In the climate discussion it often seems to be a choice between two camps. Or you are an optimist who thinks that we will get out of trouble if we take enough measures and use technology. If only we rely enough on the policy models. Underneath climate optimism is a belief in progress, an assumption that tomorrow will almost automatically be better than today. Moreover, the future is possible.
And if you don’t believe that, the opposite is often lurking: fatalism, sometimes even an almost apocalyptic, science fiction-like belief in inevitable doom.
Both the pessimists and the optimists are probably both wrong, in any case both have clear blind spots, says economist and theologian Jan Jorrit Hasselaar. “Above all, the future is unpredictable, radically uncertain,” he says in a conference room at the Faculty of Religion and Theology at VU University Amsterdam, where he works as a researcher.
Both optimism and pessimism fail to deal well with that fundamental uncertainty, he argues: “With optimism you pretend that uncertainty does not exist: the world will get better anyway. And with pessimism you can only see the negative sides of the uncertainty, while it is also full of promise.”
In his newly published book Climate Change, Radical Uncertainty and Hope (Amsterdam University Press), Hasselaar explores a ‘third way’: the way of hope. In doing so, he bases himself on the concept of hope as elaborated in various books by the British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020). For Sacks, hope was not a naive way of looking dreamily optimistic about the future. Hope is not: sitting back and hoping that things will work out. For example, Sacks wrote, “Optimism is the belief that the world will get better. Hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world a better place. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one.’
Hope is hip
Hope is hip. It is striking that the term is also used a lot in the climate movement. British chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall, for example, published her last year Book of Hope, in which she points to the resilience of nature and young people’s drive for change as sources of hope in these anxious times. Ecologist and systems thinker Joanna Macy recently released a new edition of her classic Active Hope, in which she, like Jonathan Sacks, describes that hope is not so much what we have as what we do. “Like tai chi or gardening”: first you have to take time to face reality, then you identify what you hope for, and then you take concrete steps to move it that way.
In his book, Hasselaar tries to link philosophical and theological concepts of hope to the major social transitions of today. But what is following him? “Hope is a narrative, a journey in which the parties involved, with often conflicting perspectives, learn to take responsibility together for a shared future.”
According to him, it is also about finding ‘the utopia in the now’: something positive that is already going on that you can reinforce. “The focus is not on a well-defined promised land in 2030 or 2040, but on the journey itself and the land of the promise in the now.”
You can tell from the way he talks that he is in two worlds at the same time: the world of theology and of economics. Hasselaar is director of the Center for Religion and Sustainable Development at the VU. Together with a consortium of companies, governments and knowledge institutions, he recently started a big project to investigate which cultural changes are necessary for a future-proof living environment. He also works in Cape Town with the South African Archbishop Thabo Makgoba, Desmond Tutu’s successor, on various projects with the theme of ‘hope’.
Together with colleagues from disciplines such as positive psychology and design research, Hasselaar explores questions such as: what different perspectives are there on the sustainability transition? How can you shape conversations between people in such a way that perspectives reinforce each other instead of paralyzing each other? What are the people involved afraid or angry about? What shared wishes do people have for the future of their children? How can you maintain and expand shared inspiration? “In short: who do we want to be together?”
Big questions
Those are some big questions. And also questions about which opinions can differ extremely. But conflicting visions of where the hope lies do not have to be a source of polarization, according to Hasselaar: “They can also be a source of innovation, as long as you listen carefully to each other.”
And yet: in those kinds of joint conversations where people listen carefully and work on shared hopes, we have not been very good as a society lately, it seems. For example, look at how the social conversation about the agricultural transition is going. There, polarization predominates, and there is a paralyzing lack of hope. Isn’t the focus on hope a rearguard action? “Especially in transitions, all the voices involved must be given a good place,” says Hasselaar. “That is the only way to do justice to everyone. And, only in this way can parties become aware of the images they live with and may stand in the way of real change.”
According to him, the example of peasant anger shows that hope cannot be taken for granted, and that when hope is lost, people can actually entrench themselves deeply in their own right. Hope takes effort, time, attention, contemplation. You can get distracted quite easily if you don’t consciously make enough time for it.
Hasselaar therefore makes a remarkable suggestion in his book. He thinks it would be a good idea if people invented a modern version of the ‘Sabbath’.
Sabbath means stop
Sabbath is a term often used for a holy day of rest, but it means something else. Sabbath simply means stop in Hebrew. “It is letting go of the everyday, so that new inspiration, new insights can arise.”
But weren’t we just getting rid of a Sabbath in the Netherlands? “The Sabbath I am referring to is anything but a religious holiday,” he says. According to Hasselaar, the point is that in a time of major changes and uncertainty, it is important to create a safe place at set times. A place where listening to each other and postponing judgment are made more important than polarized debate and discussion. Exactly the opposite of what often happens with many political topics and on social media.
In Hasselaar’s view, a modern Sabbath at least consists of recurring, physical gatherings to discuss essential questions so that hope can be found. But what does such a fixed moment look like? “It is preferable that these are not just meetings in which people talk and think. But where music and art also play a role and where a good meal is on the table, for example.”
Yet such a Sabbath does not sound very concrete. Should they become some kind of fixed festivals, neighborhood meetings, communal meals, conferences, events, a kind of secular church services?
Hasselaar deliberately leaves that open: “My idea is not to ‘play church’, a Sabbath should not be a new religious dictate, but something that people shape and organize themselves.” He doesn’t even have to call it a ‘Sabbath’. He himself likes the term ‘workshop of hope’. And in South Africa these kinds of gatherings are called ‘courageous conversations‘, courageous conversations. In recent years, various communities and activists, both secular and religious, have been experimenting with ideas such as ‘climate sabbats’ and ‘Fridays for Future– with varying degrees of success.
In addition to hope, people should also get to work themselves with their own interpretation of a new Sabbath, he thinks. But a joint ritual could help, Hasselaar thinks: “Rituals can help to pause for a moment, to break through the obviousness of certain behavior.” And so to find hope, he hopes.