Hope without action is apathy

There’s a clip stored in my mind from four decades ago – Mum telling somebody, whose identity I can’t remember, ‘‘he hasn’t got a hope’’.

The he was me, the hope I didn’t have was retaining my hair.

It was the conventional family wisdom and I accepted it. Dad was bald, and his Dad.

My paternal cousin, 10 years older than me, had visited South Africa from England when I was 13. Even then, there wasn’t much of his red hair left. There’s even less 40 years on.

Not me, though. I’ve made it into my 50s with a full head of hair. In fact, of Dad’s four sons, three of us have managed that fortuitous feat. If the wax sculptors at Madame Tussauds museums around the world ever run short, they should look us up. Happy to do a quarterly deal if they’ll collect.

But baldness isn’t a character flaw, or, for that matter, a globally critical issue. It’s more – sorry Warnie – an issue of personal vanity. I only tell the story because of the word ‘‘hope’’, which certainly does feel like a critically important global concept right now.

I must have hoped along the way I wouldn’t lose my hair, though it wasn’t the burning issue of my teenage years.

So the hope I had would have been passive, unaccompanied by decisive action. It could even have been seen as a vain hope, flying as it was in the face of genetic reality. I got lucky.

Quite the opposite, then, of the hope described this week by climate activist Ollie Langridge in a column for Stuff.

Langridge, who spent 100 days demonstrating outside our Parliament last year, in fair weather or foul, to push for the declaration of a climate emergency, is eminently qualified to make this call:

‘‘We must wake up and live in active hope. Not some airy-fairy and debilitating passive form of hope, but active hope that leads to courage and action. Humanity has to be able to react to an existential crisis. An oyster, in response to trauma, grows a pearl.’’

Passive hope, it strikes me, is somewhat akin to apathy, hoping for something that requires you not to do anything. I hope Donald Trump doesn’t get re-elected, but there’s nothing I can actively do to stop it.

There are many others who can do far more. Those hoping that climate change isn’t real, as severe as it’s made out, or human-induced – spoiler alert: it is x 3 – and that they can carry on consequence-free, are relying on the whole issue being a hoax. On the ‘rebel’ scientists, and Peter Williams, Leighton Smith, and Scott Morrison being right.

Somewhere on the vast canvas of the night sky there’s a minute, barely discernible pin-prick of light that represents their chances. But the reality is they’re in for a headshaving. Unfortunately we’re all in the path of those cosmic shears.

Fair warning, I’m about to talk religion. They say you shouldn’t in columns, but I’ve been called a snowflake and ‘‘one of Stuff’s New Age males’’ without going there, so I don’t see what I’ve got to lose.

I’m going there because hope is a central religious concept and in that context I think it reinforces Ollie Langridge’s call for active, almost resistant hope.

Chances are you’ve heard the words of 1 Corinthians 13, even if you don’t know the reference. It’s about love. Not the syrupy, weak-atthe-knees kind, but divine love, or in the Greek the New Testament was written in, agape.

Wikipedia says agape ‘‘embraces a universal, unconditional love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance. It goes beyond just the emotions to the extent of seeking the best for others’’.

‘‘Love,’’ verse 7 tells us, ‘‘always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.’’ So unconditional love and enduring hope are inextricably linked in the Christian understanding.

That’s by no means unique in religious faith, though. A few weeks ago, through a friend on social media, I came across the concept of ‘‘wise hope’’ in the writing of Roshi Joan Halifax, the abbot and head teacher of the Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

‘‘We must wake up and live in active hope. Not some airy-fairy and debilitating passive form of hope, but active hope that leads to courage and action. Humanity has to be able to react to an existential crisis. An oyster, in response to trauma, grows a pearl.’’

Ollie Langridge

‘‘Wise hope is not seeing things unrealistically but rather seeing things as they are, including the truth of suffering – both its existence and our capacity to transform it,’’ she writes.

‘‘Too often we become paralysed by the belief that there is nothing to hope for … that our political situation is beyond repair, that there is no way out of our climate crisis. It becomes easy to think that nothing makes sense anymore, or that we have no power and there’s no reason to act.’’

The presence of suffering in a wide range of guises is acknowledged, but ‘‘wise hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them, addressing them, and remembering what else is present, like the shifts in our values that recognise and move us to address suffering right now.’’

The key message, she says, is to ‘‘show up’’. In other words be ready to act, rather than hopeful that somehow you won’t have to, and thus unprepared.

Take it from whatever source you like; Ollie Langridge, Christianity, Buddhism, from the other faiths that will have the same message, from secular sources … there is hope, but it’s a hope that requires us to act, not check out and think it’s not our problem.