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An Education In Hope

By Braj Ranjan Mani

13 April, 2012
Countercurrents.org

Not with the heroics of heroes or saviours but with thecollective struggle ofordinarybut thoughtful and compassionate citizens, Another World is Possible! Resurrection or revolution, both individual and collective, hinges on the principle of hope. Without hope, there is no resurrection and no revolution.

In the struggle that is life, there is no greater weapon than an unwavering sense of hope. The expectation or belief that tomorrow will be better than the present enthuses us to imagine alternative realities—better ones—with the confidence that we can achieve them. Since positive outlook—ability to picture a bright future—enhances the odds of survival, hope abides in every individual and every community. Humanity and hope are inseparable like a flower and its fragrance. We even see our misfortune as a blessing in disguise. Seeing the silver lining in storm clouds is an old habit of humanity. Hope springs eternal in our hearts—to protect and inspire us, to keep us motivated and moving in the right direction. It is the elixir that keeps us alive and afloat above the sinking feelings of failure and frustrations. It is the fount of buoyancy that subdues the tragedies of life with the belief that every day is a new dawn, a new beginning. Resurrection or revolution, both individual and collective, hinges on the principle of hope. Without hope, there is no resurrection and no revolution.

“Optimism,”John Ralston Saul says, “is an essential tool in social progress. To be sensible is not to be pessimistic.” * [John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium ( New Delhi : Penguin, 2004), p. 29.] George Orwell points out the same thing in stronger words: “ The mental connection between pessimism and a reactionary outlook is obvious enough.” Similarly, Indian revolutionaries like Jotiba Phule and Ambedkar wanted everyone to like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. And, towering above them all, Buddha and Jesus, two paradigmatic figures of humanity, set the examples that the dream of a noble and fair world would never perish from the earth.

In other words, what matters even more than our experience and knowledge of the world is the meaning we give to them. It was to emphasise this point that Buddha famously said, “You become what you think.” So sovereign is the mind, as John Milton has said in a vivid metaphor, that it can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven. Robert Browning says the same thing very elegantly:

As is your sort of mind,
So is your sort of search:
You'll find
What you desire.

Without aspiration and endeavour, w e cannot do anything, let alone bring significant change. A great aspiration, agreat dream uplifts our thinking from the everyday to the extraordinary. Diminishing aspiration amounts to diminishing life.Marcel Proust: “If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.” Oscar Wilde: “A map of the world that did not show Utopia would not be worth consulting.” The point is, our aspirations and our possibilities are entwined. Unless we set our hearts on our aspirations, we cannot alter our lives. Only by altering our attitudes, by being positive and optimistic, can we bring out our best—and redeem ourselves. When we believe in the best and do the needful, the rest follows.

Hope not only keeps the heart from breaking, it also makes better things possible and prevail. Only those live truly, and do something worthwhile, who believe in the beauty of their dreams. No pessimist, Helen Keller reminded us, ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an unknown land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit. Those whose horizons are limited by thorny realities cannot beharbingers of a new humanity. Cynics and sceptics cannot be the pathfinders of beauty, nobility and empathy.

For mould-breaking creativity, we need vision, imagination and courage. We need youthful thinkers (not in appearance but in ideas) with ambitious spirits. We need men, women and children—with dreams and attitudes—who can say, “ I will think and act as if what I do makes a difference.”

We need Prometheus and Spartacus who can dare the lords of heaven and earth to ignite the fire of human freedom and dignity.

We need Savitribai and Jotiba Phule who can choose to do what is noble and liberating rather than what is traditional and expedient.

We need Pandita Ramabaiand Helen Keller for whom life is a daring adventure or it is nothing.

We need Marx and Ambedkar who canphilosophiseto change the world and emancipate the shackled.

We need Baltasar and Blimunda (the 18th century plebeian lovers in Jose Saramago's eponymous novel) who took to the skies in the Passarola, a power machine fuelled only by human will, in which they can soar above the murderous hardness of life and the implausibility of any liberation in the face of terrible court, Inquisition and the whole stink of Lisbon.(“How can freedom be won without human will?” is the keynote of this beautiful fable.) * [Jose Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda . Trans. Giovanna Pantiero (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1887).]

We need P B Shelley, and poets like him, who can bring to life the dormant power of the enslaved humanity:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many; they are few!

We need Harriet Tubman exposing her revolver to the African-American slaves she had freed, who, fearing an unknown freedom, wanted to go back to their captivity in the American South, thereby threatening the freedom of all. (Harriet Tubman could have been content with her own freedom, but she decided to do what earned her the sobriquet “the Moses of her people.” Time and time again, she risked her life to free hundreds of slaves in the South.)

We need Sojourner Truth, the black revolutionary, baring her breasts to the white sisters at a women's convention (in 1851) and asking, “Ain't I a woman?” We need people like Sojourner Truth who can speak truth to the power, and whose flaming words can become the symbol of indomitable spirit of humanity: “I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all.”

If Sojourner Truth, forty years a slave, can dream of changing the world at the age of 80, how can we despair of humanity?

One transformed person can transform the lives of many others. One ignited mind can set bush fires in many minds. Thousands of lamps, as Buddha said, can be lit from a single lamp, and the life of the lamp will not be extinguished.

On the other hand, when people don't have hope, they give up struggle. When there is no positive vision of life, people perish. Negative expectations shape outcomes in a negative way. Positive expectations propel us to surmount the greatest of odds. Courage is contagious, and so is hope. Elie Wiesel rightly says, “Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.”

As an impassioned advocate of democracy and public education, Benjamin Barber, put it: “When we wish it and will it, what we wish and will has happened. Our successes are willed; our failures seem to happen when will is absent. There are, of course, those who benefit from the bankruptcy of public education and the failure of democracy. But their blame is no greater than our own: in a world where doing nothing has such dire consequences, complacency has become a greater sin than malevolence.” * [Benjamin Barber, “ America Skips School ,” Harper's Magazine , November 1993.]

No emancipatory struggle will be possible without an education in hope. Those who are struggling for a new life need hope to sustain them. The poorest person on the planet, some wise guy aptly said, is not the one without any money, but the one without a dream. One starts dying when one stops dreaming. Going to work and coming back—to the soul-destroying rut of routine life—alienates us from ourselves and others. Cynicism or boredom born of hopelessness can be deadlier than death. Poet Avatar Singh Pash conveys it bitingly in a famous poem, Sabse khatarnak hotahai hamare sapanon ka mar jana! (Nothing is more dangerous than the death of our dreams!)

Hope and optimism, like all beautiful things in life, have conventionally been the preserve of the privileged. For most of human history, only a few have been used to hope that the future would be better and brighter. But if things are to change for better, people must dream. If the world is to be reimagined and changed, we must dream that things will change; that we shall overcome; that whatever the difficulties, we shall integrate and liberate ourselves and others. For this, as Goethe suggested,“ One must from time to time repeat what one believes in; proclaim what one agrees with and what one condemns.”

All liberation depends on an enhanced consciousness. No aspiration turns into reality without being positive, open and enthusiastic. No liberating breakthrough can be achieved without daring to believe, like Sartre, that “life begins at the far end of despair” and that “people are powerless only when they admit they are.”

Yes, it is easy to be discouraged by the life as it is; it is easy to be subsumed by lies, deceits and injustices that surround us. The world is unjust and life unfair for a large number of people. It is easy to be discouraged by the powerful forces that do not allow the unprivileged children to blossom. But if the suffering children decide to change the course of their life, and if they get community love and support in their struggle, things will change. If the seemingly powerless people persist in their creative struggle, things will change.

The challenge of life is not to be the plaything of circumstances but to dig deep, think and act to the best of our ability whatever the situation. Finding the right passion can make the difference between a fulfilled life and a frustrated one. The big thing is not what we get in life—over which we have very little power—but what we do with what we get. Adversity is hard but carries within it the kernel of redemption. Failure frustrates but also helps us break the shell and release the hidden strength from within. When we rise to the occasion, adverse circumstances become growth opportunities by bringing out our best.As E F Schumacher says, “The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing. This then leads to seeing the world in a new light.” * [E F Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).]

One great lesson that history gives us is that obstacles and hurdles temper the human steel. It is not comfort and complacency, but affliction and conflict that build character. What takes us from the everyday to the extraordinary is adversity and affliction.Crisis, not cosiness, hones and defines character. It is in the darkest night that we see most clearly. It is waking up to the oppressive reality that leads to the movement from darkness to light.

Our unearned suffering can be redemptive. Redemption through suffering is an old and noble thesis of humanity. Transcending the dominant notion of success and failure, it celebrates the idea that the people who fight for a noble cause are never defeated: “Right defeatedis stronger than evil triumphed.”Whatever the odds, our struggle can be beautiful. By freeing us from fear and despair, struggle makes us strong, noble and vibrant. Alice Walker says that social movements are movements that generate a feeling of joy and excitement and of truly being alive.Our collective struggle has power and beauty to turn “funerals into celebrations.”

There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment, and still be at peace. …To be such a person or to witness anyone at this moment of transcendent presence is to know that what is human is linked, by a daring compassion, to what is divine. During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world, I have seen fear turn into courage. Sorrow into joy. Funerals into celebrations. Because whatever the consequences, people standing side by side have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough to be that—which is the foundation of activism. * [Alice Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved (New York: Random House, 1997), p. xxiii]

Our first and foremost task is to unleash opportunities for hope. Keeping hopes alive in the face of oppressive circumstances makes all the difference. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless. Like the poignant self-encouragement of a lonely young struggler in a far away country represented in a touchingly awkward poem of John Masefield:

I have seen flowers come in stony places;
And kindness done by men with ugly faces;
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races;
So I trust, too.

Humanity never made any thing as beautiful, as resilient as the human spirit. We will prevail, William Faulkner said, because we have a soul and a spirit “capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” Evenquirky existentialists like Camus concede, “There is only one philosophical question: suicide. And if you decide not to take that course, optimism is the necessary condition to get through life.” But it takes aMartin Luther King, that stalwart of life, liberty and grace under pressure, to radiate the defining spirit of human invincibility, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

Hope has the power to transform reality. Alone, however, as Paulo Freire says, hope does not amount to much—and just to hope, without the commitment and struggle, is to hope in vain. But without hope, the struggle will be weak and wobbly: “Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle. But without the struggle, hope…loses its bearings, and turns into hopelessness. … Hope, as it happens, is so important for our existence, individual and social, that we must take every care not to experience it in a mistaken form, and thereby allow it to slip toward hopelessness and despair. Hopelessness and despair are both the consequence and the cause of inaction or immobilism ” * [Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope ( London : Continuum, 2004), p. 3].

What revolution is to society, redemption is to individual. They complement and complete each other, and both are nurtured and led by hope.

If the super glum Samuel Beckett can be so resilient—“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”—even fools can reform and idlers can work. There is no reason for the ordinary people to give up. “Go forward with hope and not backward by fear and division.” Leave behind doubt and despair. Arise and begin afresh. Cultivate intelligence and strength; exercise choice. Focus on the things that matter. Bring the mind and heart in concord. Venture to be bolder and wiser. Learn from mistakes and failures. Evolve; master the art of being humble and bold at once. Seek your individual rebirth and contribute to social renewal. Seek struggle, not submission. Break the shell; connect to others; commit to some larger cause. Inherit all that is good and great in humanity. Embrace the children in the deserted street. Demand that these children—all children—be brought up in a world without hunger, degradation and war. Get mad. Get in the fight. Never doubt that seemingly powerless but thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world.Not with the heroics of heroes or saviours but with the collective, compassionate struggle of ordinary people, Another World is Possible!

[Braj Ranjan Mani is the author of Debrahmanising History (Manohar, 2005). His forthcoming book, Reconstructing Knowledge: Transforming the Self and Society, is due soon.]

 



 


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