This article was originally published in Ellemeno on Medium.com on May 16, 2023
Thoughts about whether hoping does what we hope it will
Hope is a word we typically utter with the expectation of some outcome, usually a positive outcome, but not necessarily. It’s typically triggered by some actual or imagined threat. The hope is made with the prospect of reducing that threat.
The effort of you, the one doing the hoping, is justified depending on your relationship to who or what the threat reduction will benefit. If you admire the recipient of your hope, the hoping will be for their benefit. The opposite is likely, if you don’t like the recipient. If you’re Jesus like, it’s a moot point, since there’s no one you don’t like. Two thousand plus years having passed, there aren’t others that come to mind, so we can hope for good or bad outcomes for the recipient.
The hope giver is almost certainly a human, because hope is a substance that we manufacture in our human brains. But the recipient can be anything from an atom to a universe and any of the living things in between. It doesn’t even have to be particulate. Finally and not insignificantly, the giver and recipient can be the same unit, I and me, for example. I hope that I live to a hundred, the threat being death.
We think about hope very often as needing some intercession, usually a sentient intercessor to make it work. That entity needs to have some kind of apparatus to pick up on your hope and have some capability to implement it.
The intercessor isn’t obligatory, but hopes likely have someone in mind. The most typical one, the one thought to have the most influence on the hope succeeding, is God–or the Devil, if you’re satanically inclined. But the hope that God or the Devil will grant your hope is predicated itself on the hope that they themselves exist. If that’s not the case, there is no ultimate intercessor, and you’ll have to fall back on humans.
After listening to Kim Stanley Robinson, who hopes a lot, talking with Ezra Kline, who hopes somewhat less, on the latter’s podcast, I got curious about the connection between hope and risk assessment. Robinson’s recent book, The Ministry of the Future, is a hopeful, optimistic, but fictional work looking at the threat of climate change.
What triggered me in the podcast was the question of how much hoping helps to getting something done. Robinson’s book vests more faith in action, than hope. Is there some optimum level of hope that’s necessary to initiate action? Or, contrarily, is there the possibility of relying on hope so much that you don’t do anything?
One example on this second point that comes to mind was the level of hope inhibiting millions of people in the U.S. from getting a COVID vaccine. As of this date the virus has killed about seven million people globally, so it’s lethality is obvious and undeniable. Wouldn’t those people who have shrugged off the threat been hoping, first, that they wouldn’t catch it, or second, if they did get it, that they wouldn’t suffer much or even die? Was their hope complicit in minimizing the risk in their minds?
If hope was involved in their inaction, who was the intercessor they had in mind? God, I’d guess, because they certainly didn’t put any trust in the medical profession or even acknowledge the greater risk of putting yourself in places where a lot of people are breathing on you.
Risk assessment is a balancing act between the extremes of threat and safety. It’s a judgment call that’s based on our internalized fight-or-flight or hyperarousal response, mediated by our hormones and neurotransmitters. It’s stoked by our perceptual anatomy and moderated by our cognitive functions. It’s partly automatic and partly conceptual.
Being the complicated creatures we are, we’re not all triggered in the same way by the same threats. On the progressive side of the political spectrum, we’re (I include myself here) feeling the metaphoric clouds gathering for climate disaster, chronic gun violence, prejudice and bias of many stripes, the intolerance emanating from religion, and increasing threats to our democracy.
On the conservative side, they’re seeing the clouds around the encroachment of outsiders, the erosion of traditional family values, criminal violence, the loss of privilege, the intolerance directed at religion, and increasing threats to our democracy.
The democracy threat is interesting because both sides feel it, although each sees the agencies behind the threats completely differently. For progressives it’s conservatives and for conservatives it’s progressives. Each hopes the other will see the error of their ways and convert. There are no signs of that happening however. We’ve got intrenched polarization, which was the topic of a recent book by Klein, maybe explaining his lowered hopefulness.
Polarization kind of implies that there is no hope. God doesn’t seem interested in getting involved, so They are leaving it up to the Devil. Again, though if neither exists, and it falls to human intercession, history is telling us that the prospects don’t look good.
When the threats, however we see them, don’t diminish, we create unabating stress in ourselves which percolates down into our communities and into society as a whole. Stress ultimately kills, if you believe the doctors and the sociologists, so the reality of our stress is itself an issue on which we have to do a risk assessment. How much of it can we tolerate?
The decision to do something versus nothing establishes a baseline for our risk assessment. That decision, I believe, is tied to how much hope we muster that change will come on its own versus the hope that we can make change happen. I would argue that the more we hope, the less we’re likely to do to make change. Hope can be an excuse in other words. Maybe this is true, I really don’t know for sure.
But even if there is some latent power in hope, hope and its offshoots, “thoughts and prayers,” aren’t something we should rely on, if we want solutions. They just maybe are excuses, allowing us temporary comfort by lowering our threat level. But won’t it just go right back up again when you read tomorrow’s news? So many of us concerned about gun violence and its growing number of victims have lost our trust in thoughts and prayers, enough so, that the phrase is now stigmatized. You might still hear it in church, but I wouldn’t know.
I think we need to stop hoping so much and purposely let our stress levels rise, not too much that they kill us, but enough to raise our assessment of the risks we face and motivate us to actually do something to lower those risks.
A lot of our tech people are making a bet that the work they’re doing to broaden our acceptance and use of artificial intelligence will be the thing they can do to lower our risks. It does seem, though, more likely that the AI bots are being armed to make us buy more stuff, entertain us, and to offload onto them some of our anxieties. In other words, they will give us hope and comfort and free us of the effort to do our own hoping so much.
The bots bypass the hormonal, neurotransmitter chemistry that causes us to go nuts and act irrationally sometimes. With the bots you go right to complete rationality, no fight-or-flight or procrastination. Supposedly.
If that’s so, then all it will take for us humans to do is embrace the bots as our solution providers, make them our demigods. Instead of, I hope to God, we’ll have I hope to bot. But, since so many of us have lost faith in the big G God to be that provider, I’m not sure we’re going to be so much better served by putting our trust in silicon beings.
Speaking of building that trust, I asked WikiDiff what the difference is between “intercessor” and “interceder,” because I wasn’t sure which was the better term to use in this article. I believe I got an AI bot response, because it said:
As nouns the difference between intercessor and interceder is that intercessor is a person who intercedes; a mediator [;] while interceder is one who intercedes; an intercessor; a mediator.
Note: I added the semi-colon in brackets. Its absence was a clue to the bottiness of the response.
I’ll conclude with a hope of my own.
I (the hope giver) hope the AI programmers (the intercessors) can teach bots (the hope recipients) to punctuate correctly, to avoid stilted, ungrammatical language, and to avoid tautologies. Doing so will increase my trust that the bots may be able to help us with global broiling (which used to be global warming, before I increased my risk assessment).
My hope, which I’m directing to the bots, does imply that their handlers do some work to lower my pretty high risk assessment that they’re going to make things worse. I can forgive them the grammar issues though. We all make mistakes.