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Today is special at The Cottage. It is release day for Brian McLaren’s new book, Life After Doom.
It is special for a personal reason: Brian and I are good colleagues and friends. It has never ceased to amaze us how we care about the same issues, see the world in similar ways, and discern spiritual trends and issues that are often under the surface. This friendship has influenced our writing and speaking for two decades. In a real way, you — our readers — have benefited from it through the work we each do.
Release days are like birthdays for authors. And it is particularly special when a friend has a book birthday. To celebrate, I asked Brian if he would share an excerpt of the newborn book with The Cottage. I was thinking he’d send me a couple of paragraphs.
Guess what? He gave me a chapter!
Of course, Life After Doom is about doom — and the inevitable massive changes that are unfolding around us. The book realistically explores four potential scenarios for the future: (1) Collapse Avoidance; (2) Collapse/Rebirth; (3) Collapse/Survival; and (4) Collapse/Extinction. Pretty much they are all about collapse. 😧 😱
But it also explores a four-fold pathway of hope, joy, faith, beauty, and love in the midst of these unsettling realities. In many ways, a radical understanding of hope is the first step toward a meaningful life in this destabilizing time.
And so, Cottage friends, below please find a release day gift: Chapter 6 from Life After Doom, “Hope is Complicated.”
I hope this thoughtful selection will give you a new perspective on hope.
Take some time to read this beautiful piece. Please free feel to share it widely.
This coming Thursday, May 16 at 4PM Eastern, Brain McLaren will visit the Cottage Third Thursday Zoom to talk about Life After Doom.
All paid subscribers will receive a link on the morning of May 16. Don’t worry if you can’t make it live — a recording will be sent to the paid community afterward.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to a paid subscription, the May special discount is a great deal — 20% off for an annual subscription. Click for more information (just clicking isn’t a a commitment!) We hope you’ll join in!
An Excerpt from Life After Doom by Brian McLaren
Chapter 6, “Hope Is Complicated”
A new release from St. Martins, 2024, used by permission for readers of The Cottage. This chapter has been lightly edited for brevity.
Losing hope is not so bad. There’s something worse:
losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
— Southern novelist Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
You may have noticed that over the first five chapters, I have mentioned hope only rarely and in passing. That was intentional, and it will change in this chapter, where hope takes center stage.
I’ve always been a big fan of hope.
That’s probably because I had my first brief but intense affair with depression when I was still a teenager. “I never want to go there again,” I told myself. But depression in its various forms has come back to sit on my chest several times over the years. So throughout my adult life I’ve felt that I need to lean hard into hope as a matter of emotional survival.
As a result, I was surprised, as this book began to take shape, to realize that hope can be a problem. In fact, in the presence of doom, hope (at least a common and superficial kind of hope) can be downright deadly.
I felt this the other day as I was listening to a lecture by theologian and activist Miguel De La Torre. He captured one of the downsides of hope like this: “Hope is what is fed to those who are being slaughtered so they won’t fight what is coming.” This insight came to him, he explained, as he toured Auschwitz, one of the horrific death camps of the Jewish genocide by the Nazis. All who entered the gates of the death camp passed under a large inscription at the entrance: ARBEIT MACHT FREI, which means “work sets you free.” The inscription was intended to inspire the hope of freedom, which rendered prisoners more willing to work and less likely to resist.[1]
In other words, malevolent forces often use hope to manipulate us, rendering us compliant to their continued oppression. Hope can be a false promise, not just a lie, but a dangerous, delicious lie. And the lie becomes all the more appealing when the only alternative we see is despair.
Thich Nhat Hanh, writing from a Buddhist perspective, addressed another danger of hope. Hope has some value,[2] he said, “because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear.” But when we “cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment.” We bypass the present to dwell in a better imagined future, and in so doing, we bypass the joy, peace, and other gifts available to us here and now—including the sweetness of grief we considered in chapter 4.
Another contemporary Buddhist teacher, Joan Halifax, offered an additional critique of hope: Nobody actually knows for certain what the future holds. In Buddhist thought, there is “no independent origination.” In other words, the future constantly arises from conditions we, together with all sentient creatures, help create in the present. Because current conditions are impermanent and constantly changing, the future is unknowable, and our actions matter. This is why Joanna Macy, another Buddhist teacher, argues not simply for hope, but for active hope.
Karl Marx anticipated many of these insights when he wrote in 1844, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” In context, he was not attacking religion, as many people interpret this quote. Instead, he was expressing sympathy for the working classes who suffer oppression and exploitation by the economic system in which they labor. Their pain is so great, he said, that they naturally seek an anesthetic to numb it. The opiate offered by religion is the hope of a pain-free heaven. By dealing this drug of hope — many today call it “hope-ium” — religion offers palliative care to the oppressed between now and their death.
But hope-ium also aids and abets the oppressors by pacifying the labor force, as Miguel De La Torre so powerfully saw at the gate to Auschwitz. If the oppressed can muster the courage to put away the opium, they will feel the pain of their current condition, and that pain may make them desperate enough to take collective action toward their own liberation. It’s counterintuitive to many of us—to see hope as dangerous and desperation as necessary. But you have to admit that Karl Marx and Miguel De La Torre had a point, as did Thich Nhat Hanh and Joan Halifax.
I felt the dangerous side of hope in my own religious upbringing. We were taught two attractive ideas: that God was in control, and that God guaranteed us a happy ending in heaven. We had an army of Bible verses to defend this pair of beliefs, and we quoted them a lot. (We ignored the many other Bible verses that contradicted our beliefs.) As a result, rather than feeling the pain of our situation and translating that pain into action, we took a long draw from our religious hope-ium pipe, sang songs about the coming joys of heaven, and fell into a pleasant dream of blissful indifference.
You can see why environmental activist Greta Thunberg has thundered: “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic . . . and act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.”[3]
In my public speaking, I often feel what Greta feels. People are willing for me to speak some hard truths, as long as I am sure to end on a hopeful note, reassuring them with a few happy-ending anecdotes that everything will be OK. They need me to leave them at least as happy in their relative complacency as they were when I found them. But here’s the catch: happy and complacent people don’t change. And people who don’t change are sitting ducks for doom.
To put it in Darwinian terms, unchanging people are unfit for a changing environment.
Of course, dangers, we learn as we age, often come in pairs. So if hope can lead to complacency and even paralysis, so can despair.
Because of the way our internal board of directors works, both hope and hopelessness can have a surprisingly similar appeal. First, both relieve us from the uncertainty of an unknown future. For one, a happy ending is guaranteed; for the other, a tragic ending is inescapable. Second, both promise us a future that asks nothing of us.
Because things are going to turn out fine, you don’t have to do or change anything.
Because there’s nothing you can do to avert doom, you don’t have to do or change anything.
Just as hope can give us permission to return to our previously scheduled complacency, so can despair.
Professor and ethicist Sharon D. Welch proposed an apt name for despair-supported complacency: “cultured despair.” She noticed that many affluent, middle-class, and privileged activists are quick to give up on their cause when results don’t come quickly and easily enough to suit them. Their “inability to persist in resistance” and their susceptibility to “cynicism and despair when problems seem intransigent” arise from the fact that “it is easier to give up on long-term social change when one is comfortable in the present.” “Becoming so easily discouraged,” she writes, “is the privilege of those accustomed to too much power, accustomed to having needs met without negotiation and work, accustomed to having a political and economic system that responds to their needs.” She concludes that for those “cushioned by privilege and grounded in privilege,” for whom “the good life is present or within reach” when “one is comfortable in the present,” it is tempting to “resort to merely enjoying [the good life] for oneself and one’s family.”[4]
I think you can see it clearly now: hope is complicated, and so is despair. If you’ve always thought hope was nothing but good and despair was nothing but bad, listen to environmental activist Derrick Jensen turn things upside down:
When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.
People sometimes ask me, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.
Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.
Jane Goodall has been one of my lifelong heroes. Her 1999 book Reason for Hope had a profound influence on me over twenty years ago. More recent, she published The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times.[5]
There Goodall offers four reasons for hope: the amazing human intellect, the resilience of nature, the power of youth, and the indomitable human spirit. (Her four reasons, I think, can be simplified to two: the resilience of both humanity and nature.) She still believes that it is not “too late to do something to put things right” and that “we still have a window of time during which we can start healing the harm we have inflicted on the planet.”
“[B]ut that window is closing,” she adds, and soon it will be “too late.” She acknowledges that already “we have not just compromised but stolen [the future of today’s children] as we have relentlessly plundered the finite resources of our planet with no concern for future generations.” She is hopeful, but she is no Pollyanna. She offers no guarantees.
A careful reading of her book demonstrates that even today’s great apostle of hope isn’t always optimistic. In fact, she admits that she often feels that what we’re calling scenario 3 or 4 is inevitable:
On many days I admit that I feel depressed, days when it seems that the efforts, the struggles, and the sacrifices of so many people fighting for social and environmental justice, fighting prejudice and racism and greed, are fighting a losing battle. The forces raging around us—greed, corruption, hatred, blind prejudice—are ones we might be foolish to think we can overcome. It’s understandable that there are days we feel we are doomed to sit back and watch the world end “not with a bang but a whimper” (T. S. Eliot). . . . Like all people who live long enough, I have been through many dark periods and seen so much suffering.
Goodall knows the odds are not in our favor, and that we are in for “trying times,” as her subtitle admits. When she clings to hope and refuses despair, what she is really refusing is the paralyzing complacency of defeatism: “And why would you bother to take action if you did not truly hope that it would make a difference?” For Goodall, as for so many, hope is essential because without it, we will give up.
So there’s the paradox. According to people I respect and trust, hope is essential because it motivates. According to other people I respect and trust, hope is dangerous because it keeps you from seeing how bad things really are and responding appropriately.
Good people promoting hope and good people critiquing hope are both against the same thing: foolish complacency. And both are for the same thing: wise action. That’s why Miguel De La Torre says that the best alternative to hope is not despair, but desperation, “because desperation propels me toward action.” He explains, “When I have no hope, when I realize I have nothing to lose, that’s when I am the most dangerous” to the supporters of an unjust status quo. With nothing to lose, I can risk everything.
As I wrestled with this tension around hope, I had to admit two things to myself, and now I admit them to you. First, no matter how many encouraging stories I am told—about this amazing technological breakthrough, about that social movement, about these brave young activists, about that amazing progress in decarbonization or antiracism, I am not optimistic about our situation. If hope means optimism—a sense that we can “win,” I have lost hope. It’s not that I’m certain of scenario 4; it’s that even scenario 1 doesn’t feel like a desirable outcome. At this point, it feels like we have left the domain of hope. Now we are fighting not to win, but to avoid the most tragic scenarios of loss.
But here’s the second realization: I still have motivation. I have no interest in giving up. For a while, of course, I was too devastated to know whether I had motivation or not. But gradually, I began to feel arising in me an even more invincible motivation than before, when I was largely energized by hopeful optimism about outcomes. Here I am, hopeless in that sense, but rather than slumping into an easy chair of despair, I am still on my feet, brimming with creative energy. For a while, I couldn’t figure out why I was still standing.
Then I came upon a paragraph from historian Howard Zinn that intrigued me and seemed to beckon me beyond my paradox of hope and despair:
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.[6]
When I first read Zinn’s word “victory,” it was as if the categories of my struggle, the terms of my inner debate, suddenly shifted. Zinn wasn’t presenting me with a choice between Team Hope that thinks we can win and therefore stays in the struggle, and Team Despair that walks off the field before the game is over because it has concluded that victory is impossible.[7] Zinn presents me with a different notion of victory and a different choice entirely. My real choice is between Team Cruelty (or Team Apathy or Team Selfishness or Team Indifference) and Team Bravery and Kindness.
Reflecting on Zinn’s words today, I feel a powerful inner invitation to live magnificently in this present moment, to live as a brave, kind, compassionate, self-giving person, to live “as human beings should live” . . . whatever the outcomes might be, whatever scenario unfolds. This detachment from desired outcomes makes my response to doom feel less like a matter of intellectual risk assessment and more like a free moral choice. It feels so right that Zinn uses the word “defiance,” because that is what I feel: the energy of fierce defiance.[8] All that is bad around us motivates me to resist, to defy, to refuse to comply, and that very defiance feels like a marvelous victory.
I would like to invite you into a thought experiment to understand the power of defiance. It won’t be easy, but I think it will prove worth the discomfort.
Imagine that scenario 4 becomes as inevitable as the incoming asteroid at the end of the movie Don’t Look Up. Imagine that in 5, 25, 75, or 250 years, our centuries of ecological overshoot will catch up with us. Imagine that sea levels rise and forests burn and crops fail and vast parts of the Earth become uninhabitable because of heat. Imagine that refugees flee, markets fail, and nations go to war over the last fossil fuels. Imagine that two small men in expensive suits simultaneously press red buttons on opposite sides of the world, and within minutes, nuclear bombs fall on a hundred cities in both hemispheres. Imagine that the wind carries a mushroom cloud that rains deadly radiation across the land. Imagine the cloud drifts toward a city where your beloved relatives live.
And now imagine that they have twenty-four hours before the cloud reaches them. How would you want them to spend those last twenty-four hours? On their last day on Earth, would you want them to go out in a blaze of gunfire, venting their rage on every living thing? Would you want them to curl up into a ball of catatonic agony? Or would you want them to be brave and good and kind to each other on the last day of the world?
Would you want a young mother to sit at a table with her child and fill page after page with brightly colored paintings? Would you want a young boy to play with his dog, to throw a stick and take a walk, to tell him what a good dog he is and how much he loves him? Would you want a little girl to invite her friends out into the field and play ball and tell jokes and make their last day a good day? Would you want neighbors to come out into the street and thank one another for being good neighbors? Would you want the family to cook and share their favorite foods for their last meal together at dinner? Late that night, would you want this family to hold one another tight and tell each other how much they love each other, and maybe even pray together in gratitude for every moment of life they have shared together? If they did things like this on the last day of the world for them, would you consider that a marvelous victory?
This thought experiment helps me understand that there is a motivation that goes deeper than hope as commonly understood. It inspires “the energy to act” when all hope for a good outcome is gone. Derrick Jensen gives us a name for this motivation. In response to the question “Why am I an activist?” Jensen answers,
Because I’m in love. With salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby lampreys living in sandy stream bottoms, with slender salamanders crawling through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don’t determine whether or not you make the effort. You don’t simply hope your beloved survives and thrives. You do what it takes. If my love doesn’t cause me to protect those I love, it’s not love.
Choctaw elder and retired Episcopal bishop Steven Charleston similarly invites us to orient our lives around the axis of love in this beautiful passage:
The signs are all around us. We can see them springing up like wildflowers after the prairie rain. People who had fallen asleep are waking up. People who had been content to watch are wanting to join. People who never said a word are speaking out. The tipping point of faith is the threshold of spiritual energy, where what we believe becomes what we do. When that power is released, there is no stopping it, for love is a force that cannot be contained. Look and see the thousands of new faces gathering from every direction.
[ … ] Sometimes, in this troubled world of ours, we forget that love is all around us. We imagine the worst of other people and withdraw into our own shells. But try this simple test: Stand still in any crowded place and watch the people around you. Within a very short time, you will begin to see love, and you will see it over and over and over. A young mother talking to her child, a couple laughing together as they walk by, an older man holding the door for a stranger — small signs of love are everywhere. The more you look, the more you will see. Love is literally everywhere. We are surrounded by love.
So I trust it is becoming clear: both hope and despair, as commonly understood, depend on our expectation of a positive outcome. If we can see a likely path to our desired outcome, we have hope; if we can see no possible path to our desired outcome, we have despair. If we are unsure whether there is a possible path or not, we keep hope alive, but it remains vulnerable to collapse if that path is closed.
When our prime motive is love, a different logic comes into play. We find courage and confidence, not in the likelihood of a good outcome, but in our commitment to love.[9] Love may or may not provide a way through our predicament, but it will provide a way forward in our predicament, one step into the unknown at a time. Sustained by this fierce, creative, and courageous love, we may persevere long enough that, to our surprise, a new way may appear where there had been no way. At that point, we will have reasons for hope again. But even if hope never returns, we will still have love.
To put it differently, even if we lose hope for a good outcome, we need not lose hope of being good people: courageous, loving, kind, resourceful, “in defiance of all that is bad around us.”
My friends have been asking me lately about the title of this book. When I tell them, their next question is almost always, “Do you have hope?” What can I say?
Here’s what I’ll say going forward: It depends on how you define hope. Hope is complicated. But writing this book is helping me to see that even if hope fails, love remains.
*****
Dear Reader,
When I felt the impact of the central idea of this chapter — that hope is complicated — I felt that I had a book that needed to be written. Here are some questions for you and your reading group to consider.
Was Miguel De La Torre’s observation — “Hope is what is fed to those who are being slaughtered so they won’t fight what is coming” — new to you? How do you respond to it?
Put in your own words why hope is complicated, and why courage and love (or courageous love) may be better words for what we need in our current situation.
Choose one of the definitions or quotations about hope in this chapter and explain what you appreciate about it.
This coming Thursday, May 16 at 4PM Eastern, Brain McLaren will visit the Cottage Third Thursday Zoom to talk about Life After Doom.
All paid subscribers will receive a link on the morning of May 16. Don’t worry if you can’t make it live — a recording will be sent to the paid community afterward.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to a paid subscription, the May special discount is a great deal — 20% off for an annual subscription.
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People are always asking me where I find hope, and I tell them I don’t think of things that way…
I believe in the truth and in doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, let the chips fall where they may.
— Anthropologist/author/podcaster Sarah Kendzior
We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have the right to ask is, “What’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?”
— Kentucky sage Wendell Berry
Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing regardless of how it turns out…
[This] hope…gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.
— former Czech president and playwright Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace
NOTES to Brian’s chapter:
[1] I heard De La Torre at a conference called Evolving Faith in 2022. See his book Embracing Hopelessness (Fortress, 2017).
[2] See Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope (New World, revised edition 2022).
[3] Panic, of course, has its downsides too, which Greta, I’m sure, fully understands. It sometimes takes dangerous language to wake people from their slumber.
[4] A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Fortress, 2000).
[5] Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams (Celadon, 2021).
[6] From his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon, 2002).
[7] As I studied the scientific and sociological data related to ecological overshoot and civilizational collapse, I felt a high degree of stress. Some experts made a strong case that collapse is inevitable or extinction likely, so activism is irrational, foolish, and naïve. Others told me that there are still ways through our current situation to a livable outcome, so defeatism is misguided and premature. But none of the actions they advocated seemed to match the magnitude of the threat. I felt that I was faced with two unsatisfactory options: one was rationale but defeatist and the other was hopeful in mood but unconvincing rationally. That helps me understand why Zinn’s words were so helpful and catalytic for me. He reframed the issue as a moral choice I could make rather than as an intellectual assessment I could not make.
[8] My friend and colleague Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis entitled her most recent book Fierce Love (Harmony, 2022), reflecting this same sense of courageous defiance.
[9] This approach might be considered an example of virtue ethics, as opposed to consequentialism (the philosophy that our actions should depend on desired outcomes) and to deontology (a duty- or rule-based approach to ethics). In philosophy, virtue ethics are typically associated with Plato, Aristotle, and Confucious. In my Christian tradition, virtue ethics are rooted in Jesus’ teaching of the primacy of love. Obviously, virtuous character, considerations of consequences, and duties and rules are all important considerations. But in a situation like ours, fraught with many unknowns, I find that virtue ethics provides a way where there was no way.
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These words of Howard Zinn-"... the energy of fierce defiance." equal impact. I liken them to changing the world from the inside out.
Thank you. This chapter really put in to words and identified the tension I have been feeling for some time. I appreciate the suggestion of a changed focus to loving sacrificially.