not measure the dragon, and nor should we.
I don’t discourage prudence. Extreme mental as well as physical toil is required to meet the emergency. But something built into the foundations of the universe decrees that those who battle “with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us” shall win great victories of all sorts over monstrous practical and metaphysical tyranny against apparently impossible odds.
So discard optimism along with bitterness, gird your loins with hope, and march to victory.