What does one do to improve our conditions? When one reads about the notion of hope, some of it is in dense theoretical books (as in Ernst Bloch's massive theoretical treatise The Principle of Hope 3 vols, MIT Press 1995) and others more accessible. My understanding is that hope is not the same as optimism, or hope cannot be seen as the opposite of pessimism. (See Terry Eagleton, Hope without optimism, University of Virginia Press, 2015, Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark. Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 3 ed. Haymarket Books Chicago, 2016).

In the case of optimism or pessimism, one simply has a sense that things will get better or worse, without one doing anything. That's how it will be and one is or is not an optimist or a pessimist. Optimism/pessimism will perpetuate passivity. What people need is to find a role for themselves, to exercise their subjective agency.

Rebecca Solnit writes of why she wrote on hope, as "speaking directly to the inner life of the politics of the moment, to the emotions and perceptions that underlie our political positions and engagements. Amazed by the ravenous appetite for another way of telling who and where we were, I decided to write this. book". (Solnit, p. xiii. My italics).

This is how Solnit conceives hope:

"It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I'm interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It's also not a sunny everything-is getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings. 'Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naivete,' the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked. And Patrise Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, early on described the movement's mission as to 'Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards visions and dreams.' It's a statement that grief and hope can coexist." (At pp. xiii-xiv).

The sense of or recourse to hope is a different type of orientation from optimism or pessimism. It does not work on certainties or rely on conditions that point to future victories. "Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes - you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand." (Solnit, at p. xiv).

Shakespeare captures this sense of navigating uncertainty when Banquo, in Macbeth asks the Witches:

"If you can look into the seeds of time

And say which grain will grow and which will not,

Speak then to me." (I. 3. 22-3)

The notion of hope draws on lessons of history that can inspire our actions today and understandings of or openings for action in the present. One looks at the present for signs or germs of what could grow into something fresh and new, that may lead to the retrieval of what we have lost in recent years.

In this case, in particular, we can look at the history of the liberation of South Africa, when in the 1960s, the idea of being a free and democratic state led by Nelson Mandela and the ANC was something that was hoped for by many. But there were very few sig...