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The Thing With Feathers
2005 Winning Speech
C. Henry Smith Peace Oration Competition "Hope," wrote Emily Dickenson, "is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words—and never stops, at all." Hope. The certain belief that better futures are possible. Hope. A drive so innate that while hope remains, the human will is virtually indomitable. "Hope," an Italian proverb reminds, "is the last thing we ever lose." So critical is the link between hope and survival that every culture expects certain people to be what Dr. John Paul Lederach calls "hope-bringers."1 According to Lederach, one of the primary tasks of all peacemakers, including mediators, healers, relief and voluntary service workers, religious leaders, and community organizers is to bring hope to those they serve. Nearly everyone would agree that peacemakers who give false hope where none reasonably exists are cruel and unethical. Unnecessarily destroying hope is equally reprehensible. Along this continuum lies the ethical dilemma of contemporary peacemakers: how to inspire hope with an honest vision of real choices leading to a "better" tomorrow for humanity, rather than manipulating and then soothing fears with unrealistic, and often exclusive, utopian dreams. According to University of Kansas Psychology Professor Rick Snyder, maintaining hope is an essential human antidote to meaninglessness and helplessness. Unlike mere optimism, hope "entails creating reasonable goals and finding practical ways to reach those goals."2 For Snyder, hope is an evolutionary advantage. Snyder claims that we humans developed hope because hope has gotten us through some extraordinarily difficult times as a species. He even suggests that the most hopeful among us are the most likely to propagate their genetic line. According to Snyder's research, hopeful people tend to fare better in school, find more meaning in life, and live longer, healthier lives. By contrast, loss of hope is a factor in every protracted conflict "hot spot" in the world. Even in the United States, claims Rabbi Michael Lerner,3 millions of Americans are experiencing a growing sense of despair about the future. We are frightened of terrorism, immigrants, drug abuse, and racial and sexual difference. We take more Prozac, buy more guns, and give up more civil liberties. Fear rather than inspiration wins political contests. Just as the food-starved will eat garbage to avoid starvation, the hope-starved will embrace almost any vision that staves off despair. "Messianic hope" is what Rami Shapiro calls those promises of an impending perfect future that will lift us cleanly out of our present fear and discomfort.4 According to Shapiro, "messianists work tirelessly to free humanity from its capacity for evil" in order to "perfect the future and rescue us from our imperfect present." Sadly, such messianic hope seeks the impossible: deliverance from all the frailties that make us human. Yet, it is the very impossibility of ever reaching its utopian state that makes messianic hope so dangerous, and such an effective tool for misuse by demagogues. Messianic hope starts with a very specific utopian dream, one too perfect to be realized but too tantalizing not to fight for. So long as any "evil" or "enemy" survives, the hoped-for utopian dream lives on to be rallied around, always just one more aggressive war, genocidal massacre, or terrorist attack away. Eventually, messianic hope morphs into nationalism, jihad, inquisition and manifest destiny. It spawns crusades, pogroms, the Gulag and "ethnic cleansing." Systems built upon messianic hope—whether they originate in economic ideologies like communism or capitalism, or religious theologies like Christianity or Islam—have generated more war and destruction throughout history than almost any other single force. Nonetheless, key leaders in the U.S. continue to rely on the generation of messianic hope in order to inspire the populace to action. For example, in October, 2004, Reverend Jerry Falwell commented on CNN Late Edition that, "I'm all for the president to chase [the terrorists] all over the world, even if it takes ten years, let's blow them all away in the name of the Lord." Falwell's tantalizing hope that all terrorists can be blown away if the United States just tries hard enough—is utopian and completely unrealistic. Falwell is not alone. Fear-driven government propaganda, argues Adbusters magazine founder Kalle Lasn, promotes the idea that our nation and way of life are a beacon of hope to the rest of the world, and that we can in fact do the impossible: triumph over terror, be the world's policeman, and tighten up our defenses to keep out invaders, even as we consume record amounts of natural resources.5 Encouraging people to act based upon these messianic visions is, frankly, unethical. There is an alternative, however, built upon (1) honesty about what is humanly possible, (2) deep humility about the fallibility and bias inherent in all human dreams, and (3) the integrity of being rooted in authentic experiences of real people. Shapiro calls this radical hope because it is such a dramatic departure from messianic or utopian hope. "Messianism," argues Shapiro, "knows what is right. Humility does not." Messianic hope "paves the way to perfection; humility honors the deeper truth of human imperfection."6 Radical hope understands that one revolution, one president, or one new law will never save us from the messiness of human existence. In the end, messianic hope claims to know the future; radical hope promises only new realities—undefined and uncertain, but triumphant nonetheless—based upon open-minded, honest questioning. Lederach describes "biblical dreamers" like Noah and his Ark, or Moses and his Exodus as imbued with the ability to live according to a vision of unseen and unknown realities. Their hope, he argues, did not "predict the future according to the present," 7 but instead lay in an unseen, unknown vision. Ambiguous by nature, hope of this kind rarely engenders fanaticism. At the same time, it is thoroughly practical. Mahatma Gandhi described himself not as a visionary, but as a practical idealist, because he believed his dreams were more than utopian visions; they were real possibilities for living, based on the experiences of real people. Disdaining unrealistic, messianic hope does not mean we are limited to defining the future only by present realities—a grim, hopeless prospect indeed. In fact, radical hope-bringing can be both utterly honest and profoundly audacious like Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech, or Jesus' vision in his Sermon on the Mount, or Gandhi's nonviolent methodology of Satyagraha. The hopeful idealism of these dreamers did not promise messianic deliverance; it promised hard work and encounters with the most difficult and depressing of human behaviors. Though each dream hovered on the borders of plausibility, each actually achieved breathtaking—albeit incomplete—results. I am reminded of two personal experiences with peacemakers who are radical hope-bringers. Recently, I made an extended visit to a small Israeli village called Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam (meaning "Oasis of Peace" in Hebrew and Arabic). The village is home to Jews, Muslims and Christians seeking to demonstrate real possibilities for co-existence. Theirs is a difficult task. In a land as "hopeless" as any in the world, these villagers nonetheless seek to inspire hope grounded in the realities of their lives. Observers comment on the palpable sense of hope that permeates the village, even while tensions highlight the imperfections of co-existence.8 What sustains such a strong sense of hope? The answer lies in the principled way that the villagers have chosen to fill their role as hope-bringers: they don't promise present peace, yet the very existence of their village represents the hope for a peaceful tomorrow. They don't distort hope through unrealistic messianic claims and they don't wish to be idealized. Instead, they try to inspire real people into present action toward a better, but still realistic, future. Two years ago, I was privileged to work with peacemakers in Guatemala, a country savaged by a 30-year civil war. Peace is being built slowly by individuals like Rodolfo, with whom I worked in the Archbishop's Office of Human Rights. Rodolfo maintains the audacious hope that Guatemalan society can be reconstructed on principles of justice—even as torture and violence continue in his country. He documents the disappeared, seeks truth and reconciliation, and is sustained by the dream of a more just future, even though he cannot "know" how that future will actually unfold. This then, is the peacemaker's most ethical path in a world awash in despair: generating hope rooted in the uncertainties of human reality, yet faithful to the ideal of an improved (if imperfect) future. To be successful in inspiring such hope we must, as Lederach says, "keep our feet on the ground, and our heads in the clouds."9 The hope-bringer's task is to transform impossibilities into possibilities. Peacemakers who comfort the fearful with messianic promises inhibit this transformation because utopia is simply not a human possibility. Peacemakers who offer hope grounded in reality empower this transformation by inspiring what is best, though not perfect, from admittedly flawed humans...always nurturing a generosity of spirit which assures that the thing with feathers—hope—never stops...at all.
Endnotes
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