On Creating and Fulfilling Hope

The painting above by édouard Manet represents the concept of Peak Hope for me. Something screams with urgency from within a scene that is oddly still and silent. Time is frozen in an impossible lurch beyond now. Peak Hope is related to other ‘peak’ constructs such as Peak Oil and Peak Water and even Peak Photosynthesis.

A black-and-white image in our local bookstore (La Voz de la Patria) was my first encounter with this painting. I showed my oldest sister, who some time later brought home a book from the university library to show me the same picture, much larger and reproduced in color, the plate attached to the bound page. “A Bar at the Folies Bergère,” she announced. I asked, “Who is the woman?” “It’s not about the woman, it’s about the bar,” she explained. I didn’t understand how a picture of a person could be about a place but trusted my sister implicitly.

Only many years later, while reading George Orwell’s account of similar livings in Down and Out in Paris and London, did I begin to understand what my college-age sister had meant.

I kept coming back to the Courtald Gallery to stare at that staring gaze. The woman is the most striking element in the painting. But the woman’s pictorial gravity comes from the place she finds herself in and her relationship to the place. The bar at the Folies Bergère is an economic enclosure. [See NOTE 1.] She is a barely-paid worker enabling a business model she cannot successfully, that is, symmetrically, participate in. How will she ever move on from her situation? It feels like she feels trapped. She is.

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I started thinking about Peak Hope in the summer of 2016. My first conflation of ‘Peak Oil’ and ‘Peak Water’ with Peak Hope happened months before 8 November 2016. But it was watching William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth and Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, and in 2017 a few wonderful and eye-opening winter days in Saint Petersburg, or Petersburg or the-former-Leningrad (take your pick) that attached noisy sirens and alarm bells to the idea.

I informally define Peak Hope (see the graphic above, a work in progress) as an attitude and as a point in history. But before the peak there is the valley of that adaptive landscape itself. In this case a psychological commodity and the cultural and economic matrix it is embedded in.

And yesterday (now better described as 27 December 2017) I came across Melvin Rogers’ terse and useful definition of hope in the Boston Review: “Hope involves attachment and commitment to the possibility of realizing the goods we seek.”

Peak Hope involves the collapse of these attachments and commitments on an individual and societal basis. Professor Rogers contrasts his definition of hope with that of faith: “Faith is of a broader significance, providing hope with content.”

I am considering other words as well. My list so far includes: hope, faith, belief, trust, confidence, doubt, conviction, expectation, intention and outcome—in no particular order. (Yet.)

What is the relationship of Design and designers to the words in the list above? In my career I have learned that it’s much easier to design solutions for specific user populations [see?NOTE 2] than to do so for people in general, for citizens. (Including those that should be citizens, more on this elsewhere.) It is one thing to design a beautiful, readable, usable and sustainably-produced menu for a restaurant. It’s another thing to design the business model of the restaurant so that ALL the user populations contributing to the restaurant’s success receive an equitable share of the experience and the profits. Consider how true it is for more complex entities all the way to villages, towns, cities, states and nations.

The design industry has steadily tried to climb up the ladder to design more and more aspects of reality. I fully agree with that intention. But people like John Maeda (see this recent article) are suddenly coming to realize that the design industry has somewhat, or widely, overreached its grasp. It’s simply easier to design a phone or a web page or a menu than a way of life or the principles and mechanisms of commonwealth.

Design should be a tool for hope and progress. But how often is it?

A must-read concerning Peak Hope is the ever more relevant Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. (Available from Amazon, Audible, iBooks and your local library.)

And a recent memoir from Karoline Kan, ?Under Red Skies,? brings us to our times and gives us a Chinese perspective. (Available from Amazon, Audible and iBooks and your local library.)

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Hope is like a wireless broadcast or an airborne chemical message from every individual in a collective. Hope, and hopelessness, can be contagious. Hope may have been the original human meme, surely augmented by, and augmenting, other bodily messages. But hope is more than expectation. Hope, as far as we know, is a human construct and it involves trust in both a privilege and a right.

Hope and faith are not equivalent, however. Having hope and having faith are different things, supported by different mechanisms. And I have come to realize that faith is not the exclusive domain of religious experience. (I am, by way of disclosure, a materialist. [See NOTE 3.]) Hope comes from our individual perception of how we fit into the fabric of a collective reality. Faith is a personal decision to carry the burden of a set of expectations.

Hope comes from our individual perception of how we fit into the fabric of collective reality. faith is a personal decision to carry the burden of a set of expectations.

There are types of hope just like there are types of faith. There is a difference between existential hope and operative hope.

Existential Hope is biological. Organisms act. Living things “do,” they do not simply “are.” (Rocks are different, they ‘do’ by ‘being.’) Existential Hope is extremely difficult if not impossible to break. When Existential Hope breaks it leads more often to biological inaction than to violence against the self or others. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, as it benefits the group over the individual. More people —and animals— fall into terminal depression than commit direct suicide.

Operative Hope is political. It is an individual and social projection of intent and possibility. Operative Hope requires social, cultural and above all economic means of expression within a political framework. There is no point of talking about hope without talking about the fulfillment of hope. About some fulfillment of hope at a certain rate that will support the dynamics of a system evolving towards success for itself and all its components. It is precisely when the belief mechanisms of Operative Hope break down that we may run into a Peak Hope situation.

It is when the support mechanisms of operative hope break down that we may run into a peak hope situation.

[...to be continued...]

— Hector Moll-Carrillo (copyright ? 2017, 2019)

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NOTE 1: An ?economic enclosure? is a circumstance or set of circumstances that traps an economic agent (you, me, us, them) in a pattern of expenditure it is difficult or impossible to escape from. By its very nature an economic enclosure may reduce or eliminate the positive effects of innovation and competition.

A very mild example, there are much worse: You may choose to buy a bottle of water elsewhere in the city because the brand or the price are not to your preference. Inside an airport you may find that ALL stores, even if named and branded differently, belong to a single business who has been granted a concession. This often means the same selection and prices everywhere in that airport or airport terminal. And yet you thought you lived under a Free Market capitalist paradise. Interesting? There are many more examples of economic enclosures than we realize. (Disclosure: I am a capitalist.)

NOTE 2: A user population is a group of people that may be defined by a certain role they play in a multi-user relationship. The term ‘user’ has lately fallen victim to misguided identity politics and ideological fundamentalisms on left, right and center extremes. However, the concept of user populations is both segmenting and inclusive. For example, whether one is rich or poor; white, black or other; male or female or other; &c, when boarding a train or walking into a store one becomes a visitor, browser, shopper, customer, employee, manager, rider, crew, among many other possibilities. A user in terms of interaction design is simply a person who utilizes a product, service, or product-service combo. How we label and assign persons to roles is a complex set of issues.

NOTE 3: I consider and label myself as a materialist. It simply means that I consider material causes and effects sufficient to be the source of everything we can perceive (and much we cannot, it would be logical to assume) and that we may be able to ultimately gain a good-enough understanding of why and how things happen in our universe. But as a materialist, I do respect the beliefs of people who are not.