Hope from Despair^*

Abstract

The public discourse on climate change has long centred around hope-based narratives pushed by both the media and mainstream environmentalist agents from Greenpeace and WWF to Bill Gates and Al Gore.11 Most recently, see for instance Gates 2021. The promises of scientific and technological advance in particular, they argue, give us reason to be hopeful that it is in our hands to halt the incipient climate catastrophe. We just need to roll up our sleeves and get on with it. In the face of humanity’s apparent inability—on display most recently at COP26 in Glasgow—to adopt the ‘rapid and far-reaching changes in all aspects of society’ required to at least keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C,22 IPCC 2018. this narrative has come under pressure. More radical climate activists make the case for an affective shift away from hope in the face of global warming towards darker attitudes such as anger, panic, or fear, or, most surprisingly perhaps, despair. The activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has arguably been the most vocal in their call for hope to ‘die’.33 Greta Thunberg (2019) famously encapsulated this sentiment in her Davos speech: ‘I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.’ Hope, they worry, obscures the truth about global warming as the single largest existential threat to the planet and hampers the kind of radical action that would be required at least to rein in its consequences. ‘In facing our climate predicament’, they argue, ‘there is no way to escape despair'.44 Extinction Rebellion 2019, p. 13. The notion of ‘climate despair’ has been used at least as far back as Pooley 2010, but has only recently gained prominence. Reactions have been mixed, both from within and beyond the climate movement. While some fellow activists express enthusiasm about an explicit invocation of despair,55 Hine 2019, p. 11. others worry about its potentially stifling and depoliticizing effects on the public. According to the American scientist Michael Mann, the rhetoric of despair ‘is in many ways as pernicious as outright climate change denial, for it leads us down the same path of inaction’;66 Mann 2017. writer and activist George Monbiot even considers succumbing to despair to be a moral failure.77 Monbiot 2019. In the media, XR are frequently portrayed as the ‘eccentric and dangerous merchants of despair’.88 Harris 2020. This discursive backlash chimes with a philosophical scepticism about despair that is both widespread and long-standing. According to Euripides’ Amphitryon, despair is the ‘mark of a worthless man’;99 Euripides, Heracles, 105–6, cited in Cairns 2020. Aquinas considers it ‘the greatest of sins’;1010 Aquinas 1923, Qu. 20, Art. 3. Kant’s greatest worry is that we might ‘succumb to despair’ in the face of moral obligation;1111 Kant 1996, 8: 309. Charles Peirce equates despair with insanity.1212 Peirce 1992, p. 405. And contemporary philosophers juxtapose celebratory accounts of hope as a motivation and source of grit with a view of despair as unproductive, impotent, or nihilistic. Despairing agents, they argue, should either give up on the relevant end or cultivate an attitude, such as hope, that strengthens their resolve rather than undermining it.1313 E.g., Han-Pile and Stern forthcoming. Unsurprisingly, political philosophers tend to agree that ‘a hopeful politics, one based upon a vision of generalized global prosperity and sustainability, best addresses the problems of climate change’.1414 Moellendorf 2021a, p. xxi. The aim of this article is to withstand this wholehearted rejection of despair in philosophical and public discourse alike. I shall argue that a specific form of despair that I call episodic has an important role to play in our practical and particularly in our political lives.1515 Hope itself has only recently attracted the attention of political philosophers (e.g., Howard 2021; Stockdale 2021). For an overview, see Blöser et al. 2020. In guarding against certain pitfalls of false hope, episodic despair can help us to hope (and ultimately act) well. Against this background, I propose to understand XR activists not as asking us to reject or give up hope, but as aspiring to a and kind of hope, from despair. 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