Yonder Come Day

I can understand pessimism, but I don't believe in it. It's not simply a mater of faith, but of historical evidence. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give hope, because for hope we don't need certainty, only possibility. Despite all those confident statements that "history shows . . .," hope is all the past can offer us.

Howard Zinn: Failure to Quit

Things are certainly darker than they were when that paragraph was written in 1990, though I remember 1990 and things were pretty damned dark then. The subsequent three decades have certainly given us every reason to give up hope but there is one overriding reason not go give it up. Giving up hope might have the comfort of lowering your expectations to zero and the wallowing in a lazy, fashionable dispair, so much more congenial if you're a member of the privileged classes than of an oppressed group. That temptation is overridden by one of the hard truths about despairing and giving up hope, it is also a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom so despaired of.

I will be restarting the reading of The Prophetic Imagination in the next few days, Going back to my previous treatment of the introduction and first several chapters, applying it to the days and weeks news in the run-up to the election, I certainly didn't give Walter Brueggemann or the Prophets anything like their due. I'm thinking of starting again in light of Howard Zinn's advice on, with knowledge of how tenuous it is, hope is all we've got and it certainly has the virtue of making the possibility of better things happen, certainly more than nihilistic despair or cynical nihilism. That those two poses, guaranteed to prevent a better future ever coming, ever gained currency on the alleged left is certainly related to how the abandonment of faith was also made fashionable among the secular left. I will leave it to you to read the rest of Zinn's call to optimism despite the continual countering evidence, I certainly don't believe anyone will look at his sample of reasons to be optimistic and be wowed by the immediate victory of good over evil because it's clear good does not have anything like a guarantee of winning over even terrible evil but if you give up on it, you guarantee it has no chance.

At the end of his article, Zinn said:

Surely history does not start anew with each decade. The roots of one era branch and flower in subsequent eras. Human beings, writings, invisible transmitters of all kinds, carry messages across the generations. I try to be pessimistic, to keep up with some of my friends. But I think back over the decades and look around. And then it seems to me that the future is not certain, but it is possible. 

 

It's possible, it's not guaranteed, there is nothing guaranteed about the continuation of the human species, no more than the myriads of species that have lived and either died off or whose offspring evolved into other species, including ours. Hope is an emotion, an action that depends on the future, it hopes for a fulfillment that we desire. Or one that we will find good. It isn't wisely spent on wishing things would stay the same because nothing does stay the same. The belief it can is a delusion. 

 

And the future will always be unknowable from the present. It is one of the biggest follies of the materialist-atheist attempts to replace revealed morality with idiotic schemes, none so much as utilitarianism which is based in a pudding-headed claim that it is possible for us to know the ultimate tally of whether something in the present or immediate past will produce more happiness for more people than some other possible thing in the present or immediate past. Well, no one can know what the ultimate good or evil will come out of something. No one can say who may not have been born who was either figure of enormous evil or enormous good in any possible line of present day or future human beings. I'll bet every single one of us has ancestors who would easily fit into both categories, without whom the greatest of good people among us would not be here.

 

And it works the same way when considering human beings collectively, too.  I dare say that if it were not for WWII many of us whose parents met because of the war would have no secure belief that but for that terrible thing, we might never have been born. The war and the fascist, imperialist and Nazi systems that caused the war was certainly an evil thing, but there is no way to figure out what its final results will be. One of those results is certainly the diminution of the evil of antisemitism in Western societies, albeit too briefly. The at least temporary diminution of expressions of racism in the United States was a result of the exposure of the evil of American apartheid. 

 

That is one of the things that the evil of eugenics has in common with utilitarianism, other than its scientific and philosophical incompetence, it holds that it can discern a future which is unknowable and claims the right to act on that fantastic delusion of a gift of precognition "for the better." I knew a young man, a very intelligent lawyer who knew he had a fifty-fifty chance of not living to be old and so went into public-service lawyering. The reason he knew that it was possible he would not is because his mother died of Huntington's disease. He was genetically tested because his girlfriend didn't want to marry him if he had the gene that would doom him to die a terrible death from it, she didn't want to risk having a child with him if he did. He did carry the gene, she married someone else and he continued on with his legal career until he started showing symptoms. He has since died. I don't know how her children with her husband will turn out, though the marriage ended in divorce. Maybe her children will do great and good things, maybe she would have had a child with him who would. Having spoken about how we are dependent on the telling of stories, the fact is, we often don't have an ending for them in reality. Reality has a way of editing our chosen endings of stories, it is one of the idiocies of modernism that it believes we can tell those now.  

 

There is no getting past the fact that things are a hell of a lot more complicated than the meat-headed utilitarians presented them as being. That utilitarianism arose in the same intellectual milieu that claimed the possibility of applying the very limited methods of the successful physical sciences to enormously complex and largely unknowable things like human cultures, human societies, politics, human minds and behavior, economics, the law - things I suspect that Howard Zinn would have found more easily palatable in all their pseudo-scientific nonsense than I do - proves how intellectually bankrupt modern materialistic, atheistic secularism is. The despair experienced by modern intellectuals is due to the fact that their secular faith leads to it, inevitably, in Zinn's piece he gives huge reasons to be despairing and rather weak examples of why we shouldn't give into it. I honor his conclusions a lot more than his reasoning advocating hope. 

 

I hope because I believe in God, I believe in the claim in Genesis that God saw creation was good. That somehow things will work out to a good end, an end I can't know and will certainly never live to see in this life. I choose to believe that because it is the right thing to do. Believing in the opposite doesn't get you to anything better.  It guarantees you worse.