Testing a hypothesis today . . . .
I was thinking about the nature of hope.
first, a question:
what does a dog, or a lion, or a seal, or a chimpanzee, or any animal hope for?
Because they have no language they cannot verbalise their hope or the nature of it but, because life and hope are so intertwined, their hope IS their life and life itself their hope.
Perhaps, then, it is the way in which we hope that makes us different from the other animals.
This traditional thing about man "having a soul".
No. To a modern man this means nothing.
What we have is language.
and it is our ability to speak, hear and think in words that changes everything.
Our verbal thinking is our greatest gift but also our heaviest burden.
It is true that, as young children, we live without much needing to hope. The present is enough for us and this makes us close to the animals; although we learn to hope for Christmas and birthdays and holidays soon enough.
Adults teach us this.
As we grow and learn to think verbally our sense of the present is tempered by things we hope for. Initially, hopes are perhaps short-term: building
a snowman, visiting a waterpark, a visit to McDonalds, a sleepover,
and, yes, a birthday party, or Christmas presents, a visit from a
much-loved granny. Gradually we come to see that hope of nice things to come gets us through the darker days when the present is less a place we want to stay.
As hope becomes intertwined with the very fount of our lives, we begin to live around much longer-term hopes: getting good grades in our exams, saving enough money for a new camera, getting a better physique, developing footballing skills, learning to play a musical instrument. . . . we set goals and some of us are prepared to work hard for these.
At school we are taught to sacrifice the present for the future.
But this is a precarious business.
Many things can prevent and damage this process. Setting our hopes too high; over-estimating our abilities; never coming close enough to reaching a longed-for goal can result in repeated disappointment and shattered hopes. But, equally, setting sights too low can lead to boredom and apparent failure too. Low self-esteem can lead to even lower self-esteem. Traumatic events, unstable situations at home, bullying, teasing or inadequate support from parents, teachers or peers can make realistic and approachable goals hard to visualise, verbalise and realise.
In extreme cases, where this process has gone seriously awry somewhere along the way, to function at all on a planet that goes on revolving however hopeless things seem, we may may feel forced to revert to the child's perspective - an animal's perspective even - trying to live entirely in the moment. We have a drink, take a drug, eat, have sex; not so much to numb the pain but more to fill the void created by our lack of a clear hope, or a failure of a sense of being able to achieve a clear hope.
Children or animals can never fall into this deadly cycle because hope, for them, is instinctive; easy as breathing and sleeping.
Putting it another way, of course, I can see that people who experience constant love and support from parents and friends through their childhood are much more able to withstand disappointment and shattered hopes and see things in perspective.
Hope and love are clearly intertwined in the fabric of our being.
My point is that religious symbolism is fundamentally a way of expressing linguistically, those things that are, for animals and small children, completely instinctive. It is the means by which we can steer our way back to a realistic perspective.
To put it another way, faith is a search for that instinctual hope that we lose as a result of language. When we put our hope in a deity - of any sort perhaps- although it may seem to an atheist that we are thereby hoping for nothing at all - it can nevertheless get us up in the morning and sometimes even joyfully. And yet faith - despite it being a search for something instinctive; a search to live more in the way that children and animals do i.e. in the present moment - can only be "known" through language.
So there is the paradox: language gradually takes us out of the present into the future or the past or both, and faith, expressed through language, can steer us back towards the present.
Religion then is the means by which man seeks to stay in touch with the most essential instinct: to life.
Descartes writes "Je pense, donc je suis." It is simply not enough if there is no hope. For Descartes himself, of course, it was his very search for meaning that gave him the hope he needed to get him out of bed that day.