This diary is of course a response to a previous diary, which was on the Rec List at Kos when I woke up Thursday morning. "What happened to the energy of hope here at DailyKos?" AntonBursch said Thursday morning. Of course, there was the follow-up diary on Saturday -- but that one didn't seem to add much to the first one. Yeah, OK, some of us are motivated by hope, others by despair. Focus on what we are saying in defense of our attitudes.
There is one obvious question begged by such diaries. What, precisely, should we place our hope in? Should we hope that Obama brings about paradise on Earth, when the electorate properly learns to hate Republicans and vote them out of office (presumably next year)? Is Obama finally going to experience some pushback from the "Democratic Left" to the extent where he would actually improve his policy mix? What, precisely, is going to happen to give us hope? Should we hope that aliens descend from outer space as they did in Arthur C. Clarke's classic (1953) novel Childhood's End, and bring peace and utopia to humankind?
I can be persuaded otherwise, of course, but I don't think that hope of the progressive, electoral variety will come to DailyKos.com until Markos adjusts his FAQ a bit. "More and better Democrats" and "no promotion of third party candidates" have shown to be a good way of promoting the concept of "my party right or wrong" rather than of progressive hope. (That may not have been the intention Markos had in setting out such rules, but it appears to be the result, and if there are still plenty of interesting things to be seen here at DailyKos.com, I'm not sure progressive hope is one of them.) I'm not going to say more about this, because I don't want it to distract from the main topic of this diary, which is to say, hope.
I have, in previous diaries here, contested the idea of progressivism itself. The diary titled "Why I don't claim to be progressive" contains my main argument. Progressivism was a good thing in the Progressive Era, but in my view is not radical enough for this era, in which society is in fact regressing for lack of an alternative to a capitalist system which has claimed the world and is experiencing exhaustion at all levels. Thus there remains the possibility that progressive hope may itself be an illusion for us and that what we need is a more radical hope, or at least a different sort of hope than that encompassed by progressivism.
In light of this possibility, then, I would like to suggest other species of hope -- and below the fold I will attempt a preliminary investigation of what that hope would consist of. Many of my observations are going to appear as side-notes upon first inspection -- but what ties them together is a piece by a neural biologist, titled "Epigenesis, Brain Plasticity, and Behavioral Versatility: Alternatives to Standard Evolutionary Psychology Models" (Complexities: Beyond Nature and Nurture: eds. Susan McKinnon and Sydel Silverman). My opinion boils down to this: I think that human beings, with their vast reserves of brainpower and versatility, are capable of figuring out how to manage their affairs without entirely screwing up life on the planet.
For those who haven't read my diaries before, I'll summarize briefly what it is I think we have to overcome with our hope. We need to deal with our threat to the ecosystems of planet Earth, which significantly means that we've got to mitigate global warming but also we need t deal with our species' predatory behavior toward itself and toward its other living things. In order to do this, we've got to overcome the division of humanity into social classes, and design something better than capitalism for our mutual sustenance. There are of course all of the other divisions of the human race, but I think that there's an important distinction to make between a simple recognition that people are different from each other (which itself shouldn't prevent the application of humanistic standards in social relations) and the erection of barriers and problems of "foreign relations" between us and those "other" people.
At any rate, in the following analysis I will try to show that human beings are creatures of enormous potential, but that such potential has yet to be reconciled with the historical realities of human existence. There is, however, hope for some sort of revolutionary unleashing of human hope and versatility, such as has been at points in time been put on display in recent uprisings (e.g. the Arab Spring, the uprisings in Latin America and Europe, the Occupy movement).