Hope is belief in a better future that despair refuses to see. That’s why vision is a defining characteristic of leadership because it holds up a better future in which people can invest their hope. If there is no clearly defined vision, there is no leadership. Sadly, too many people in authority fail to provide hope by means of a clearly defined vision.
One of the supreme examples of a leader providing hope in a seemingly hopeless situation came in the dark days that followed the outbreak of World War II. In his first speech as Prime Minister, Winston Churchill showed how to inspire positive expectation in the midst of seeming catastrophe: “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be.”
Viktor Frankl made this psychological reality clear in his classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
Courage in the face of overwhelming odds is built on confidence, a word derived from the Latin ‘cum fides’, meaning ‘with faith or trust’. Courage is having faith in the rational order of the cosmos, in a future worth fighting for, in the ultimate triumph of good over evil, and in oneself and others doing the right thing, regardless of the cost. And all those things depend on the hope that fires the human heart, and without which we lose our humanity.
Despair, the antithesis of hope, deadens the soul, as is readily seen in today’s alarming rates of mental illness and suicide. And despair goes hand in hand with presumption, the chronic attitude of the postmodern West that says we deserve material well-being and security regardless of how we conduct our lives. As Chesterton told us, “The two enemies of hope are presumption and despair.”
Sadly, people confuse hope with the pursuit of utopia, or wishful thinking. Utopia means ‘nowhere’, and history is littered with hopelessly idealistic, deliberately vague promises of human perfection: the Cult of Reason, the classless society, the master race, universal equality, the End of History, are just a few. They all cause untold misery and never bear fruit.
The optimistic belief that science and technology will construct a world without natural disasters, disease, war, poverty, and famine is exposed as pie in the sky by the extremely dangerous world we live in today. The fact that we have the expertise and the wealth to provide food and fresh water for all people on the planet, yet refuse to do so, is enough to expose our real challenge: the conflict between good and evil in the human heart.
Optimism and pessimism are shallow sentiments. Far better to be a realist, tackling life with faith, hope, and love. Faith is confidence in a rational cosmos in which the good is framed by the natural law that transcends human laws and holds the rich and powerful to account. Love is willing to sacrifice self for the good of others, and hope springs from love and faith.
Hope is, of course, essential in the grim realities of violence and suffering. Between 1963 and 1976, when he was released to the West, the Soviet dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, was imprisoned by the authorities, and tortured for going on a hunger strike in support of a friend.
The torture involved force-feeding the prisoner through the nostril by means of a thick rubber tube with a metal nozzle. The tube could only penetrate the nostril by bursting through the skin and cartilage, causing massive bleeding, which then threatened to suffocate the victim. The procedure was repeated on the following day, just as scabs were forming to heal the wound. Bukovsky endured the ordeal for 12 days, but his torturers could not break his will:
“I developed a technique which many people develop under these conditions – you just pretend it doesn’t happen to you; you pretend it’s somewhere outside of you; you just externalise the pain – it’s just somewhere over there, it’s not here. And it does help. You just don’t feel it that way.”
In the most dreadful circumstances, Bukovsky never relinquished hope in justice and freedom, in the triumph of good over evil, and in a more civilised future. He exemplified the exhortation of Teddy Roosevelt: “When you’re at the end of your tether, tie a knot and hold on.”
The fear we all feel as we confront the severe crises of our world today is perfectly natural, but the despair being engendered is not. Every other society has experienced existential threats, from the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt to the sack of Rome; from the Mongol invasions to the Black Death; from the Mfecane in southern Africa to the inferno of Hiroshima.
Sadly, our cynical, consumer society has swallowed the myth of endless progress, and presumption is its default position. In times of crisis, that turns quickly to despair. The speed with which the pandemic and lockdowns reduced the West to docility and hopelessness is a signal warning. Freedom, constitutional government, and the Rule of Law are being surrendered by leaderless people afflicted by a sense of hopelessness.
But leadership is a choice that belongs to all of us, and it can only be built on hope. If your worldview is rational, properly informed, and attuned to the transcendent realities of truth, goodness, and beauty, and you believe there is more to being human than mere consumption and sexual gratification, then hope will continue to surge in your heart, and you will seize every opportunity to serve your community and to rebuild our battered world.
