Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote recently that the “black political tradition is essentially hopeful,” yet the historical record gives many indications that injustice is tenacious and unlikely to yield. That means that a historian or a political analyst deeply cognizant of history should not be committed to hope:

A writer wedded to “hope” is ultimately divorced from “truth.” Two creeds can’t occupy the same place at the same time. If your writing must be hopeful, then there’s only room for the kind of evidence which verifies your premise. The practice of history can’t help there. Thus writers who commit themselves to only writing hopeful things, are committing themselves to the ahistorical, to the mythical, to the hagiography of humanity itself. I can’t write that way—because I can’t study that way. I have to be open to things falling apart. Indeed, much of our history is the story of things just not working out.

Coates is critical of “only writing hopeful things” and of assuming that “your writing must be hopeful.” He is not saying: abandon all hope, you who enter into historical thought. But he is distinguishing the cultivation of hope from the pursuit of truth. If hope emerges from truth, that is a matter of sheer chance and not to be counted on.

I have argued, more generally, that truth, justice toward others, and inner psychological wellbeing are distinct goods.* It would be wonderful if they could fit together neatly, and even better if each caused the others. That would be the case in a universe constructed by an omnipotent and just creator, which is why the Bible says things like “the truth will make you free.” But I see no particular reason to believe that truth will make you happy or just, that justice will make you happy or truthful, or that happiness will make you truthful or just. In many situations, knowing the full truth just causes sorrow and paralysis; committing fully to justice requires sorrow and untruth. In my view, all three goals are estimable, but they conflict, and that is one reason it is so hard to live well. This position is consistent with Coates’ admiration for both the truth-telling historian and the hope-instilling tradition of Black politics in the US.

In the previous paragraph, I wrote about happiness in contrast to justice and truth, dropping the word “hope.” For some, hope is a form or close relative of happiness. But one can debate whether hope is a good at all. Neither the classical Greeks nor the ancient Indian thinkers thought that it was. Hannah Arendt observed that “Greek antiquity ignored [faith and hope] altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box” (The Human Condition, p. 247.).

Indeed, a Stoic or a Buddhist can endorse a strong argument against hope. First, hope is a thought about the future, but wisdom lies in fully experiencing the present, which alone is real. Like nostalgia and regret, hope is a source of irrational disquiet.

Second, hope is about matters beyond our control. For instance, it makes no sense for me to “hope” that I will answer a question honestly. If I am an honest person, I will just answer it honestly. To hope about our own actions is to renounce responsibility. By the same token, we ought to spend no energy hoping that others will be honest–or otherwise ethical–because that is beyond our control. They will do what they will do, and we should respond in the best possible way.

Third, we should not make hope the precondition of acting right, for that is moral weakness. We must do right regardless of the odds of things turning out well.

Most pre-Christian thinkers of the Mediterranean and Northern India ignored or opposed hope. Christians then turned hope into one of the three greatest virtues. That made sense because of their theistic commitments. Indeed, hope is closely connected to faith and charity because it is faith in the Creator’s charity or grace that (alone) substantiates hope in a world of evident suffering.

Arendt was a non-Christian author who thought that the Christian concept of hope had been a positive contribution, related to her own core virtue of amor mundi–love of the world. Notwithstanding the Stoic and Buddhist arguments against hope, and notwithstanding the real tensions between hope and truth that Coates explores–hope could be a virtue. It could be a virtue if it is a resource that human beings need in order to act well. Then instilling hope increases the odds of good action, just as giving people courage does.

In both Stoicism and at least some classical Indian thought, quietism is a common theme. The wise person accepts what is–in which case, hope is irrelevant and distracting. But activists must think about more than the present. They must form plans, which requires estimating the probability of success. When the probability approaches zero, it is time to form a new plan. That means that hope is a rational precondition of action.

And possibly hope is an intrinsic virtue. By Act IV, Scene 1 of King Lear, Edgar has already suffered much, having been cast out of his family and society and onto the wild heath. He convinces himself that he can still be happy because he can still have hope (“esperance”):

Yet better thus, and known to be contemn’d,
Than still contemn’d and flatter’d. To be worst,
The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.
The lamentable change is from the best;
The worst returns to laughter. Welcome then,
Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace!
The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst
Owes nothing to thy blasts. 2255

Immediately following these lines–in a perfect illustration of tragic irony–Edgar’s father stumbles into view. We have watched his eyes being deliberately thumb-wrenched out of their sockets, and now we see him “Enter …, led by an Old Man.” Edgar cries:

But who comes here?
My father, poorly led? World, world, O world!
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,
Life would not yield to age.

It was not true that Edgar had seen the worst or that the subsequent changes would be for the better. Things were about to get much worse. And things ultimately get worse for all of us. Yet it was better for Edgar to have those moments on the heath than not to have had them. It was to his credit that he could forgive and “embrace” life. He chose to describe his state as hope, and that seems praiseworthy. Hope wasn’t an accurate prediction of the future but rather a choice and a disposition.

To return to the beginning: I agree with Coates that history is not hope-instilling and that the rigorous empirical historian should not go looking for hope in the record of the past. At the same time, a human being who manages to be hopeful seems to be praiseworthy and a gift to others. The historian is a human being, and like all of us, must navigate these two inconsistent values.

*See also: on hope as an intellectual virtue (with the opposite thesis from today’s post); unhappiness and injustice are different problems; why we wish that goodness brought happiness, and why that is not so; three truths and a question about happiness; and all that matters is equanimity, community, and truth.

Tufts has created and released this 10-minute video, based on a talk of mine. I found it a good exercise to write, memorize, and present everything that I hold most central for a general audience in that span of time. The presentation ranges from the individual networks of ideas that each of us brings into public life to strategies for enhancing civic engagement at the national level. It proposes a universal definition of good citizenship as well as a diagnostic account of our current condition in the US in 2015 and some suggestions for reforms. It’s my best shot at summarizing all of my life’s work so far (minus some thoughts about methodology in the human sciences and a critical argument about modernity that I have advanced in my books about Nietzsche and Dante). Of course, I have created none of this on my own but owe everything valuable to colleagues and collaborators.

What are these times, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many misdeeds,
When, if you’re calmly crossing the street,
It means your friends can’t reach you
Who are in need? – Brecht, from An die Nachgeborenen (1939)

Racist incidents and youth protests in the USA (including the successful protests at Yale), terror in Paris and Beirut, war in the Levant–these are vastly different topics, and yet they all feed one 24/7 stream of commentary, social media, private conversation, and presidential politics in which themes seem to recur and recombine. Everyone has different views, but I think I discern at least three importantly distinct political philosophies in the mix:

1. A kind of liberalism that we might call, with Judith Shklar, the liberalism of fear. This perspective starts with an abhorrence of deliberate cruelty, especially at a large scale. The premise is that people are more or less capable of living decent lives if left alone, although they may need and deserve economic assistance that they can use as they wish. The worst danger comes from states. Governments must be restrained by general rules that prevent tyranny even if they also block some good ideas.

From this perspective, a private college like Yale is state-like, a threat to its members even if its leaders happen to be benign at the moment. Not only free speech rules but also autonomy for departments, decentralized hiring, tenure, a very flexible curriculum–these are all constitution-like protections against tyranny. If someone proposes a good idea, such as a required course, the question becomes: Why won’t that turn into a bunch of bad course requirements? Do you really trust the administration and the dominant culture that it represents to legislate what courses students must take?

Meanwhile, ISIS is obviously a fundamental threat to freedom and happiness. But the debate within the liberalism of fear is whether to pull out all the stops in attacking ISIS or rather to be concerned that European states and the USA will violate civil and human rights in the name of fighting ISIS.

2. A kind of radicalism that draws on critical race and gender studies, the Frankfurt School, Foucault, and postcolonialism. It observes some people oppressing many other people in a wide variety of settings, often inadvertently. Oppression is built into cultures and mentalities and requires changes in people’s ideas as well as rules and practices.

From this perspective, a private institution like Yale is not only an organization that has chosen official rules to regulate its members. It is also a place dominated by certain cultural norms and populated by people who have been selected and invited (rather than rejected or excluded). Almost everyone thinks that members of the Yale community should have specific rights, such as free assembly and tenure, but this perspective attends to other issues as well. It notes that the whole community has been formed and shaped to have a certain character. The institution’s pervasive culture is biased against some of its members–not to mention the many people who were not allowed in at all. These biases must be challenged.

Meanwhile, ISIS is obviously a terrible threat to diversity and inclusion, but the question quickly arises whether one contributing cause of terrorism may be the biased behavior of countries like France and the United States toward our own religious minorities and toward the Middle East.

3. Views that confidently propose a character for public life, either within a given institution or across a whole society. When John Kasich proposes an institute to spread Judaeo-Christian values, he certainly presumes that the US should have a dominant and unifying culture, but other people have other visions of what a good society should look like. The French republican tradition, for example, is egalitarian, nationalistic, and anti-clerical. It has little in common with US conservatism except for its willingness to argue that every citizen can be, and should be, part of one community with one set of norms. People who are saying, “Don’t pray for Paris–religion is what caused the problem” are invoking a particular idea of France as secular. Some years ago, Emmanuel Todd was sure that Muslim immigrant youth in France were rioting because they have “embraced … the fundamental values of French society, such as … the dyad of liberty-equality” and because they have inherited political norms from the ancient “peasant family structures in the Parisian basin.” He seems to have changed his tune lately, but his view was perfectly franco-republican in its assumption of a unitary egalitarian political culture.

From this perspective, an institution like Yale has a powerful culture and character that may not appeal to, or serve, everyone equally. The question is, what should that character be? Political and critical? Scientific and rationalistic? Nurturing and inclusive? Competitive and demanding? Eurocentric? Postcolonial and cosmopolitan?

Meanwhile, ISIS is an evil threat for this third perspective, but not because its leaders espouse a particular vision that all must follow. Rather, ISIS has a vision that is bleak and cruel and conflicts with the ethos of, say, secular, fun-loving Paris or capitalistic, Christian-infused America.

These are simplified views. I have ignored many complications–to name one, the question of whether a private voluntary association like Yale is very much like a state. As I wrote at the outset, everyone has a position of her own. For myself, I struggle to combine elements of all three views because all seem to me to embody some wisdom.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry (by Joseph Heath) methodological individualism “amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.” I find that I have written three blog posts that are critiques of methodological individualism from different angles. That makes me–I guess–an opponent of it.

In against methodological individualism, or why neighborhoods are not like broccoli, I proposed six reasons why not to treat the neighborhood in which a person lives as a variable that we can assign to the individual person as a causal factor. The neighborhood in which a person lives is neither straightforwardly the result of any individuals’ choices nor a factor that helps explain their actions. Rather, neighborhoods should be thought of as having their own place in causal models. The theorist who inspired these thoughts was Robert Sampson.

In more to life than individual attributes, I argued that we should study mechanisms, processes, and episodes as phenomena that we can generalize about and model, both as causes and consequences. If we always only try to understand rioters as individuals, we will miss what we could learn by studying riots as episodes. The theorists who inspired those thoughts were Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly.

And in is social science too anthropocentric? I offered a short review of Brian Epstein’s  The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. One of the conclusions of this book is: “facts about a group are not determined just by facts about its members.” For instance, it is a fact about the Supreme Court that it upheld the Affordable Care Act, but that fact was not determined by the opinions and votes of 9 members. Many other factors came into play, including the actions of the individuals who had created, constituted, limited, and chosen the court.

Many would agree with these points, none of which are original to me. But still a lot of social science is methodologically individualistic, especially the research that is meant to influence policy. In quantitative studies, often the data is a matrix with an individual in each row and a variable in each column. Instead of individuals, the rows may be cities, zip codes, years, or events like crimes or purchases. Still, those are really means or counts that describe groups understood as aggregates of individuals. (For instance, the poverty rate in a zip code is the proportion of the resident individuals who are poor.) And qualitative research is very heavily about what person A, who has descriptive characteristics X and Y, says about topic P in context C.

I think we are missing much that we could learn if we treated not only groups, but places, episodes, and other phenomena as causal.