So what I can share with you today is not
an answer to the question of “What is hope?”
but I can share with you about how a tradition
that I’m involved in studying and that I’m
linked to has a take on what ways of hoping
may be better or more useful than others.
So my understanding of this tradition that
I have studied and engaged with for a few
years now is the African American Protestant
tradition of hoping, that’s crafted over
centuries of despair and dehumanization.
And I think it has something to teach our
nation.
Our nation that has in some ways undermined
this very tradition of hoping.
And the nation in some ways has trivialized
hope itself, made hope into something that’s
largely a market-driven quest for getting
our aspirations, for reaching our goals, for
achieving our aims.
I think one of the things that not unpacking
this distinction between Obama’s hopes and
King’s hopes—based on the painting which
I’m going to describe now—is it leaves
us more vulnerable to romantic conceptions
of hope.
We tend to fall into this way of thinking
about hope that’s more reflective almost
of what Shelley called in 'Prometheus Unbound',
1822, he said he wants “to hope till hope
creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”
It’s a beautiful line, right, and I’m
susceptible and seduced by that kind of hope.
But when I think about King and Obama and
this painting I tend to get more clear about
what is deep hope, right.
So I want to highlight quickly the distinctions
between both King and Obama and then I’ll
be done, because I think this will help us
understand both what I’m trying to get at
and where we are now.
So first, King’s hope, his description of
hope is always disappointed and never realized,
while Obama’s hope guides us past disappointment
and is realizable.
So here we have a clear difference between
the Protestant embrace of a tragic sense of
life and the kind of democratic politics of
hope that aims to resist the politics of cynicism.
And that’s fine.
So the important thing to remember though
is that the difference in the Protestant embrace
of tragedy attenuates our inclinations for
happy ending.
It works against that romantic conception
that I argue, I pointed out Shelley was referencing
in the 1822 'Prometheus Unbound' quote, right.
Its romantic sense: to hope until hope reaches
what it contemplates.
Second, King’s hope is a discipline of the
present moment.
It’s a social practice done in community
with the aim of reminding us that our lives
are always incomplete and unfinished.
Our deep hopes will not come to fruition,
is King’s point.
In this way we might say that King’s hope
is a way of relationship.
It is a relating to suffering.
It tells us to just keep going.
Obama’s hope on the other hand is the aspiration
for the future.
It’s a rational belief about the probability
of attainment.
Attaining one’s ambitions.
We might say that Obama’s hope attends to
the pressures of achievement by affirming
aspirations for the future.
So I quickly want to caution you from taking
what I’m saying as a way of thinking about
Martin’s account as just another form of
tragic hope, dark hope, melancholic hope,
“I hope against hope”, hope of the hopeless,
right.
Because I think that I take King’s hope
to simply be a reminder of the idea of the
tragic in our life, the notion that our mortal
days will not be fulfilled.
So it’s dark in that sense, but I don’t
want to pitch it as a dark hope, right.
I want to pitch it as a deep hope.
And when people go with melancholic hope or
blues hope, I think they often end up romanticizing
a kind of hope that seduces us into thinking
there may be a hope without suffering.
That is, the idea of a “dark” hope relies
on the idea of a “light” hope, and that
has all kinds of problems, right, analogically.
But just the fact that both things sort of
seem like they have to exist together is misleading
and it skirts the fundamental insight of Martin,
which is to remind us of a certain kind of
suffering.
Now for King, a man who we often associate
with things like the 'I Have A Dream' speech,
right, the song 'We Shall Overcome'.
He’s telling us in ’59, ’63 and later
on in ’68 he gives a sermon called 'Unfulfilled
Dreams' where he continues this theme that
all our hopes are blasted and our dreams are
shattered.
In other words the person we think of as the
amazing hoper and dreamer is really trying
to tell us something much different.
He’s trying to tell us our hopes are perfidious.
As George Buttrick notes, “We die with half
our music in us.”
So you might ask then, "What is the purpose
of this sort of hope and why would I want
to subscribe to it?”
And that’s just it.
This hope is not up for subscription.
It’s a way of relating to suffering and
facing the ultimate fact that we shall likely
not achieve all of the promises of life.
But this is just what life is, in this strand
of Protestantism.
It is not life’s failing.
King tells us that the tentacles of evil are
always present, taking meaning out of life
but we must go on.
We must have the will to refuse.
We must have what Tillich called “the courage
to be.”
This, I think, is the link between Martin
King and the Watts painting.
Both are fundamentally trying to affirm a
relationship between suffering to continuing,
right.
And Martin is dealing with the death of dreams.
Watts, I think, is dealing with the death
of his, reportedly his stepdaughter.
Remember Du Bois lost little Burghardt in
1899.
Burghardt was 18 months old.
Du Bois wrote that he was feeling a hope,
“A hope not hopeful but un-hopeless.”
The message is once again that our hopes are
shattered.
This shattering provides a path to suffering
that allows deeper meaning.
This is what deep hope is about.
So when students ask me “Why do I hope?”
I turn to Martin.
And these questions, of course, have recently
increased.
Not because people are necessarily more depressed
but because I think they don’t understand
the deep hope that Martin was trying to call
us to.
So let me just end by saying this.
Obama’s not the only—it’s not Obama’s
fault that we’re not attentive to the deep
hopes that Martin was trying to call us to
based on his interpretation of the painting.
Global marketers have made hope into a rational
calculation for personal gain.
Many academics have subjected hopes to standards
of analytic precision and conceptual clarity
which has kind of degraded it.
It’s been certainly diminished by Christian
leaders who reduced hope to a form of compliance.
This has led to a loss in our appetite for
hope, deep hope.
That is, we want the romantic hope but not
the deep kind that’s in touch with suffering.
This is the kind of tradition that I’ve
been studying.
The tradition that Martin and Jeremiah Wright,
Fred Sampson link to the painting of George
Frederic Watts in 1886.
And thus I leave you with an invitation to
the painting as well as one to deep hope.
Thank you very kindly.
