Optimism goes away but hope remains.
In an interview published in The Journal of American History in March of 1994, the historian and social critic, Christopher Lasch, had this to say in response to a question about the distinction he made between hope and optimism.
[Lasch was interviewed by two of his former graduate students in the summer of 1993. At the time Lasch had taken a leave of absence from the history department at the University of Rochester in order to undergo cancer treatment. The treatment was not successful and Lasch died in his home in Pittsford, NY, on February 14, 1994.]
“Optimism is a kind of investment in the future. It can’t, therefore, survive disappointments. In the face of disappointment, it tends to become cynical and bitter, resentful. God knows, American politics and life are full of examples of curdled optimism.
“Hope, on the other hand, isn’t tied to a vision of the future. It’s more like what Erik Erikson and other psychoanalysts mean when they talk about ‘basic trust.’ It’s a trusting attitude toward life, as opposed to the attitude of mistrust and resentment and despair that so many of us carry around with us, which is a constant temptation — in fact, it’s the temptation for the thinkers I enjoy and admire most deeply, starting with Jonathan Edwards and Emerson and continuing with Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Hope is the rejection of envy and resentment and all that invites them. It’s not difficult to see why those would always seem to be compelling moral postures, because we live in a world that doesn’t seem arranged for human convenience. It’s a world in which human happiness is not the overriding goal, and our plans go awry, and there are terrible limitations on what we can know and understand and control.
“And in any case our lives are very short. The fact of death is always there, haunting our imagination. All of which seems to justify a renunciation of any belief in the possibility that the world, in spite of all these facts, is good, just, beautiful. Hope is a grateful disposition that acknowledges everything that justifies its absence. None of this, of course, implies that this is the best of all possible worlds or that the struggle against injustice ought to be suspended on the grounds that whatever is, is right.”
