Hope and care in dark times: A follow-up essay

Abstract

I would like to thank Nowak for their careful engagement with my essay which is best read as a reactionary product of my exasperation at a specific historical moment in time. In fact, there are a lot of things in my essay that I wish I didn’t claim, such as the usefulness of the “veil of ignorance” of which logic, on a careful reading, relies on atomistic individualism—that I do not (or never intended to) support, even inadvertently. Regardless, if I were to explain why I had fashioned my ideas in a certain way at that time, I could probably muster a few words to say. On hope, what I wanted to point out in the essay was the uncertainty of the Covid situation at that time, and what that uncertainty brings us in forging new future actions. I was not talking about “hope” in the sense of a blind or passive belief, but rather in the sense of staying active for a transition—preferably a transition with our collective intention. Because we just do not knowwhat will eventually happen, and yet the assumption that our life would still continue is sustained regardless, one can speculate how something new and unexpected may be transitioned into something better. Relatedly, Wills and Lake (2020: 3–51) highlight the wisdom of pragmatism that not only provides guidance for dealing with uncertainty, but also views uncertainty as a possibility for our continuous trial and improvement. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (2007[1981]: 5) wrote decades ago: “Angst is an intermittently fashionable emotion and the misreading of some existentialist texts has turned despair itself into a kind of psychological nostrum. But if we are indeed in as a bad state as I take us to be, pessimism too will turn out to be one more cultural luxury that we shall have to dispense with in order to survive in these hard times” (emphasis in the original). For a lot of people, “hope” is not a luxury; it simply is a useful mechanism of concatenating lives in dark times. Simone and Pieterse (2017), in New Urban Worlds, challenge the “common sense” assumptions about slums and informal settlements as “inhabitable” or “the areas to be developed.” They also warn, however, the danger of romanticising hope. As they critique: