Hope For The Human Venture

November 2, 1986
Lakeland

Hope may seem a masochistic theme for a life-long fan of the Boston Red Sox. After Monday night’s seventh game I was tempted to change my title to “Wait Til Next Year is a Song That is Worn Out After Being Sung for Sixty-Eight Years.” But that night I slept soundly and in the morning I said to myself, “Hey, guy, you are alive, you have been alive, and you probably will be alive to see the Bosox again in that best of all ballfields, Fenway Park.”

[CJW note: “Our strength as humans is that we can laugh at ourselves for being ridiculous. Our weakness is that we have to do it so often.”]

But, I still speak of hope for the human venture. By hope, I mean to cherish desires and needs with expectations that somehow, against much evidence to the contrary, we will survive the nuclear age and that slowly, even spasmodically, there will be a lessening of poverty, crime, hate and disease, not only in our land, but everywhere on our home planet, Earth.

There are shadows on the light of hope. This week, one cannot help but reflect on the political campaigns now staged in multiple negatives on the TV tubes. The campaign strategists and PR people are very adept in character assassination while skillfully avoiding legal grounds for slander. Reasonable debate and discussion about authentic issues seem to be shunned for the most part. What hope is there for American politics?

But would you believe political campaigning has become more polite and civil? In a book about presidential campaigns, Paul Boller cites some of the flamboyant examples such as “Murder, robbery rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood and the nation black with crimes.” So a newspaper attacked Thomas Jefferson in his 1800 campaign.

Or what was directed against another candidate - “A fourth-rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar, and who, to raise the wind, delivers his hackneyed, illiterate compositions ... the most unmitigated trash, interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.” That was a blast directed in 1860 at Abraham Lincoln.

The 1872 contest between Horace Greeley and Ulysses S. Grant, according to one observer, was “a choice between hemlock and strychnine.” Lord Bryce, the English historian, “called the 1896 race, pitting the womanizing Grover Cleveland against the slippery James G. Blaine, a contest between the copulative habits of one and the prevaricative habits of the other.”

So, if you have been distressed, turned off, or disgusted by the shallow, negative qualities of the 1986 campaigning, take courage. The campaigns are better than they used to be and always there is hope for improvement. So take heart and vote for your best choice Tuesday; and if you can’t do that, vote for your least bad choice. Furthermore, be on the side of those who would legislate against PAC special interest contributions, which create the multi-million campaigns of irrelevance, nonsense, and the cultivation of irrational fears.

Samuel Johnson, famous 18th century literary figure, said of a gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married again, and almost immediately after his wife, died: “it was the triumph of hope over experience.”

Quite aside from the wit in Johnson’s remark, there is wisdom for all of us in it. The human family has never had an easy time. Uncountable millions have died in the wars that are described on every page of history. The plague of the 13th century wiped out 1/3rd of the population of Europe. Countless persons have perished in famine, murder, fire, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. Individuals and families have endured shocking losses and catastrophic circumstances. Yet by and large, people pick themselves up after cussing out the terrible fates, and go on – a triumph of hope over experience. [CJW note: Zen – such is life; seven times down, eight times up].

The lesson of the old Greek myth of Pandora’s vase [CJW note: blaming women, as in Genesis] is that after all the evils were let loose on the earth, hope remained. Compared to the age of the earth and some of the creatures alive on it, the human family is young (we haven’t grown mature yet). Denise Levertov recognized that in the lines from the poem I read:

We only have begun
to imagine the fulness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
- so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
- We have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy
only begun to envision
how it might be.

But hope has to be more than a blithe notion that “every day in every way things are getting better and better.” There needs to be recognition that consequences can never be fully anticipated or be what we wish them to be.

Oscar Wilde, in the sad but compelling writings from jail, composed this parable about unforeseen consequences:

[Read]
[Editor’s note: passage not saved]

[CJW note: p. 258, RELIGION FROM TOLSTOY TO CAMUS, Kaufmann]

A firm base of reality is needed if hope is to triumph over experience, for we can misuse our gifts as well as master our difficulties, as Wilde so poignantly wrote in his parable. The nuclear evil is loosed from the vase of politics, science, and technology. The discovery of oil and then the combustion engine multiplied the pollution already pouring from smokestacks and chimneys. Nuclear power, so praised in its beginnings, is now feared as a wide-spread threat when things go wrong as they did in Chernobyl. What shall we do, curse the fates, and keep on drinking and making merry, for tomorrow we die? That’s one choice – but it is a hope-less way.

If hope for the human venture is real and not illusion, we must encourage new ways of thinking. By that, I mean the merging of old wisdom with new imaginings. Sometimes I find more clues to new ways in humor than lengthy expositions. This is a story from Reader’s Digest:

“A yacht sank in the Caribbean, an there were only two survivors – the boat’s owner and his steward, who drifted to a tiny island. Making himself comfortable, the yachtsman lounged against a palm tree and lit up a cigar. ‘You’re mighty calm,’ the steward commended, ‘I’m afraid we’re goners.’ ‘Stop worrying,’ the boss said. ‘In 1984 I gave the United Way, the Red Cross, and the United Jewish Appeal each $500,000. In 1985, business picked up, and I gave each $800,000. You can count on some fund-raiser from one of those outfits finding us real soon.’”

Old wisdom – new imaginings. Philosopher Karl Jaspers, writing of the nuclear threat and his hope that humankind will not obliterate itself:

“The old politics act on the principles of present enmity and future war; the new politics will action the principle that there can be honest, rational communication and peace.... In foolishly idealistic politics, we act as if the condition we want had been attained already. [CJW note: That is, it is foolishly idealistic to believe that either great power will unilaterally weaken its nuclear power. Fear of defeat is greater right now than fear of mutual destruction.] In foolishly idealistic politics, we act as if [peace] were unattainable, that it never can be. Both ways are irresponsible. The responsible way is to foster each rudiment, to nurture each germ, to take up each good impulse, to see the chances of the future in the facts of the present and to think and act with these chances in mind. This is not a middle way between extremes; it is the high road above the two abysmal benightments that we call idealism and realism.” (THE FUTURE OF MANKIND, p. 352)

[CJW note:
“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.”
- Auden, 9/1/39]

Thus, old wisdom, new imaginings, illustrated by an old fable of the ox and the colt who went to a spring to drink, and fell to quarreling as to who should drink first. They prepared to fight it out. Then, looking up, they say the vultures wheeling, waiting for the battle and its aftermath. So the ox and colt decided to drink together.

More profound for hope are Denise Levertov’s words:

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of non-being?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet –
There is too much broken
that must be mended.

Too much hurt that we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much in bud.