How do hope and fear influence power

Politics must acknowledge, and work with, this powerful collective political force. What he has to say about hope as an affect experienced by individuals does not automatically or neatly map onto his analysis of collective hope in politics see Steinberg, The political is not merely the personal, writ large. From the point of view of the free man sketched in the Ethics, Part 4, every passion involves passivity and so detracts from freedom and reason.

But there is no such thing as a perfectly rational human being — we are all, by nature, subject to individual and collective passions. But collective human endeavour gives rise to new powers of action and intensely political affects. As a recent anthology argues, Spinoza was a prescient theorist of the social and political implications of relational ontology Armstrong et al.

Insofar as, for him, everything that exists is connected to everything else, and the power of any given body is constitutively determined by the good and bad compositions it is able to form with other bodies, being itself is always political. Although other human beings are among the most dangerous things we can encounter — because they are more cunning than the other animals — Spinoza also judged that when human beings combine their powers harmoniously then homo homini Deus est man is god to man, E4p35s.

The contributors hail from the United States of America, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and each brings something of their own political context to bear on the question of hope and the political.

For Susan James, the disempowering affects and lack of stable consensus, recently witnessed in political debates over Brexit, can be usefully addressed through a Spinozist framework that casts hope and fear in a mutually corrective and jointly empowering role.

This framework encourages a community to reflect on its shared hopes along with the potential risks that accompany them. Finally, Martin Saar reflects on the value of a neo Spinozist perspective that treats hope as an indicator of the transindividual social conditions that help shape political agency.

Although Spinoza is often appropriated as a warrant for quite diverse forms of theorising affective politics, such warrants are not always sound. It is surely the case that contemporary democratic societies have little in common with the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch Republic in which Spinoza lived, and which helped to form his views about politics.

However, certain of his insights into human ways of being and ways of knowing remain key to figuring out what beings like us might do in order to better understand our present, and through such understanding act to enhance our collective power to enjoy free and reasonable lives. We should recall too that it was one of the sites of the bubonic plague pandemic of — that reportedly killed up to , people in London.

Hope and fear — about plagues, wars, and natural disasters — are not new, and remain the two most powerful drivers of our political behaviour, and the constructive institutional management of these passions is essential if governments are to provide safety and security. Also essential to the effectivity of our political institutions is some understanding of the collective imagination and our enthralment to images.

The power of the social imaginary to play on our vulnerabilities, to manipulate as well as to enhance our political strengths, should not be underestimated Saar, For him, it is always a question of finding a judicious balance between these passional states but, as some contributors note, Spinoza recommends the inducements of hope, reward, and love over the threats of fear and punishment.

Rulers who can inspire trust and love in the polis will be stronger than those who rule by deception and fear. This is because love is a joyful passion and as such involves an increase in our power, unlike hatred and fear which are always sad and debilitating. Governments that encourage well-grounded hope for the future will be more loved than feared by those whom they govern, and so will constitute more joyful and more powerful political bodies. His critique of theology James, , of human narcissism in relation to our imagined privileged status in nature Lloyd, , and of our epistemic hubris, all repay study today.

As part of nature, and a very tiny part at that , our hopes and interests are easily crushed by the many non-human forces of nature fire, pandemics, famine, tsunami, earthquake. But the power that we do possess is to endeavour to understand ourselves, our context, and the ways in which our future possibilities are determined by past and present causes.

TP, chapter 5, p. To form reasonable, peaceful, and secure democratic political societies, based in a harmony of powers E4Appen XV—XVI , is the excellence to which he bids us to aspire. His cautious philosophy of hope can inspire a range of strategies and resources for imagining our future otherwise. To do so, we need first to understand that we are a part of nature — a status we share with all other beings — and that our well-being depends on respecting and sustaining the complex interdependencies of all human and non-human life.

This Spinozistic realisation of what our genuine powers and vulnerabilities are, would compel us, through an inborn impulse to preserve ourselves conatus , to select, to build, and to maintain joyful networks of active affects and to form connections between affirmative and non-reactive powers, all supported and enhanced, ideally, by reasonable collective bodies. This would amount to embodying, expressing, and nurturing that type of power that understands itself as enabled by connection and interdependence — rather than opting for a reactive and instrumentalist power that reckons its worth by what it can use, abuse, or dominate.

For Spinoza, the attainment of our political aspirations does not depend on reason alone, nor on desire alone, but also on a capacity to mobilise a collectively imagined hoped-for future. America may be the land of optimism, but it peddles a rather tainted brand of hope.

And if the land of the ever-expanding frontier promised an escape from suffering for some, it came only at the expense of the suffering of others, building hope on a foundation of expropriation, exploitation, and slavery. But while his election was historic, it soon became apparent that Obama himself was an inveterate incrementalist, not a transformative politician.

While this dashed the hopes of some, the vision of Obama as an iconoclast persisted in right-wing media and cyberspace, giving rise to anxiety and vitriol that generated first the Tea Party movement and then the populist wave that propelled Donald Trump into power. Trumpian hope is born of, and sustained through, a thousand gnawing fears. While Spinoza was writing in Post-Westphalian Europe, in what would come to be regarded as the Dutch Golden Age, the political situation in the young Dutch Republic was still rather volatile, as theological disputes, civil factions, controversies about confessional liberties, and ongoing wars left the country frayed.

The account runs something like this: when people are anxious they are eager to find sources of hope or signs of something better to come, irrespective of the epistemic merits of these sources TTP, Preface, p.

Credulity then gives rise to stable superstition when the governors mobilise the affective power of religion for political ends TTP, Preface, p. Hope and fear function together here for, by keeping people anxious and miserable — bereft of other sources of hope — shrewd, deceptive political leaders can position themselves as saviours, beacons of hope in a bleak world.

In addition to hope and fear, Spinoza points to hate and anger as affects that feed politicised superstition TTP, Preface, p. In both cases, a politically manipulated anxiety begets credulity, antagonism, and ultimately commitment to a specious form of hope. From all of this, we might expect that Spinoza would be critical of the role of hope in politics.

Not only does Spinoza think that hopeful citizens will preserve the institutions and laws of the state more steadfastly than fearful citizens, he also thinks that hopeful citizens are freer, less constrained, and more willing than their fearful counterparts. Unlike the desperate, fear-fuelled, Trumpian form of hope described in the preface of the TTP, the form of hope that he recommends arises from living in a well-functioning state.

In his political treatises, Spinoza cites security securitas as one of the chief aims of the state TP, chapter 1, p. The psychological or affective import of these claims has often been overlooked, as security is often read as something more like physical safety, despite the fact that Spinoza explicitly connects security with freedom from fear TTP, chapter 20, p. By understanding security as confidence in the state and its institutions — a kind of civic trust — we can better appreciate his endorsement of hopeful governance.

The question of why hope, as a mental state or attitude, is good must be distinguished from the question of why it is good to be hopeful. One reason why it is good to be hopeful is just that hope is an indicator of expected utility.

But this still leaves us to answer why hope as an attitude is itself good. Much of the current philosophical literature focuses on the empowering function of hope. Victoria McGeer, for instance, has argued that hope enables one to acknowledge and respond to limitations on agency, fostering resilient and imaginative responses:.

McGeer also claims that hope can empower us to trust others and that by displaying trust in others we can empower them to exercise their own agential capacities McGeer, , p. To support this, she considers the way in which depression and despair — and the correspondingly high rates of alcoholism and suicide — have ravaged indigenous communities in America , pp.

Consider the reasoning behind his claim in the Ethics that one cannot think less of oneself than is just:. For whatever man imagines he cannot do, he necessarily imagines; and he is so disposed by this imagination that he really cannot do what he imagines he cannot. For so long as he imagines that he cannot do this or that, he is not determined to do it, and consequently it is impossible for him to do it.

Spinoza is implying here that in order to be capable of doing something, one must first imagine that one can do it, which is not possible without hope. To lack hope, then, is to render oneself incapable. We see this in his analysis of oppressive states, which are marked by pervasive fear bordering on despair:. No state has stood so long without notable change as that of the Turks … Still, if slavery, barbarism, and being without protection are to be called peace, nothing is more wretched for men than peace … peace does not consist in the privation of war, but in a union or harmony of minds.

TP, chapter 6, p. In sum, then, Spinoza recognised that a lack of hope is incapacitating, and that it is a fundamental political concern to ensure that people feel hopeful. In addition to thinking that security is good because of what it facilitates, Spinoza also thinks that to live and act from security rather than fear is itself to live more willingly and, in a sense, more authentically.

He proceeds to contrast compelled, fearful action with willing, hopeful action:. For in this way everyone will do his duty eagerly. TTP, chapter 5, p. TTP, chapter 14, p. Spinoza relies on the same conceptual pairs of hope-willingness and fear-constraint in the Political Treatise :. A free multitude is guided by hope more than by fear, whereas a multitude which has been subjugated is guided more by fear than by hope. The first want to cultivate life; the second care only to avoid death.

The first are eager to live for themselves; the second are forced to belong to the victor. So we say that the second are slaves, and the first free.

TP, chapter 9, p. To act from timidity is to seek to evade some evil rather than to affirm the good in the action. People whose actions are motivated largely by fear are conquered by external causes. By contrast the secure person is able to affirm directly the good in their action. For example, if someone sees that he pursues esteem too much, he should think of its correct use, the end for which it ought to be pursued, and the means by which it can be acquired, not of its misuse and emptiness, which only someone sick of the mind thinks of.

E5p10s, emphasis added. Rather, the aim is to promote security through good governance. Ultimately, he wishes to promote hope as an indicator of expected utility, an instrumentally empowering attitude, and as a direct expression of power. This leaves us to ask how exactly the state can foster security. Admittedly, they are quite dim.

But they are even dimmer if we lack hope. For that reason, perhaps we must now summon resources for proleptic hope, for only by acting hopefully in these bleak circumstances can we create conditions that might one day justify this hope. Despite the horrors of that day and of the days to come, I felt a sense of hope. In the weeks that followed, that hope gave way to fear and despair as the Australian government instead did everything in its power to avoid admitting to the link between climate change and the severity of the — bushfire season.

The fires were blamed on arsonists or on the failures of hazard reduction burning, but behind these scapegoating tactics the implicit message was clear: to take action on climate change would be to risk the loss of a way of life built on a fossil fuel economy. When faced with an event with the potential to build broader social support for meaningful action on climate change, the Australian government responded with a strategy of fear and misinformation: Australians were encouraged to fear the costs of action on the economy and their standard of living over the costs of inaction.

Citizens concerned about climate change were thus positioned as economy-wrecking enemies of the Australian way of life. Instead of serving to unite Australians in common cause around a common hope for a liveable future, the bushfire crisis in Australia was cunningly exploited to entrench social divisions and foster mutual fear. In foreclosing the possibility of reasoned public debate, this strategy of fear also ensured that the power interests vested in maintaining the political and economic status quo would continue to be shielded from scrutiny.

Spinoza could not have foreseen the ecological crisis that we face today, but he would certainly have recognised the hopes and fears constitutive of the various personal and political responses to this crisis.

Of all the passions, Spinoza regarded hope and fear as some of the most important in creating and sustaining communal identities and in shaping the character of social and political life. In sharing hopes and fears with others, we express a common outlook on the world, and because our hopes and fears motivate us to pursue the things we hope for and to evade or overcome the things we fear, shared hopes and fears also constitute collective patterns of action and response.

In the Ethics , Spinoza presents hope and fear as two expressions of a single affective complex. Our hopes and fears track the ways in which our bodies and minds are empowered and disempowered in relation to uncertain outcomes.

The inconstancy of the affects of hope and fear is a function of the fact that their objects — the idea of the outcome we hope for, or fear will come to pass — are uncertain. Conversely, when one fears an outcome, one at the same time hopes that it will not come to pass. Gripped by hope that the bushfire crisis may prompt the Australian government to rethink its climate policies, I am also fearful that it may not. It is because our hopes and fears enmesh us in uncertainty, doubt, and anxiety about the future that they are particularly important political tools.

The desire to resolve a state of anxious uncertainty by securing the ends we hope for renders us easier to control with promises of security. The same desire for certainty makes us vulnerable to the influence of the ambitious who seek to exploit our hopes and fears by offering superstitious interpretations that serve to consolidate their influence and power over us.

Managing the relationship between hope and fear is thus central to politics, and the role these affects play in any particular political community will determine its character in fundamental ways. In reflecting on the political deployment of the affects in his political writings, Spinoza suggests that it is the ratio of hope to fear that is most important in determining the character of states.

This observation entails both a descriptive and an evaluative element, as the following passage from the Political Treatise indicates:. In this passage, Spinoza suggests that in political communities in which hope prevails over fear, people are more empowered, joyful, and freer, than in communities in which fear dominates Steinberg, , chapters 4—8.

He is recommending, contra Hobbes, that the wise state adopt an affective strategy of motivating obedience to its laws and institutions by fostering hope of benefits rather than fear of punishment. This strategy, he suggests, is the best way to engender loyalty to the state and thus a better means of securing political stability than a Hobbesian strategy of fear Steinberg, ; Field, When the state seeks to secure participation and loyalty by appealing to our aspirations for freedom and empowerment, it binds us to itself predominantly by the joyful bond of hope for empowerment.

And when, through the lens of hope, we see political society as an enabling condition of life, and an arena for the pursuit of the good, we are motivated to participate in it more actively. Because, for Spinoza, freedom and empowerment can only be realised in community as an ongoing collective project, a hopeful orientation towards community plays a vital, contributory role in the project of freedom. Consider, first, how we might envisage the affective economy of hope and fear operating in the politics of the environmental movement.

It might seem natural to think that the environmental movement, because it tends to appeal to dreadful images of an unliveable future to motivate commitment to its cause, is itself primarily motivated by fear to avoid the evil that an unliveable future represents. However, this characterisation seems to me to be fundamentally misleading, since it suggests that this movement lacks any positive commitments.

When one considers what the environmental movement is committed to, the answer must surely be that it is committed to pursuing the kind of socio-political transformation required if we are to construct more sustainable ways of life. In that sense, and using the terms that Spinoza provides, its primary orientation is towards hope for the good that a transformed society represents — a more sustainable and liveable future — and it only secondarily fears not being able to achieve this outcome.

As long as those involved in this movement are able to remain hopeful of making progress in bringing about this desired future, fears about what it would mean to fail will not devolve into the despair that certainty of failure produces E3DEfAff XV , but may instead function to further energise their resolve by reminding them of the stakes of failure.

Thus, as Susan James argues so richly below, although fears of failure always shadow hopes of success, the ratio of hope to fear, and the relationship established between them, makes all the difference to whether the affective dynamic thus established contributes generally to empowerment, or on the contrary, to disempowerment. This affective economy, in which hope for the good is made to prevail over fear of an evil, can thus be understood, not just as a description of how the environmental movement contingently happens to be constituted, but instead as an affective relationship that can and must be cultivated.

One of the key advantages of the privileging hope over fear is the fact that hope is a species of joy, which corresponds to an increase in power, while fear is a species of sadness that signals its diminution.

Thus, any social organisation or political order in which hope mostly prevails over fear will be experienced as generally more empowering than one in which the intrinsically disempowering passion of fear predominates.

However, although hope is more empowering than fear, it suffers, as all passive affects do, from an instability that derives from the fact that it signals our dependence on undependable external things. It is the unstable and fluctuating nature of passive affects that explains why Spinoza attends so closely to the issue of how to design social and political institutions capable of channelling and stabilising their expression.

In addition to these institutional checks, Spinoza also considers the non-institutional ways in which our affects come to acquire a relatively stable and settled cast. The key mechanism he identifies in this regard is the imitation of the affects, whereby perceived resemblances between individuals form the basis of imaginary identifications, which provide the basis for common collective affects. In other words, according to Spinoza, we come to imitate the affects of others we perceive to be like us E3p27D.

In light of the imitation of the affects, we can see how the hope that motivates individuals as part of the environmental movement might be reinforced through being shared, and also stabilised through its directedness towards an idea of a common goal, so as to create a fairly stable affective basis for a strong form of civic engagement and activism.

For Spinoza the realist, affects are the true basis for civil unity, which is why he regards politics as an art of cultivating the affective life of the body politic in ways that support the rational desire for empowerment Steinberg, , chapter 8. Turning now to the conservative political reaction to the environmental movement, what can we say about the affective economy of hope and fear that sustains it?

Does its tendency to downplay worries about the seriousness of climate change mean that it is motivated by a hopeful, if misguided and vague, optimism about the future? I think it is uncontentious to describe this object, or uncertain outcome, as the possibility of changes to the present. What motivates conservative politics is the desire to secure the present against change, to preserve the status quo , so that business as usual — fossil fuelled consumer capitalism — can continue unabated.

Because the possibility of preserving the present only becomes uncertain, and thus an object of fear, when it is threatened by something external, we can understand the conservative political response to the environmental movement to be driven by fear of the threat that this movement poses to its continued enjoyment of present goods. However, once fear ceases to be about an uncertain outcome, and is instead directed at what is imagined to be a threatening and hostile external force, it gives rise to hatred.

Of more interest to the present topic of hope is the question of what happens to hope, and how hope is managed, within a conservative political landscape dominated by fear of change. What are the hopes that shadow fear of changes to the present, and that serve to attach us to the socio-political present more strongly?

The answer to this question depends entirely on how one is situated in relation to the political present. Here I will focus only on the kind of hope that binds beneficiaries of the existing political and economic order to this order, thus serving to ensure its preservation. For those who directly benefit from the existing political and economic order, investment in that order typically takes the form of privatised hopes.

By attaching us to the existing political and economic order via hope for the private advantage that it promises to secure for us, privatised hopes also serve to invest us in the preservation of that order. Moreover, because the privatisation of hope detaches personal expectations from the wider world, it serves to weaken the sense of our belonging to a collective, and thereby also weakens collective capacities to solve collective problems like climate change.

Understood as an affective strategy, the privatisation of hope constitutes an effective means of undermining social solidarity and obscuring the social and political sources of problems. In this disempowering relation between structure and affect, we see an example of how a particular distribution of the affects of hope and fear can lead us to support our own servitude, making us fight for slavery as if for our survival TTP, Preface, p.

To think with Spinoza about the place of hope and fear in politics is to become attentive to the determining role played by these affects in our social and political lives. Spinoza invites us to be alert to the ways in which hope and fear may be fostered and deployed, and to consider how the different relationships established between them may serve either to empower or to disempower individuals and societies.

Adapting these therapeutic insights to our own context can serve, at the very least, to make us aware of the political significance of our supposedly private hopes and fears. In his most philosophically ambitious mood Spinoza is not an advocate of hope. As we develop our rational understanding, he argues, the transient satisfaction we derive from hoping gives way to the steady joy of concentrating on what we understand. A community of perfect philosophers would therefore have no use for hope.

But as Moira Gatens reminds us in her introduction to this Critical Exchange, Spinoza is well aware that we are not perfect philosophers. Since losing hope is one of the most painful things that can happen to us Crichton, , p. For Spinoza, this is both a philosophical and, as Martin Saar points out, a political problem.

As well as pointing to the remote possibility of transcending hope, philosophy indicates in both theoretical and practical terms how we can use hope to cultivate joyful and empowering ways of life. However, the difficulty of doing so is made especially complicated by the fact that hope is always accompanied by fear, and the satisfaction of hoping is always to some degree offset by anxiety.

If we are to live joyfully, it seems, we must therefore disjoin it from fear. In his recent book, Justin Steinberg calls this the Inseparable Counterparts challenge, and my discussion of the problem implicitly draws on his account Steinberg, , pp. Nevertheless, I shall argue that the interdependence of hope and fear cannot be overcome and must instead be accommodated.

In the first place, affects vary with their objects. At the same time, our affects reflect our individual, embodied histories. The same piece of music may make one person joyful and another melancholy, while a thunderstorm may terrify one community and inspire hope in another. Although we classify affects into types, they are in truth unique LeBuffe, , pp.

More than this, however, many of the situations we encounter arouse contrasting affects in us, as when admiration is tinged with envy, or love vies with resentment E3p7s. We are torn between different feelings and desires, and experience what Spinoza calls fluctuatio animi.

In her translation of the Ethics , George Eliot renders this phrase as fluctuation of mind Eliot, , where the Latin fluctuatio carries connotations of being swept by one affect after another as a wave fluctus is driven by the wind E3p59s. We fluctuate, for example, when a single situation simultaneously arouses contrasting affects and moves us to opposing courses of action. We also fluctuate when one affect is partially overlaid by another, as when a generally contemptible politician does something worthy of respect, and our approval alternates with disdain.

Fluctuations such as these are a manifestation of our power to be affected in many ways at once E3p17s. An object arouses more than one affect, and neither gives way to the other. But fluctuations can also constitute new affects. To borrow his example, a man who discovers that the woman he loves is also seeing someone else may start to hate her without ceasing to love her E3p Out of his emotional conflict jealousy is born.

While these passions always occur together, they do not constitute a new affect. What ties the two together is the fact that each is a response to doubt or uncertainty.

When we confront uncertainty, fear of a disempowering state of affairs is always offset by at least a corner of hope, and hope of empowerment is always intertwined with anxiety. To put it another way, whenever we are in doubt about a potentially joyful or saddening outcome, we fluctuate between hope and fear. Indeed, as Spinoza explains, doubt and this species of fluctuation are really the same thing E3p17s. Because so much of our affective life revolves around our desires for uncertain ends, fluctuating hopes and fears are bound to be integral to our existence and will remain so as long as we fall short of perfect understanding.

Learning to live as well as we can is therefore a matter of learning to manage the relationship between hope and fear so that it contributes as far as possible to a satisfying way of life. At this point, Spinoza suggests, everything depends on how our hopes and fears fluctuate, i. In general terms, we are most disempowered when the balance tips towards fear. As Spinoza remarks more than once, when governments attempt to rule by fear rather than hope, their efforts to exert control over their subjects tend to generate anxiety and resentment, and threaten the peacefulness of the state TTP, chapter 5, p.

Superstition, as Spinoza conceives of it, is the attempt to suppress anxiety by fantasising the existence of powers capable of protecting one against the dangers one is afraid of, and ritually placating them.

Commenting on this strategy, Spinoza remarks that the people most thoroughly enslaved to superstition are those who invest great hope in uncertain goals and suffer a correspondingly intense fear of not attaining them. By reassuring themselves that God will protect them, they suppress their doubts and restore a more positive outlook. To the extent that superstition diminishes fear, it can be empowering, but Spinoza is adamant that the hopefulness it yields is vitiated by a longer, destructive pattern of fluctuating affect.

Because the powers to which superstition appeals are the fruit of fantasy, the hope that people invest in them is likely to be disappointed, and the fear that superstition was meant to allay is liable to return TTP, Preface, p. Usually, then, superstition can only provide short-lived periods of hopefulness in an outlook inherently susceptible to anxiety and cannot definitively suppress a painful pattern of fluctuating affect Gatens and Lloyd, , pp.

This pattern also has further damaging consequences. Dispirited by relentless alternations of hope and fear, some people move in the direction of despair, tipping the balance of their affects even more sharply towards disempowerment. Others relieve the discomfort of doubt by fixing on some source of hope and rigidly suppressing the anxieties associated with it.

Although both strategies block the fluctuation of hope and fear and to this extent relieve sadness, they do so at a cost. People who take these ways out disempower themselves, in one case by stifling their desire for a more joyful way of life and in the other by blunting their sensitivity to risk and doubt. Contemporary states, for example, promise complete security whilst warning of insidious terrorist movements. Governments reassure us we can continue as we are, while our own experience tells of environmental Armageddon.

Increasingly, we find ourselves vulnerable to the anxiety that arises when the balance of our fluctuating affects tips and fear dominates hope. Increasingly, we try to relieve the discomfort of fluctuating affects, whether by giving up hope or refusing to acknowledge any grounds for fear.

It is easy enough to find examples of these disempowering strategies within our own political communities, and a single parochial case will be enough to illustrate the point. During the recent British struggle over whether or not to leave the European Union, opposing sides defended their positions by offering wildly divergent interpretations of the political future Britain might hope for and the risks attendant on failing to secure it.

In parts of the Brexit-friendly press, an image of an independent, homogeneous, internationally respected nation with firm control of its borders was contrasted with a dependent, even enslaved state, in which a flood of needy immigrants threatened to destroy long-established ways of life. By contrast, the anti-Brexit media dwelt on an image of an advanced, prosperous, culturally rich and politically stabilising Europe. To abandon it, they claimed, would be economically disastrous, culturally retrograde, and would put peace at risk.

Bounced between these contradictory and to some extent imaginary ideals and dystopias, superstitiously fluctuating hopes and fears became the order of the day. Lack of a stable consensus stretched constitutional processes to breaking point, and both individual and collective agents suffered increasingly from consternatio. Some voices invested ever more rigidly in whatever it was they hoped for and denied associated risks. Confronted by unfavourable predictions about the economic effects of Brexit, for example, it became enough to dismiss them as scaremongering.

Meanwhile other agents, individual and collective, descended into the spectrum of affects closest to despair. Debilitated by the disquieting sense that there was nothing worth hoping for, fear came to dominate their lives.

To protect ourselves against these disempowering responses, Spinoza urges us to make hope the dominant partner in the balance of our affects and ensure that the pattern of fluctuation between hope and fear is not itself a source of overwhelming anxiety. At one level, following this path comes naturally.

As Justin Steinberg points out above, the striving that constitutes our essence is a striving for empowerment, and we are consequently more strongly inclined to empower ourselves by hoping than to disempower ourselves by dwelling on our fears. Although apprehension can get the upper hand, we are nevertheless oriented towards hopefulness and strive to live as hopefully as we can Martin, How, though, do we maintain a hopeful balance of affects?

How do we keep the anxieties that are the unavoidable counterpart of hope within bounds, and avoid the destabilising patterns of fluctuation manifested in consternation and superstition? This formulaic piece of advice may seem insufficient, but underlying it we can discern a way for hope and fear to play a jointly empowering role.

The interconnectedness of hope and fear draws attention to the complexity of our affective interpretations of the world. Through the fluctuating relationship between these affects we track both opportunity and risk, as hope delineates what we take ourselves to be able to achieve, whilst anxiety makes the limits of our power present to us. Each affect offsets the other, keeping our vulnerability as well as our possibilities in play.

Without the counterweight of fear, our disposition to construe the world hopefully — to imagine things that increase our power of acting and deny the existence of things that diminish it E3p12 — would make us more likely to overreach ourselves and ignite the saddening forms of fluctuation we have examined.

Learning to attend to the fluctuations of our hopes and fears, and cultivating the ability to use them as a means to our individual and collective empowerment, is a vital though extremely demanding process Armstrong, , pp. In all aspects of our lives, the task of empowering ourselves partly depends on our ability to help one another keep our fears in check, and we can do this in many ways, whether by talking through the particular anxieties that individually threaten to depress us, or by devising measures to prevent panicking governments from irrevocably damaging the social fabric.

At the same time, our empowerment depends on learning how to prevent our hopes from distorting our sense of what we can achieve by taking off into a realm of ungrounded optimism. A community can take steps in this direction by articulating its shared hopes along with the risks that accompany them, and expressing them in specific and realisable policies. In doing so, it constitutes the hopes and counterbalancing fears that dominate public life and shapes the fluctuations of mind that its members habitually undergo TP, chapter 5, p.

By creating a compelling and hopeful political culture, it ensures that fear is guided by hope, rather than the other way around. A sensitivity to the interdependence of hope and fear is also a condition of successful deliberation.

Unless negotiators are moved by the hope of reaching a satisfying resolution, are anxious to avoid the risks at stake, and remain sensitive to both affects by feeling and responding now to one, now to the other, the lives they are discussing will be in danger of becoming mere numbers on a spreadsheet, and any solution they arrive at is likely to be a disappointment. Again, however, great skills are called for. When negotiators are too hopeful they may underestimate risk; when they are not hopeful enough they may settle for uninspiring resolutions; and when they are side-tracked by superstition or consternation they will be unable to reach stable decisions.

In its most productive form, the unavoidable fluctuation of our hopes and fears expresses itself in a nimble yet cautious openness to possibility, and in social practices that allow us to develop more empowering ways of life.

Standing on his shoulders and adapting his insights to our circumstances, we too may be able to align our hopes and fears so that our sensitivity to risk supports the pursuit of our shared aspirations, and reduces our vulnerability to disempowerment or sadness.

Hopeless times usher in the need for hope. Among philosophers, the urge to make room for hope amidst hopelessness is increasingly felt. For quite some time, the topics of hope, progress, and utopia were not at the centre of academic debates, but recently this has fundamentally changed.

To expect from Spinoza scholarship, and neo Spinozist authors, some elucidation of these topics is appropriate, given that many of us have promoted the relevance and timeliness of seventeenth-century philosophy for current theorising and, more broadly, for reflecting about politics, power, institutions, and social action cf.

It can be any real or imaginary difference: liberals, conservatives, Middle Easterners, white men, the right, the left, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs. The list goes on and on. During the first year after my arrival in the U. People were leaving a building in Orthodox Jewish dress; it was a temple. For a short second, I noticed a subtle, weird but familiar feeling: fear! I tried to trace the source of this fear, and here it was: My hometown was almost all Muslims, and I never met a Jew growing up.

One day when I was a little child and we were visiting a village, an old lady was telling a crazy story about how Orthodox Jews steal Muslim kids and drink their blood! Having come from a well-educated family that respects all religions, being an educated doctor and having so many great Jewish friends, I felt embarrassed that still the child within had taken that stupid and obviously false story a bit seriously, only because that child had never met a Jew. This human tendency is meat to the politicians who want to exploit fear: If you grew up only around people who look like you, only listened to one media outlet and heard from the old uncle that those who look or think differently hate you and are dangerous, the inherent fear and hatred toward those unseen people is an understandable but flawed result.

Some are strong, some are weak, some are funny, some are dumb, some are nice and some not too nice. There are several reasons. One is that logic is slow; fear is fast. In situations of danger, we ought to be fast: First run or kill, then think. Politicians and the media very often use fear to circumvent our logic. I always say the U.

They are kind of political reality shows, surprising to anyone from outside the U. If one undocumented illegal immigrant murders a U. That response has helped us survive the predators and other tribes that have wanted to kill us.

But again, it is another loophole in our biology to be abused. When demagogues manage to get hold of our fear circuitry, we often regress to illogical, tribal and aggressive human animals, becoming weapons ourselves — weapons that politicians use for their own agenda.

Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. White nationalists clash with protesters at the Aug.

Arash Javanbakht , Wayne State University.