Hope Without God?

Hopeful Pessimism
by mara van der lugt 
princeton university press, 280 pages, $24.95

Is it possible to be a “hopeful pessimist”? Mara van der Lugt, professor of philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, argues in a new book that this oxymoronic disposition exists, and might benefit humankind. Whereas her previous book, Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering (2021), interrogated pessimism as a source for moral deliberation, Hopeful Pessimism presents it as a useful driver of human action.

Van der Lugt’s argument begins with a simple observation: Pessimists judge their hand to be worse than that of the dealer and expect to lose the game—but they do not always fold. Why do they stay in the game? And how can we encourage more of them to do so? The latter question is of special interest to van der Lugt, who prioritizes saving the world over philosophical clarity. Her answers ultimately reveal a faulty understanding of hope itself.

Activism, and climate activism in particular, motivates her account. Climate change is the “bad hand” that humanity has been dealt. In her view, climate change is drastic and inevitable, and the environment will soon become much less hospitable to human life. One naturally assumes that such a belief would be enervating for the activist. If catastrophic climate change is inevitable, of what use are environmental reforms?

Van der Lugt considers despair a fitting response to “losing the future,” as many young people feel is their fate. “All the things they have been told give life meaning are rendered either pointless or problematic,” she writes. But by her account, the “collapse of meaning” in the face of climate catastrophe does not justify refusing to act. Those who resist the temptation to give up van der Lugt names “pessimistic activists” or “hopeful pessimists.”

According to her, pessimists make good activists because they know what is worth fighting for. They are less susceptible to burnout because they don’t have unrealistic expectations. And they can muster the will to keep going even when things look dark. They expect the work to be hard, and they expect to lose. She offers the example of Jewish resistance against the Nazis, rebellions that, though doomed to fail, “were truly justified in a critical sense—for reasons of justice, dignity, and solidarity, if not victory.”

She also draws on The Lord of the Rings to illustrate action that is guided not by optimism, but by “blue hope,” her term for “sustained action in the face of likely failure, motivated by love and determination.” It is the counterpoint to cheerier “green hope,” which has “an expectation of good.” Blue hope tells us “that we have to try, regardless of our chances.” It is blue hope that grows in Sam after he realizes that he and Frodo are unlikely to return from Mount Doom, a hope that, as Tolkien writes, “was turned to new strength . . . as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue.”

Van der Lugt has certainly identified a phenomenon worth examining. Indeed, pressing on in the face of inevitable loss is a noble and even Christian behavior. But the oxymoronic framing of “hopeful pessimism” invites logical errors that are only compounded by the author’s desire to rescue climate change activists from the implications of their own professed beliefs. 

If one truly believes, as so many activists claim to, that it’s already too late to halt or meaningfully mitigate warming, whatever “hope” (blue or otherwise) one experiences is irrational, and activism amounts to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It is of course possible that activists, in their bones, do not believe their own rhetoric, in which case their hope actually has a chance at realization, and ceases to be pessimistic. Or it might be that activists cynically instrumentalize climate activism for other political ends (or to signal personal virtue). Whatever the case is, the subject at hand is not a hope that stretches “beyond” what is likely.

“Hopeful pessimism” is a confusing lexical cul-de-sac. By making “hope” synonymous with “optimism,” which she rejects, van der Lugt is forced to conjure some vague prophylactic against terminal despair in order to ensure the action she desires. Using The Lord of the Rings as an illustration only deepens the confusion. Hope in Tolkien’s novel is inescapably spiritual—and Christian—as it is oriented toward a transcendent horizon. Though its object may not be visible in this world, there is another world and a deeper law that demands hope continue to spring eternal. Van der Lugt’s use of hope, however, is utterly immanent. 

Without a transcendent referent, “hope” becomes nothing more than a slogan. The activist is left in the position of Camus’s absurd hero, who believes the universe is without God and meaning, but makes his own meaning in persisting rather than committing suicide. Perhaps meaningless action can be sustained courageously in the face of impending doom; but it remains absurd, incapable of making normative claims. Without God, “losing the future” is indeed losing all that we have.