Deep hope
I often feel deeply hopeful. For my future, but also for the futures of the people closest to me and for humanity at large. Why does it feel strange to say that?
It seems like a uniquely human ability to vividly imagine suffering. Many creatures probably know suffering all too well and are motivated to avoid it. But we seem to be able to conjure up misery, pain and suffering and witness it with grotesque clarity unlike any other species.
The same doesn’t seem to be the case for happiness. Describing or representing blissful joy or even the promise of blissful joy does not seem to attract our attention anything like its opposite.
I think the aversion to imagining how good things can be for humanity stems from a reasonable source of mistrust. Utopias are probably treated with skepticism because they’re all too often used to justify extreme actions.
But I think it also stems from a lack of imagination. Imagining blissful states is hard, because most people rarely experience them. Those who do might only experience them momentarily, and then annoy people around them for the rest of their lives because they don’t stop talking about it.
Nonetheless, there have been attempts to describe what peak states of happiness might be like. Here’s Toby Ord, in The Precipice:
“Consider the parts of your life when you brushed paths with true happiness. The year, month or day when everything was coming together and you had a glimpse of the richness that life can hold; when you saw how much greater a life could be … we have seen enough to know that life can offer something far grander and more alive than the standard fare. If humanity can survive, we may one day learn to dwell more and more deeply in such vitality; to brush off more and more dust; to make a home amidst the beauty of the world.”
And Nick Bostrom, in Letter from Utopia:
“Have you ever known a moment of bliss? On the rapids of inspiration, maybe, where your hands were guided by a greater force to trace the shapes of truth and beauty? … Do you not see it? Do you not feel it, the touch of the possible? You have witnessed the potential for a higher life: you hold the fading proof in your hands. Don’t throw it away.”
My friend Robert Long gathered some examples of descriptions of peak experiences here, too.
This writing is deeply moving and inspiring. But I wish I could experience a feeling more steady than the momentary peace these glimpses offer us.
I think the momentariness comes from the fact that these are just ways of helping us imagine the highest states of being, a snapshot of a potential future. These descriptions help us believe that these states are possible, but the warm feelings they conjure don’t seem to stick with me for long.
I find hoping for an unimaginably better future a more steady feeling. Not expecting it, and perhaps only rarely imagining it in all its potential glory, but really hoping that these experiences will be what life is, all the time.
This might sound unoriginal — of course we all hope for a better future! But I think the usual futures offered to us, however good, are usually quite modest. When most people say they hope for a better future, I think they usually mean a future where they’re (only) comfortable and safe. They imagine themselves free from worry, doubt and pain and out of the reach of suffering. I expect this is sufficiently motivating for most people, and if we all worked to help each other reach such states, the world would be radically better.
But it could be much, much better than that. We could not only eliminate suffering, we could create splendours and wonders that exist only at the fringes of our imaginations. Life, for everyone, could be unimaginably good.
I call hoping for such futures deep hope. If hope is to lift our heads above the water’s surface and see land, deep hope is to thrust ourselves up, to lift our heads further and to fix our gaze on the snowy mountaintops of potential experience that lay beyond the vast coastal plains.
To hope is to allow yourself believe that we might make it, that we might see things through, that things might work out.
Deep hope says we might actually be close to getting everything we’ve ever dreamed of. That we might actually attain endless peace. That we might actually brush off the dust and make a home amidst the beauty of the world.
This may not sound pragmatic. But I find this disposition motivates me, especially when rudimentary, plain hope seems naive or unwarranted. Deep hope, much like the wonders it seeks, is far removed from our day-to-day experiences and is therefore more resilient against surface-level trials and tribulations.
Humanity is still striving forward, however carelessly, and has been for centuries. For as long as that continues, I think we have good reason to hope, deeply, and let ourselves be oriented and guided towards the glimpses we have of a vastly better world.