Hope Won't Save Us. It's Going to Get Us All Killed.
Climate optimists keep talking about hope, but philosophers offer us a warning.
I've heard it all before:
Doomers are ruining everything. They're encouraging everyone to give up. They're evangelizing hopelessness and fear.
Yawn.
The hopium dealers trot out every tired cliche they can think of. They claim expertise and pass judgment on anyone who tries to express their raw emotions about what's going on these days. Apparently, people don't have a right to make anyone else feel uncomfortable.
Anyway, I got curious about this word hope. The climate optimists keep throwing it out there, like it's a good thing.
I looked it up.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ancient perspectives on hope saw it “mostly as an attitude to reality that [was] based on insufficient insight into what is true or good.”
Ding.
As the great stoic Seneca wrote, hope always accompanies fear. He described them as “bound up with one another… like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to.” Hope by itself didn’t make things better. Both fear and hope “belong to a mind in …