Abandon All Hope

In which we break dreams before they become nightmares

La Divina Commedia di Dante by Domenico di Michelino (hell on the left, stairway to heaven in the background, and a fashionable Dante front and center.)

I.

Dante's Divine Comedy was one of the first big ‘classics’ I read in my early teens (I sort of skipped the young adult phase). The work is one giant epic poem in which Dante follows his guide, the ancient Roman poet Virgil, through the nine circles of hell and into purgatory. There, beautiful Beatrice, symbol of divine love, takes over Virgil’s role and - hallelujah - leads Dante to heaven.

It should come as no surprise that Dante’s description of hell is the one that best stood the test of time. After all, that’s where all the interesting people are — ancient poets and philosophers, mythical heroes...

Whether or not you have read the Divine Comedy (have you?), there is a quote you will have heard. As Dante and Virgil pass the gate of hell, Dante notices an inscription.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

Or

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

What exactly is Dante abandoning, though?

Hope is a tricky thing. Is it an emotion? A cognitive skill? A desire? A predisposition? For now, let’s call it a positive mindset with the expectation of better things to come, although poet Emily Dickinson describes it much more beautifully:

Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
and sings the tune without the words
and never stops at all.

A tad more scientific, psychologist Charles Snyder spent a good chunk of his career developing a hope theory and he suggested that there are three crucial components to hopeful thinking:

• Goals: you hope for something.

• Routes: you can imagine semi-plausible ways to get to that thing.

• Agency: you have at least some decision-making power in whether or not to try one of those routes.

Even if hope remains somewhat hard to define, it’s usually cast in a positive light. For good reason. In the elderly as well as in cancer patients, being hopeful is correlated with greater (subjective) well-being and - in the elderly - with better physical health.

Plot twist: I, however, never liked hope.

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II.

Let’s leave Dante in hell for now and move further back in time.

In Greek mythology, when Prometheus stole fire to give it to humanity, Zeus had a bit of a fit — classic tough guy behavior. He told the artificer god Hephaestus to mold a woman from clay (neat trick) and she then received gifts from the other gods. The woman came to earth with a box and seduced Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus.

Her name was Pandora.

From there, you know the story. Open box, evil besets the world. Zeus the bully is pleased again. (Actually a better story to explain the existence of evil than the ones most current religions resort to.) Only… Pandora’s box was never emptied entirely. One thing remained inside. Hope.

There are as many interpretations for this as there are readers. Was Zeus remorseful? Was hope in the box to make sure the evils didn’t run rampant?

But there’s another interpretation, one which professional curmudgeon Nietzsche frames this way:

Hope in reality it is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of Man.

Hope is intrinsically deceptive and biased, like an expectation-based Dunning-Kruger effect on steroids.

Hope can set you up for disappointment and prevent you from adapting to less-than-ideal circumstances. Paradoxically, hope can lead you to hopelessness. As a concrete example, consider this 2009 study in which some people were told that their colostomy was reversible and that they could undergo a second operation to reconnect their bowels. Others were told that the colostomy was permanent. The permanent colostomy group reported being happier over the next six months than those with reversible colostomies.

III.

At this point, I have to backtrack on my natural cynicism (a little bit). Those potential negative effects of hope are probably more severe if the hope we have is false, if our expectations are delusional.

Can we save hope? Is there a way to hope sensibly?

For the beginning of an answer, we leave ancient myths and medieval hell behind to listen to admiral James Stockdale, who was the highest-ranking US officer in the Hoa Loa prisoner-of-war camp during the Vietnam War. Not an enviable position, as you can imagine. Torture was part and parcel of his eight-year stay. When author Jim Collins later asked Stockdale how he endured it, the admiral replied (bold is mine):

Retain faith that you will  prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties and at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.

Sensible hope combines a hopeful outlook with an accurate sense of reality. This is also called ‘true hope’ in contrast with ‘false hope’, in which a hopeful outlook meets unrealistic expectations. There’s even a false hope syndrome that combines neglecting lessons from the past with the expectation of an unrealistically high payoff. The difficulty is distinguishing true from false hope.

A last nuance is something philosopher Bert Musschenga points out.

… the belief that is part of hope is not a statement of fact, but a probability statement, from an epistemic point of view hope cannot be true, it can only become true. Neither can hope be false, it can only turn out to be false.

As a result, he reconsiders the problem of false hope as the lack of knowledge to make our expectations realistic. Or:

… the lack of relevant information about the chances that the desire that constitutes hope will be realized.

In a roundabout way, this brings us back to Snyder’s hope theory. Hope is not only the desire or the goal; it includes imagining ways to get there and the capacity to at least start on that route. Ideally, you have reasonably accurate information about both the pathways and (the limits of) your agency.

False hope, then, is simply a mask for ignorance, whereas true hope is humble and tentative. It doesn’t mean you can’t reach for the stars, but you have to be humble enough to recognize that you’ll probably need a rocket to get there.

Eventually, Dante reaches heaven and he sees the true, ineffable face of his Christian god. And there:

… vigour failed the towering fantasy:
but yet the will rolled onward, like a wheel
in even motion, by the Love impelled,
that moves the sun in heaven and all the stars.

Or what else did you hope for?

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Hey. I hope (*groan*) you got something to think about from this. Click buttons!