I AM sorry to tell you that the world is about to end — albeit in approximately one billion years, when the sun starts burning out. Of course, it could be earlier, given the eco crisis: there have been at least five mass extinctions before, when life has lost out to a planet trying to get itself back in balance. Worryingly, asteroids with a 1km diameter strike the earth every half a million years or so; and that is not to forget the risk of the arrival of hostile aliens or the robo-apocalypse meanwhile.
Closer to home, in reaction to the unfolding geo-political crisis, there is a three-year planning assumption in place in Whitehall for the onset of the Third World War. No wonder we are raising a generation of sad children (Analysis, 9 May).
In Works and Days, Hesiod wrote about an earlier end-of-the-world event, when Pandora opened her box and released into the world plagues, sickness, and death. Afterwards, Hesiod tells us that “only Hope remained.” The Greek word that he uses for hope, transliterated elpis, is the same word as St Paul uses throughout the epistles, as in 1 Corinthians, where he juxtaposes faith, hope, and charity. He uses it again in the famous passage about character from Romans: we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us (Romans 5.3-5) (Comment, 23 May).
In this context, hope is a posture or an orientation, not simply an emotion. It is a theological discipline, because it is a refusal to despair. It is about loving the future, in spite of it all. As Nick Cave puts it, “Hope is optimism with a broken heart.”
HOPE is also a strategy, because hope can be viral and contagious, in the same way as, when someone smiles at you, it is really hard not to smile back. My hope in hope is based on both God and game theory, a branch of mathematics which models interactions between decision-makers. It reduces typical interactions to formulaic “games” to test strategies and to predict likely outcomes, and is used in economics, politics, and negotiation, as well as in logic and programming.
As part of his exploration of the evolution of co-operation, the political scientist Robert Axelrod once organised a massive tournament of computerised games, submitted by a wide range of experts in diverse disciplines, all designed to play a classic Prisoners’ Dilemma game iteratively with one another.
The games submitted ranged from complex exploitative ones to those that were simply nice. The tournament showed that, by the 1000th generation, the game Tit for Tat, with its co-operative strategy of “Be nice, punish a defection once, resume being nice,” was the most successful. Moreover, he found that, in a system of games which mixed together nice and nasty ones, the nice games ultimately prevailed, because the nasty ones destroyed the environment that they needed for their own success, and thus failed to thrive.
The research acts as an unusual proof of Matthew 5.13 and 16 “You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world,” because, as a theory of change, the maths shows that “mony a mickle maks a muckle.”
IT MAY be the end of the world, one way or another, but, as the song by the band R.E.M. says, it’s probably only the end of the world as we know it. So, in her cheerily named book Not the End of the World, the data scientist Hannah Ritchie counsels us against despair. We will not be the last generation. On the contrary, we are the first generation with options. Previous generations had poorer life outcomes, and did not have either the knowledge or the means to live sustainably on this planet; but we do — and we need to use hope to fuel our action.
We have been here before many, many times, and our history is full of stories about it. Dougald Hine’s book At Work in the Ruins expands on this idea, drawing on the work of the Italian philosopher Federico Campagna.
He notes that, throughout history, people have been born into the ending of a world. If it happens to us, our job is to make “good ruins” on which the future might base its new foundations. We are told in Exodus that the people of Israel “took the best things of Egypt” with them when they left: what should we steal away with us into the future now? As we see refugees all over the world leaving their homes, it is sobering to think about what you would put in your own luggage, let alone what we might pack for humanity as a whole.
But the one thing that we must be sure to pack is hope: our love for the future. Hope as an attitude; hope as attention; hope as a very human defiance in the face of Dementor algorithms that feed on despair. Hope is our investment in tomorrow, so that even putting something in the freezer, posting a letter, or going to bed is a simple but profound practice of hope.
IN THE 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson posited a lovely thought experiment. Imagine if the stars came out only once every thousand years. Can you imagine the awe that they would inspire? Can you imagine the stories that would be told about the last great sighting, and the growing excitement about the next? Can you imagine what practices of hope would be required to sustain the intergenerational wait? And we are lucky enough that we just need to go out tonight and look.
Nature is patterned on hope through the cycle of life — every spring reminds us of that. But perhaps, in these overwhelming times, we need to remember that hope is the thing with feathers, not wings; it is a fledgling that may need to be coaxed out, and it needs to grow.
So, on the next clear night, let us pray Psalm 8 with the stars, and start developing our wing-strength from there.
Dr Eve Poole is executive chair of the Woodard Corporation and writes in a personal capacity.
