As I write these words, the world is in the grips of a deadly disease, with some nations’ swift and rigorous responses counterbalanced and undermined by the criminally negligent conduct of others. The public health crisis amplifies the hardships of modern economic distribution, further destabilises international relations, and threatens to overshadow the increasing urgency of climate change. At the same time, vast numbers of people continue to be abused, enslaved, exploited, and prevented from seeking sanctuary, while other groups assert their will by force. Even if you and I are lucky enough to be healthy, free, and secure, it’s a hard day on the planet.
Two weeks later the number of American deaths from Covid-19 had risen to 241,000.
While no one can deny that there are problems plaguing humanity, there is deep disagreement about which issues are most pressing and what to do about them: which remedies would be the most effective at the least social cost. The problems that I have in mind are those that are caused by human actions (or inaction), and that stand some chance of solution or amelioration. Rather than advancing proposals for specific solutions, I shall argue that there is at least one precondition for any kind of political change, and that it is an essential attribute for all persons who seek and work for change – essential in the sense of being morally obligatory. It’s called hope.
What hope means
Any term chosen to do such important work needs to have broad agreement about what it means. Hope is commonly thought of as an attitude, emotion, or state of mind. I’ve seen it used interchangeably with ‘optimism’, but have also seen attempts to distinguish those two terms, some of which directly contradict each other.
One way to settle on the meaning of a term is to examine the way it’s used, suggest a plausible definition, try to think of examples of its everyday use that do not fit the suggested definition, and then modify the definition so that it captures our intuitions. While I don’t propose to do this here, there is general agreement that hope incorporates a desire for some state of affairs and a belief about whether that desire will be satisfied. Philosophical accounts of hope have often focused on the likelihood of obtaining the desired end. For a state of mind to count as hope, it has to have a probability of obtaining the end that is greater than zero (i.e. not impossible), but also not 100 per cent assured. Someone may have hope even if it’s not accompanied by much confidence that it will come true, or if the hoper has little or no power to achieve it, but in those circumstances it looks very much like wishful thinking or fantasy. In literary and religious contexts, it has sometimes been linked to faith.
The reason I want to link it to activism instead is because political change is not something that ‘just happens’. Some nation, coalition, organisation, person or group has taken actions to bring it about. I think hope for political change has a more muscular character than the kind of hope we feel for the success of a movie protagonist’s quest, the prospect of good weather for the holidays, or a buoyant stock market. To characterise hope as more or less rational depending on how likely we are to achieve the hoped-for end is to discount its potential power, and our own, in achieving it.
Hope versus prognostication
A person doesn’t have to be a hoper to support candidates and parties advocating change, or to belong to organisations with political agendas. It’s also possible to be an astute analyst of political circumstances while preferring some decisions and policies over others. But discussion can come to a dispiriting halt when the astute analyst concludes with ‘We’d all love to see that outcome [that legislation passed, that candidate elected, this policy adopted, these politicians persuaded] but it will never happen’, with the spoken or unspoken corollary ‘It’s irrational to hope for it.’
The astute analyst may be someone who wants the same kind of state, nation and world that I want. She may also be someone whose motivation to participate in political action is unaffected by her belief that it’s unlikely to change anything. While such conversations generally take place in academic or social settings, not meetings of environmental campaigners or refugee advocates, pessimistic diagnoses can have a chilling effect on other people’s motivation. But is psychological comfort the main thing to be said for hope? Do we need to feel that our efforts are worth it, even if that feeling isn’t justified?
Justification, in the context of politics, is less straightforward than in science or philosophy. Political change depends on the actions of people, and power relations can and do shift. Predicting who will win an election, what will happen after the election, who will be influential in shaping policy and so forth is an individual activity. Gaining the support of voters and convincing the government of the practical or moral reasons for particular actions, by contrast, are collective activities. While an individual can hope for particular outcomes, only collectively can hope be an element in bringing them about.
In her 2020 article ‘Hoping for Peace’, Lee-Ann Chae presents a view of hope in which the value of hoping does not depend on what happens in the future, and whether the hope is ‘justified’. Although the individual hoper wants the hoped-for event to take place and actively engages in efforts to make it happen, its contribution to her efforts is not ‘all it takes’ to make her hope valuable. Hope shapes her interpretation of circumstances and the factors that she finds salient, as well as her decision as to what she will do to create change or help it along. Her hope is a component of how she sees the world: how she views not only the unsatisfactory state of affairs, but also the other people who are (and must be) a part of the effort to bring about change. I would add that politically effective hope is hoping together – it is what makes a group of individuals an us, and what makes the action and the hoped-for outcome belong to us.
A present-day political illustration may be useful.
Triumph and disappointment
For nearly 30 years, Australia has been deliberately removing protections for people who arrive seeking asylum. It has imposed criteria that can be impossible to meet if you’ve fled your country in haste; it has excised islands from its ‘migration zone’ (where those arriving without a valid visa can still be covered by provisions allowing them to apply for protection); and it has imprisoned men, women and children indefinitely as a deterrent to others. Refugee advocates have presented evidence and personal stories, lobbied, written letters, held protests, and documented the circumstances that cause people to risk their lives for transport to safety. Despite these efforts, neither of the two dominant political parties has shown any inclination to reverse the punitive policies. The reasons for the continuing cruelty are beyond the scope of this essay, but changing legislators’ minds will entail changing citizens’ minds, since perceived electability is a key element for both the Liberals and Labor.
In late 2018, a push to get more than 130 refugee children off the island of Nauru, where they were detained in appalling conditions, led to a bill amending the Migration Act. Backed by independents and the Greens, and ultimately joined by the Labor Party, the ‘Kids off Nauru’ campaign was hailed as a triumph for human rights.
Its success, however, resulted from the election of independent Kerryn Phelps, a medical doctor and human rights advocate, to a historically Liberal seat in parliament. Her victory delivered a ‘hung parliament’ (where neither major party holds the required number of seats to constitute a majority) and left the Liberals contemplating the possibility that a dissident among them might break ranks and vote with the opposition. If this were to happen, it would be regarded as a de facto vote of ‘no confidence’ in the government. The backdown by the Liberals was not a sudden fit of compassion, but an act of political survival. The children left Nauru, but in 2019 legislation enabling critically ill detainees to be evacuated to Australia for treatment on the advice of doctors (the ‘medevac’ law) was repealed and asylum seekers continue to be detained – or sent back to their countries of origin. Phelps lost her seat to a Liberal in the 2019 federal election, with her win the previous year attributed to turmoil in the Liberal Party and the resignation of its leader.
Hope was not sufficient for getting the kids off Nauru, and it would be hard to argue that it was necessary. Factors that had nothing to do with hope-fuelled activism played a decisive role. Nor did hope prevent the repeal of medevac. Refugee advocates had hoped that independent Senator Jacqui Lambie would vote against it, but she was persuaded by government allegations that medevac was not operating as intended and that transferring decision-making powers from the Minister for Immigration to doctors would have opened the back door to criminals entering Australia. She agreed to support the repeal in exchange for an undertaking on the part of the government, which she said national security reasons prevented her from disclosing; the government has denied that there was any ‘secret deal’. As of late October 2020, 1226 people who were transferred to Australia for medical treatment or other reasons do not have a valid visa to stay. Most of those who were brought in through medevac are in detention within Australia,1 held in hotels with two or more to a room. I can’t speak for them, but for their advocates, hope would appear to be at best a coping mechanism: harmless if you need it, gratuitous if you’re sturdy enough to persist without it.
Making the world better by making us better
‘[W]hen I hope for peace, others can get drawn in to my hopeful picture when they recognize how I see them – namely, as potential peace partners. When they recognize and endorse this picture of themselves, they can become lit up by hope for peace. Then they, too, will put their hopes out into the world through their thoughts and their deeds.’2
While asserting that ‘the value of what I do now on the basis of my hope does not depend on the future’, Chae seems here to be pointing to the power of one person’s hope to move others. How, then, is it to be understood as having something other than an instrumental value?
Political activism is about consequences. Debates about how a nation should deal with displaced people knocking on its door do not generally include discussion of the moral character of the politicians making the decisions. But there is no action without agents, and we do in fact refer to our collective moral character when we use phrases like ‘We are better than this’. The starting point for effective action is not an individual’s hope that the government will change its policy or that more compassionate people will be elected to office, but the embodiment of the values necessary for the achievement of those aims. In hoping together, those who hope become a ‘we’ who are, in fact, ‘better than this’. It is we who constitute a democracy, and through advocacy we invite others to become a part of us – including those who represent us in government.
Keeping hope alive
Australian refugee advocates were angry and disappointed by Senator Lambie’s vote to repeal medevac, by the secrecy surrounding her negotiations with the government, and by her overall support for boat turnbacks and offshore processing on the basis of ‘border protection’. The condition Lambie said she had placed on her vote was the government’s agreement to an ‘outcome’ that would improve medical treatment for those in offshore detention. As of November 2020, this condition still had not been disclosed. Lambie says she will tell the public by the end of the year if the prime minister fails to do so.
Meanwhile, the government continued to chip away at the conditions in which asylum seekers are detained. In September 2020, it introduced legislation to ban mobile phones in detention, saying the purpose was to stop the trade in drugs. It would also prevent detainees from speaking to lawyers and for many, would cut off all contact with the outside world. Lambie’s vote was again crucial. This time she conducted a poll, which garnered 100,000 responses, 96 per cent of which opposed the bill. In her e-mail to respondents, she said the poll had provided the opportunity to hear people’s views and why they felt that way, and to consider the reasons given for and against. She voted against it.
‘Most of them are using their phones to text their friends and family. They’re using it to watch YouTube videos about cats or movie trailers or whatever. They’re not using it to organise bloody riots. They’re using it the same way I’ve been using mine through Covid – just to get through the day. I’m not going to stop someone calling their dad on his birthday.’3
It may have been a stroke of good fortune that those who responded to Lambie’s survey felt strongly about the plight of detainees. But her statement that she considered the reasons people gave for their views indicates that her decision was not simply a matter of tallying up the pros and cons to see what the majority wanted her to do. The result, for those who value the motivating force of reasons, is hope: hope for refugees, for ourselves, and for those we choose to represent us.
Conclusion
In its conception as well as its realisation, political hope involves other people. It makes the difference between being, on the one hand, a supplicant for favors or a lone David challenging Goliath, and on the other hand, a member of a team. It doesn’t relieve us of the need to frame the arguments with all of the logical and rhetorical skills we can muster, but it makes it conceivable that your antagonist will end up being on your side at the end of the day.
References
Wainwright, Loudon, III, ‘Hard Day on the Planet’, More Love Songs, Rounder Records, 1986
Chae, Lee-Ann, ‘Hoping for Peace’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98(2), June 2020, pp. 211–21
See also
McGeer, Victoria, ‘The Art of Good Hope’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 592(1), pp. 237–54
Photo credits
230,000 died, On the Ellipse, 1 November 2020 by Victoria Pickering on Flickr, licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0
Kings Canyon, Northern Territory, Australia by Dirk Baltzly
Group conversation by Antenna on Unsplash, cropped from original
Peace: it starts with you, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 29 May 2020 by Josh Hild on Unsplash, cropped from original
Sanctuary rally #LetThemStay, Melbourne, Australia by John Englart on Flickr, licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 CC BY-SA 2.0, lightened from original
Palm Sunday rally 2018, thanks to Australian Refugee Action Network
The Nut, Stanley, Tasmania, Australia by Dirk Baltzly
Citation
Please cite as: Miller, L. Elaine, ‘Hope, for change’, It Could Be Words (blog), 12 November 2020, https://it-could-be-words.com/hope-for-change
- Refugee Council of Australia, Offshore processing statistics, 25 October 2020 https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/operation-sovereign-borders-offshore-detention-statistics/5/ [↩]
- Chae, Lee-Ann, ‘Hoping for Peace’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98(2), June 2020, p. 217 [↩]
- Karp, Paul, ‘Jacqui Lambie sinks Coalition plan to ban mobile phone access in immigration detention’, The Guardian, 2 October 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/oct/02/jacqui-lambie-sinks-coalition-plan-to-ban-mobile-phone-access-in-immigration-detention [↩]
