Teaching, Hopefully

It’s nearly impossible to talk about hope today without raising the image of Barack Obama’s meteoric rise. Addressing the 2004 Democratic National Convention, then-Senator Obama asked Americans to choose whether to “participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope.” While Obama is often credited for returning hope to the political arena, in doing so he reinscribed certain assumptions that have proven less than hopeful. For one, Obama yoked “hope” to a “politics,” and in doing so oriented hope toward a system of representatives who will act for the people, thereby rendering unnecessary hope as a force the people keep for themselves to render effects in their everyday lives. For another, Obama’s reduction of hope to a politics confuses the manifestation of hope—what I will call hope’s cathexsis—for hope itself. In so doing, he risks othering segments of the population whose hope might resemble his, but whose politics decidedly don’t.

Equally troubling is how Obama defined hope in opposition to both cynicism and academic culture, which, for Obama, become one and the same. In opposing hope and cynicism, Obama misses the ways that hope and cynicism derive from a shared sense that the world as it is does not operate optimally, that better functioning worlds can be imagined and enacted. The way what looks from one perspective like cynicism may look from another like hopefulness becomes clear when Obama asserts that cynicism overwhelmed American politics beginning with “old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses” during the 1960s, eroding “those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans.” It’s hard to know precisely what Obama means by “grudges and revenge plots,” but the case could be made that the “cynicism” evident on campuses in the 1960s—aimed at policies that continued a violent war abroad and discrimination at home—did more to enhance fellow-feeling and trust, although vested in the power of organized citizens rather than in the government, than it did to erode them. Would that we had more such cynicism on campuses today. The intellectual movements that arose from that “cynicism,” furthermore, including post-structuralism, critical race, feminist, and queer theories, disability, environmental, and anti-imperialist studies, have remained archives of truly audacious hope in a world that discredits such progressive hopefulness as ivory-tower naiveté and deliberate obfuscation.

Obama’s connection of academics and cynicism draws on a long narrative tradition. As far back as 1860, William Morris characterized academics at Cambridge and Oxford as affecting “an exaggeration of cynicism in order that they might be thought knowing and worldly-wise” (103). A similar note was struck in 1959 by the eminent literary scholar Newton Arvin, who accused literary critics of peddling “the cant of pessimism” (19). “We hug our negations, our doubts, our disbeliefs to our chests,” Arvin charged, “as if our moral and intellectual dignity depended on them” (31). More recently, Richard Rorty has blamed the “leftist negativity” (Shulman, 10) of the academy for surrendering the national ideals espoused by John Dewey and Walt Whitman, ideals that fostered a hope for a unified and forward-looking national community.

Sitting in the audience of academic conferences, one might well agree with Morris, Arvin, and Obama, but I want to suggest that the differences between hope and cynicism are less important than their divergent narrative styles. To put it simply, cynicism is no less hopeful, but puts its hope in negative relief, saying what it wants by saying what it disavows. Although this strategy is often effective, especially in contemporary academic circles, I want to press for the necessity of moving beyond critiques toward more direct expressions of hope that foreground the critic’s ideals, rather than leaving it for the reader to piece together from accounts of what we find wanting in the ideals of others. Whatever the short-term academic prestige that attaches to such fault-finding, we have less to gain by saying what Obama got wrong than we do by articulating what we understand as hope and what we...