Hope, with Tom Whyman
About the Guest
TOM WHYMAN is a philosopher, writer, and faculty member at Durham University. He wrote Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster.
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Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster, by Tom Whyman.
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Transcript
TOM WHYMAN: I mean, hope doesn't exist if you're totally certain about stuff, right? You don't hope for things you’re totally certain of. I mean, “are you ever justified in hoping” is an important philosophical question, I think.
BLAIR HODGES: When Tom Whyman started thinking about whether he wanted to become a father, he felt some hesitation. The stakes for women and men are often so different. Tom was worried about political instability where he lived in the UK. He thought about the rocky academic job market. He felt the increasing threat of climate change—not to mention all the little daily ways having a child would change his life. And then a global pandemic shook things up even more.
He worked through his worries by writing a book called Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster. Tom Whyman joins us in the episode of Fireside with Blair Hodges.
Philosophy as a worthwhile failure – 01:14
BLAIR HODGES: Tom Whyman, thanks for joining me today at Fireside with Blair Hodges. It's great to meet you.
TOM WHYMAN: Hello.
BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about a book that you wrote called Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster. And I saw this book during COVID and had to pick up a copy of it, I think for obvious reasons.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: I saw it and was just like, okay, that seems very relevant right now.
You're a philosopher, and you begin the book by talking a little bit about philosophy and Immanuel Kant in particular, where he kind of said philosophy was focused on these questions: “What can I know, what should I do, and what should I hope for?” And as a philosopher, you say you've seen a lot of focus on the first two questions—what can I know, and what ought I to do—but not as much on the third one. Why do you think that is?
TOM WHYMAN: I think, generally speaking, philosophers like to—or maybe not like to, but there are sort of incentives within the academy to say things you can at least claim some sort of certainty about.
So, “What can I know? What should I do?” Those sorts of things you can at least pretend to give definite answers to. Whereas “What can I hope for?” I mean, Kant's answer to that question is very religiously inflected. So perhaps you can give definite answers to it in like a divinity department, if you're training to be a priest, you can kind of have a definite answer to it. But if you're a philosopher you can't really have a definite answer to it.
And so yeah, there's a kind of contingency to hope, and a kind of uncertainty to hope that I think perhaps puts philosophers off, yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: You also said that philosophy for you kind of began in wonder, and then it continues in pedantry. [laughter] Tell us a little bit about your experience of philosophy in the academy.
TOM WHYMAN: When you teach a lot of philosophy classes—certainly in the UK, in my experience, I'm from the UK as your listeners may be able to tell—
BLAIR HODGES: Really?! [laughs]
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah. So when you're in the UK most philosophy undergraduates start out, and the only philosophy they might have been exposed to at school is where we have A levels. So we have high school, but then you go on to something called sixth form, which is when you're like 16 to 18, we’ve got these things called A levels. And that's the first time you might have done philosophy. It's optional, and most places don't even do it. And one of the things we have in that course is Sartre, and lots of people who go on to do philosophy at university do that and think most philosophy is going to be like Sartre, and they get—
BLAIR HODGES: He wrote that book, Nausea, basically. Which is just very, very sad.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, he wrote Nausea, it’s kind of like intersections of thoughts and literature and you know, philosophy's about “hanging out and looking cool.” And they get to university and that's what they think philosophy is. But they get to university and realize that actually, it's a bunch of guys who go, like, “how did names work? So what's with that?” “Why are there numbers?”
And it's not really the same as what they imagined it to be. And it becomes like—you know, to be honest, actually, I don't know if necessarily the typical undergraduate really thinks it's all going to be hanging out looking cool with a kind of wonder. But I think there's a certain sort of undergraduate anyway who would enter in sincerely asking philosophical questions.
But you go through your undergraduate courses, and you realize this is what philosophy is, it’s wonderful. You get to ask these kinds of questions. And then you've done your graduate studies, you're in the academy, and in order to get any of your thoughts about these questions out, you have to go through peer review in academic journals, and someone kind of skim reads it and goes, “Yeah, but why isn’t that something totally different?” and you can't get published. And I mean, even more sort of like refined, pedantic stuff tends to rise to the top through that process.
BLAIR HODGES: And yet you chose to become a philosopher.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah!
BLAIR HODGES: How did you make it through this gauntlet of saying, like, I want to make this my professional life?
TOM WHYMAN: So I'm gonna be honest Blair, it was just total naive obliviousness! [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: You're like, “I made a mistake.”
TOM WHYMAN: I've never really thought about it, I suppose—I mean, you know, lord knows there's times where I thought: I have two children, you know what? Maybe I can make a lot more money if I did something else, if I'd chosen to do something else.
And actually, I couldn't have done. Because you know, I studied philosophy just almost by chance, really. I applied to go to university to study something else and I hated it in my first week, and I just picked doing philosophy out of like, you know, what could I switch to, in a kind of panic. And then I grew to love it and chose to do graduate study in it. After you do a master, in the UK, you don't just go into like grad school to do a PhD, you do an MA separately to a PhD. I did a master's and I had like add a year out. And you know, I tried to get a job and I couldn't, so then I got funding to do a PhD. And I sort of just got suckered into it. And it's always actually been financially incentivized for me to remain within the academy.
BLAIR HODGES: And it's almost like to get that PhD was almost a job because—
TOM WHYMAN: It was a job, I got funding to do it, yeah, and it was the best option I had. And there's not really been a time, again—I mean, when I'd written a book, actually, I didn't have an academic job. It's like the only period since 2007 when I haven't been associated with a university as a student or member of staff. And I kind of write a book in a kind of anti-Academy kind of mode thinking, hey, I'm out of the academy. I can just write however I want. I don't have a future anyway. So write according to my own norms now!
BLAIR HODGES: I can tell, I mean your book doesn't read like a typical philosophy book. I think it's a bit more approachable and more conversational, and I think more personal too. And there are some philosophers that write in that mode, but it did seem like you were able to create a book that had your character and voice, and just really said things you really wanted to say, without having to worry too much about, you know, whether it was going to fit into an academic niche or not.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, and I think that's how I, again—like, as I said, it's part blind obliviousness. Maybe I would have benefitted from being more calculated about how I approach writing or research or anything. But that’s just not the type of personality I have, you know? I just can't do it.
But this book was certainly a product of just like, I can do what I like, and this is just what I wanted to do. And part of it was obviously having a child, and part of it was, you know, I was imagining—at the time, I thought, I'm never gonna get another academic job and do anything in philosophy again, so I'm gonna collate all of the philosophy I've ever done into this work.
I did my PhD on Adorno, who comes up and, in the book quite a lot. And so I was thinking like, how do I—
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, the philosophy of Adorno, right.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah. So how do I kind of combine the Frankfurt School of critical theory and Aristotle and a philosophy of political action, and all that sort of stuff into a book.
BLAIR HODGES: I think it's fair to say that philosophy itself, just as a practice, is sort of a perpetual exercise of failure. [laughs] Like, we haven't solved anything. We haven't resolved anything. But it's the kind of failure that I think is really worthwhile, because it's driven by an attempt to know, it's driven by an attempt to feel, and to hope, and all of the things, you know, the three things that Kant mentioned.
So it may be an exercise in failure, but I think it's really worthwhile one, and I think your book kind of shows that.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, I think my book is a very worthwhile failure, I'd recommend it to anyone as a worthwhile failure! [laughter]
Moral and ethical questions about having children – 07:44
BLAIR HODGES: Well, and it opens up with this really lovely journal entry. This is a letter you wrote to your future child. This is how you open the book, and you wrote it when you first saw the ultrasound.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: You knew that your wife was pregnant, and you wrote to this little clump of tissue, and you said, “You're the best thing I've ever seen.” And then then you kind of disclose to the clump, you say, “You raise a lot of philosophical questions, a problem for me.”
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Whether it was right or good, given how the world is right now to make you happen, basically. And that was before COVID happened!
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah. So that was the start of 2019. So before COVID happened.
BLAIR HODGES: What were you thinking at that time? I mean, the letter's really, it's really beautiful. But it raises that real problem I think a lot of people wrestle with right now, which is like, is it a good idea to have kids?
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, and I mean, I was thinking like, you know, I'm poor. I don't have a secure income. I was thinking about climate change. I was thinking about—I mean, I don't know how much you or your listeners know about the UK. But our government has for a long, long time been very poor, almost like—very kind of intent on destroying the country in a way, which was baffling really, sort of like watching some sort of malicious clowns stomping on your face.
And yeah, so I was just wondering, who would bring a child into that? And obviously, it was me and my partner—you can also call her my wife, that's fine, I call on my wife all the time. We're not technically married. But whatever. We actually were engaged to get married, and then her due date turned out to be the day we had scheduled for our wedding, so we didn't get married, because—[laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: And now we're like, so far into things that I can't edit that out, so we’ll just leave that one in [laughs]—
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah. Which is fine! She's my wife, she's my partner too. It doesn’t matter.
BLAIR HODGES: She might as well be, yeah.
TOM WHYMAN: So yeah, we've got two children now.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
TOM WHYMAN: So I was just thinking, you know, I wanted, we wanted this child, we wanted to be able to give them a good enough life. And we were just worrying. I was worrying. She was worrying, like, can we do this both in terms of our own personal situations, and also our own kind of broader political situation?
So it did kind of get me starting off writing about hope. You know, again, if you hope for something, you're kind of casting yourself off into a sort of void. I mean, hope doesn't exist if you're totally certain about stuff, right? You don't hope for things you’re totally certain of. I mean, “are you ever justified in hoping” is an important philosophical question, I think.
Anti-natalist perspectives – 09:56
BLAIR HODGES: And you were dealing with it on a personal level but then you also—in the book you point out that this is a question people have, and there are arguments against having kids, right now.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about a few of those to begin, like Schopenhauer, for example.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: He kind of said that human existence has the character of contracted debt for a person.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, I mean, it is interesting because as you said, there are arguments against having kids right now, but even Schopenhauer, he was writing in like 1830, absolutely. I mean, his work sort of feels very relevant now, because obviously we think we are autonomous, or that we can decide—certainly nowadays—we think we can kind of decide how to live, that we can decide how to live in a way that's potentially good, right? Sort of choose to do things for the good, and determine what a good life is for ourselves.
And Schopenhauer kind of just thinks that's all an illusion, so he thinks that in reality, what we are is we're the blind puppets of this thing he calls the will. So the will is what’s ultimately real, and everything—I mean all life, including human life—is just kind of a manifestation of the will.
And so in fact, our desires—which we think of as our own, which we are inclined to think are rational, are actually just the will trying to perpetuate itself. And the will perpetuates itself through sexual reproduction, basically.
BLAIR HODGES: It sort of reminds me of Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. But instead of the will, it would just be like the genome, or DNA is driven to reproduce. And so we're just this unfortunate side effect of all that.
TOM WHYMAN: Absolutely. And I mean, you know, Schopenhauer was someone who was certainly an influence on Freudian psychoanalysis. I mean, he was an influence on Darwinist ideas about how species perpetuate. I'm not, I couldn't say for sure if he was an influence on Darwin himself, but I think he was certainly tacitly an influence on people like Dawkins.
So yeah, I mean, that's not a coincidence. But it kind of sounds that way. And, you know, the kind of Dawkins/Darwinist idea is that we’re like the blind puppets of our genes. But I mean, Dawkins doesn't think that's morally bad as far as I know, he kind of thinks it’s sort of morally neutral.
BLAIR HODGES: I think that's right.
TOM WHYMAN: Schopenhauer thinks it's kind of morally bad, right? Because he thinks existence is characterized by pain. Because even though we have all these illusions about ourselves, these are illusions we've sort of created to cope with the fact that existence is suffering. Even though we're rationally driven to perpetuate the species, perpetuate the will, what we actually experience as individuals is suffering. So for Schopenhauer the correct response to that is to try and kill our desires. So he's kind of got an almost Buddhist attitude to existence.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, like suffering is rooted in desire, so get rid of desire, and then you won't suffer.
TOM WHYMAN: Exactly. So—
BLAIR HODGES: Did he succeed? Did Schopenhauer—did he pull it off?
TOM WHYMAN: I mean, he didn't have kids. So in that sense he succeeded, but I don't think he pulled it off because I don't think he ever felt, from what I know about his life, I don't think he ever felt happy, sort of, personally.
BLAIR HODGES: It reminds me of David Benatar, another person that you refer to who basically said that the absence of pain is preferable to the presence of pleasure. No joy or goodness could ever outweigh the fact that pain exists, is kind of his calculus.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah. So he's a contemporary South African philosopher who argues for anti-natalism. So he thinks creating new life is morally bad. And that's because he thinks existence is characterized primarily by suffering.
So Benatar, I just don't buy his instinct that like—I just don't actually buy that pain outweighs pleasure. Like, I think pleasure outweighs pain. I can give you an example, like in the last week I've had a horrible kind of mouth ulcers. I've been recovering from a kind of respiratory illness, which has been delaying the recording of this podcast.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I had some mouth ulcers when I had shingles. So I've experienced that, it's pretty painful.
TOM WHYMAN: It's really painful. And I've had them over the past week, and they've been the dominant kind of feature of my like affect in the world for the past week. They've gone away today, and I've just forgotten about them. I don't remember them, really. I don't think about them anymore. And I'm happy. I'm happy to be doing things that don't involve having mouth ulcers.
I mean, certainly I think Benatar's sort of arguments follow from this intuition he has that you're always gonna remember pain more you remember pleasure, but I just don't get that at all.
BLAIR HODGES: It doesn't connect with me as much on that level. Where I'm tempted by it is the idea that, when I think about it—
I have children, two children. And when I think about the fact that they experience pain, it's really painful as a parent to see them experiencing pain. I think about the fact that they're going to, if they live long—and if they don't, that's its own kind of pain and suffering—but if they do, they'll experience heartbreak, experience confusion, and loss. And that's hard as a parent to face. Like, we basically kick that process off for them, that they're going to face a lot of sorrow.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah. But you also made it so they can experience pleasure, right? And you give them pleasures, like, you can show them things that they’d like. Like giving a child a date, you know, not like a romantic one, like a fruit, for the first time, and seeing their face like light up. Or you know, just doing silly things for them.
Like my daughter, who’s just about to turn one in a couple of days’ time. She’s just learned to roar. Her brother roars a lot because he loves dinosaurs, and she's just learned to roar and just look at how proud she is. She can't even talk. But you can see how proud she is, she can roar, it’s just wonderful.
BLAIR HODGES: I hope that simple—yeah, I hope that simple stuff outweighs. And I'll say even for myself, if something were to happen to my kids it would be devastating. But I would rather have had the love and the connection with them that costs that devastation than to not have had it. That's how I personally feel about that.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, I mean, my parents lost a child just before I was born, which I talk about a bit in my book, my older brother died before I was born. And they talk about him in sort of those ways. He died when he was about three. And I mean, obviously it's devastating. But when they talk, normally the memories they share of him are just happy memories.
Like the things they remember aren’t just him being sick, but my dad's favorite memory was when he accidentally took some sips of my dad's beer when they were out somewhere and he’d spent the whole time in the car home hugging my sister, who was then like, one year old, you know, just being there.
So just absolutely, those are things they remember of him. They don't—You know, they obviously also remember other things, but they were things that, again, that yeah. I guess that, you know, obviously it does terrify me all the time, for my children, right? That something horrible might happen to them, but like, yeah, you do—you will still have, even if that does happen, you do have to remember they sort of have given the world some joy.
Yeah, I mean, I can't really talk about it because obviously like, it hasn't happened. Lord knows I hope it never will. But yeah, that's something I talk about in my book, that you do, by having children, you expose yourself to that, the possibility of the worst pain you could ever possibly know, I think.
BLAIR HODGES: And you also mentioned climate change, too. So this is another reason some people would say it's not a morally good decision to have children, is because it could contribute to a rising global crisis. What are somewhat are people saying about that?
TOM WHYMAN: I think it's a couple of things. I mean, so firstly, like various of these kinds of arguments basically, that climate change is going to lead to a world so bad, it's just not worth living in. So it's almost an act of cruelty to bring children into that world.
And that sort of related, I think, to what we've just been talking about, like if having children is just going to open up either yourself or them to different kinds of suffering, then it wouldn't be worth it.
I mean, the other argument is the carbon footprint argument. That the thing we need right now is to reduce our carbon emissions as much as possible, right, we're in almost a kind of carbon emergency. So the number one way that you can guarantee you're going to reduce your emissions is by not creating more human beings that emit carbon.
So you have a moral duty to either—I mean, some people would say you have a moral duty to not have any children. Some people say you have a moral duty to limit the amount of children you have. So the way it's often reported is like, you know, taking a domestic flight or something is going to emit a certain amount of carbon, which you could not emit by taking a train ride, but having a child is going to emit a certain amount of carbon, which you could not emit by not having a child, basically.
I mean, certainly at that end of the argument I think it's kind of silly, because a child is not like a flight, you know? A child makes their own choices about what they do and what they emit. Like if we started getting into hypotheticals about what actions our child is likely to take, I mean, obviously, as you basically just said, we have this duty to educate our children and, in a way, give our children the opportunity to be better than we are.
So it might be true that it's morally bad to bring children into the world if they're definitely going to do morally bad things. And you can say emitting carbon is definitely a morally bad thing. But then you might also want to say, well, the way to deal with that is to attempt to construct a world in which we have a better and more sustainable relationship with the environment.
BLAIR HODGES: And we need to have kids to teach to do that.
TOM WHYMAN: Yes, exactly.
BLAIR HODGES: This can get dark pretty quick, though. Like it can get pretty dark in terms of people saying, “Well, I mean, if you're going to apply that to kids, why not apply it to yourself?” Like, you're right now emitting carbon. And I think there perhaps have been some people who have said there's some sort of moral goodness in suicide even to say, you know?
TOM WHYMAN: It's interesting. So I've not seen or encountered that in a philosophy paper. So that's interesting. I mean that is a kind of extension of the argument, right? You're right.
Like if you shouldn't have kids because they're going to make carbon then yeah. I mean, if it's all completely morally bad to make carbon, and you should do everything you need to in order to reduce carbon emissions, then yeah, it does become an argument for suicide being kind of the correct course of action.
Certainly, there's people who would argue, there have been people who've argued, that voluntary human extinction is kind of the right way to go, you know. Then obviously, on the basis that we as a species are always going to have an unsustainable relationship with the environment, so the best thing we can do is to eliminate ourselves, which we could technically freely choose to do, and then leave a planet for other species. But you know, that’s not for me, that argument, to be honest!
BLAIR HODGES: My best argument against that is I don't want that. [laughs]
TOM WHYMAN: Certainly I think with both of these arguments, we could just kind of try and do differently. Like, you know, These kind of all—
BLAIR HODGES: Scorched earth.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, these are arguments that assume all else has failed. And I wanna say well, all else hasn’t actually failed. We haven't really seriously explored our options enough.
Defining hope – 19:55
BLAIR HODGES: And I think where hope comes in, as you said, is, we can't prove that. We can live toward that. And we can hope for that, we can desire that.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: But we can't prove it. And so, you know, we're stuck at that impasse, in a way. I think most of humanity probably would side with team humanity in a way, you know, “let's see what we can do,” rather than the nihilism of destruction. But, you know.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, I mean, people like Benatar and Schopenhauer would probably say, “well, that's irrational if you’re siding with team humanity here. But like, then just call me irrational, that's fine, that's an irrational thing I'm kind of prepared to have.
And again, I think hope is kind of irrational in a way, right? It's never gonna have a fully rational basis. Because if you were totally certain about something, you wouldn't need hope.
BLAIR HODGES: Well let's define it. Tell me, what's the most simple definition of hope as you understand it? How do you define hope?
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, let's look it up in the book! [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you've got a whole book about it.
TOM WHYMAN: I’ve remembered, I do have a definition of hope in the book.
So hope is an attitude that agents might adopt towards the world, probably usually involuntarily, but perhaps also voluntarily, which is characterized by the following two things:
One, a recognition of a possibility of the better.
Two, an active desire for the better to occur.
BLAIR HODGES: To the possibility of the better, you recognize that it’s possible things could be better. And you also actively desire for the better things to occur.
TOM WHYMAN: Yes. What I wanted to rule out there is the idea that hope could just be going like, “well, I'd kind of like things to turn out better. But I'm actually not even—I have no idea how that might happen. And I'm not willing to pursue options that might make it happen,” basically.
I think having children, for example, can be a hopeful act, even in an age of climate disaster. But I wouldn't say it was a hopeful act if you go like, “Well, I've got a genuine idea of parameters of a disaster here, I'm having a child anyway, and who knows, maybe things will sort themselves out.” That's not hopeful. That's what I would call resigned—you're just resigned to whatever fate is going to bring.
BLAIR HODGES: Like, you'd like a good thing to happen, but maybe you don’t think that it will and you won't do anything to make it happen?
TOM WHYMAN: Oh, yeah, you'd like a good thing to happen. You think maybe a good thing could happen. But you're kind of passive, you're passive in relation to that outcome.
BLAIR HODGES: I think what's interesting is like, we can experience these different types of hope. Like we can experience resignation about some things, and then hope about other things. In other words, I don't know that it's like, a person is a hopeful person. I would have to be more specific than that, right, to say “well, they're hopeful about something in particular, and they're resigned about something else, or they're cynical about something else.”
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, that's true. I think so. You can try and be hopeful in all aspects of your life, but you're probably not going to manage it, right? You know, I might be hopeful about—I might have hope for my son or my daughter, but I don't necessarily have hope, I might not have hope for, hypothetically, my professional prospects or something like this. I might be resigned towards my career, but hopeful for my children.
And actually, being resigned towards my career might be a way in which I make my hope for my children active, right? If I have a kind of boring dead-end job I don't like—that's not true to life—but if I do, then I might just be doing that in order to secure a good future for my children, right? I might be resigned toward my job but hopeful for my children.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you can act resignedly with hope for something else.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, exactly.
BLAIR HODGES: What about the time element? Does hope always have to be future facing, or about the future?
TOM WHYMAN: I mean, that's a difficult question, actually. There is a wonderful book by Jonathan Lear, which listeners should check out if you're interested, called Radical Hope, which is about—it's a kind of philosophical book but it's a philosophical meditation on the testimony or the autobiography of a Native American chief called Plenty Coups. And he's talking about the loss of the lifestyle he lived when he was young man. And Lear talks about the kind of hope Plenty Coups has.
Plenty Coups’s hope, it's kind of future oriented, because it involves a sort of hope that one day the buffalo will return and his tribe will be able to, his people will be able to live the life they used to.
I mean, it's also, I think—Lear sort of thinks it is a hope for the past, it's a hope for, maybe things could have gone differently in the past, maybe if the white man didn't destroy our lifestyle, basically. Because the hopes he has for the future are not sort of realistic ones. But there's nevertheless a kind of, Lear thinks there is a hopefulness to the fact that Plenty Coups kept living his life even after he recognized his—the life he found meaningful was over. And that is a kind of hope for the past I suppose.
Walter Benjamin in another essay I talk about in the book, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which Benjamin actually wrote very shortly before he was murdered by proxy by the Nazis—he committed suicide, but while fleeing from the Nazis, he was Jewish. And he talks about revolutionary action as being an attempt to redeem the past. So revolution produces political action as an attempt to redeem the past. So there's a kind of hope for the past, again, in future interactions, there is kind of—it can be a kind of hope for the past.
BLAIR HODGES: Does it redeem the past? Because like, seeing something bad from the past can spark change and improvement for the future. And in that way, it's not like saying “oh, I'm glad those terrible things happened,” but at the very least the silver lining to them is they could be used to spark something better.
TOM WHYMAN: I think that's kind of what Benjamin is driving at. So he's sort of arguing against the kind of conception of history where bad things are ultimately justified because they lead to progress, right? So okay, so it was bad for—I mean a Whiggish view of colonialism or something would be bad, these people lost their land, but—
BLAIR HODGES: Like, “It was bad that they wiped out the Native Americans, but now we have this great country, et cetera. And that's great.”
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah. Benjamin is trying to philosophize about history from a perspective of the victims. And so yeah, he, I mean, I think he was trying to say that resistance to the powers that be, the winners in history, as a kind of hope directed towards the past, because it's about trying to get justice for people who suffered throughout history, and the sort of alleged glories of the powers that be have kind of been built on the bones of the dead—that’s sort of what Benjamin thinks is going to drive revolutionary political action. So yeah, so that's a kind of hope for past.
Bad hope and actionism – 26:12
BLAIR HODGES: You also talk about some bad kinds of hope. One of the things I noticed was “actionism,” which you talked about.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: It's kind of a bad type of hope.
TOM WHYMAN: Actionism is—
So Benjamin was a philosopher who was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. And one of his great intellectual soulmates was Theodore Adorno. He was another philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School. Benjamin was more like a kind of a power academic, like he didn't have an official job in the academy. Adorno did. But Adorno also was based in Frankfurt, and he had to flee Frankfurt, first for Oxford and then to New York and Los Angeles during the Nazi period. So he was Jewish, or he was of Jewish ethnicity.
Adorno kind of used a phrase, actionism. So later on in life, Adorno returned from America to West Germany. And he was someone who was on the political left, he was very kind of concerned—so he obviously chose to go to West Germany over East Germany, right, which was controversial with some of his sort of more hardline leftist friends, because: Communist East, capitalist West. Adorno was very concerned with helping set up some sort of liberal democracy in West Germany. And in the 1960s, towards the end of Adorno's life, there was a very active student movement in West Germany, as it was in lots of Western countries. And lots of leaders of this movement were Adorno students who were associated somehow with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
And Adorno thought of these students were basically a kind of threat to democracy because he thought, basically, so even though he has kind of leftist aims he recognized those tendencies of fascism in them, in sort of like student leaders’ hostility to debate, and in particular, their desire that something must be done, no matter what it is. So that's why Adorno used the word “actionism” to describe that kind of philosophy of the student movement.
Because he thought, okay, so they want this outcome, which is you want justice, right? They want a system in which there aren't powerful people oppressing the less powerful, okay? Great. I mean, it's great, but they're kind of—Adorno's point is, you know, we're living in a post-war kind of settlement. Basically, we’re in a defeated nation, this nation has been sort of created effectively by a kind of a nuclear settlement between West and East, you don't have any power to kind of change this into an ideal society. The best thing you can do is try and make it the least worst possible society that it can be. You think you're going to make it into an ideal world, but you're powerless to do this.
And Adorno's sort of accusation of the students almost was, like, they're refusing to recognize their powerlessness in the face of the people who control the atom bomb, and they're just going to try and do anything in order to make themselves feel better about their own powerlessness.
BLAIR HODGES: Including, like, violence.
TOM WHYMAN: Including violence, and I mean, one of their big focuses ultimately became chasing Adorno out of university. Which they succeeded in doing and then he had a heart attack out of stress and died. They kind of won that battle. But yeah, like they kind of, they assaulted him in his lectures and kind of chanted "If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease," it’s just kind of like, it almost kind of proves Adorno's point.
Like, basically, this is something you can do, right? You can chase your professor off his job, and that's gonna make, maybe it's going to make you feel better, right? So it was kind of cathartic. But it's motivated by deep powerlessness and by the enormous realization of your own powerlessness, because if this is what you can do, that's a concrete action that you can do, you're not actually going to work towards your aims by doing it.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's not going to stop capitalism.
TOM WHYMAN: Exactly. It's not actually going to, exactly. If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will just do just fine regardless! [laughter] Like, capitalism hasn't, it doesn't think it doesn't care!
BLAIR HODGES: That doesn't rhyme though, Tom.
TOM WHYMAN: Exactly, it doesn't rhyme, right. Yeah.
The only potential capitalist enterprise that will be affected by this is Verso Books, less big book publishers might be affected. Yeah. [laughter]
So and Adorno thought that basically this kind of actionism, this attempted action, an attempt at doing something, doing something to do to bring about a better world is in fact, resigned. Like I bring that into being because obviously my definition of hope involves not just a recognition of a possibility of better world, but active desire to bring about a better world. The student movement in West Germany, the leaders of that movement might have seen themselves as hopeful, I suppose, on those grounds. Adorno says they're not, because actually, they sort of misrecognize how they could bring about a better world or misrecognize something about the possibility of a better world. And instead, they've ended up being kind of resigned to just playing silly games, ultimately violent games.
BLAIR HODGES: Do you see those dynamics playing out today at all? I mean, that was—it’s been awhile. But do you see that today?
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah. I mean, there are all sorts of examples you could cite across the political spectrum. I mean, I think you see it a lot on social media, people on social media feel kind of atomized, powerless. But if they can see, you know, you have the opportunity to bring someone who's more well-known than them down, and they can do it because you can. So you might be someone who's kind of vocal on social media, but ultimately that's all they are. So even if you discredit them on social media, if you've done it, maybe it makes you feel good about yourself a bit, because it’s kind of cathartic, because you feel you've done something, but you haven't really.
BLAIR HODGES: That sounds really resigned. [laughs]
TOM WHYMAN: What sounds resigned? My assessment of it or the action itself?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, just like one of the—I hear people complain about cancel culture, for example, right?
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And for me, I see like, formerly disempowered people have a better way to influence market forces now. So for example, an actor does something really terrible. And a movie studio maybe won't work with that actor again next time because enough people won't, don't want to support that. And I see that as, you know, different from suppressing free speech or being fascist or anything. Really, it's just saying, “We don't like what you did—
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: “And I don't want to support that kind of behavior.”
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, I mean, I didn't—I don't want to use the word cancel culture, because I think it is loaded and are like kind of—
BLAIR HODGES: Totally.
TOM WHYMAN: You know, they're obviously kind of, I mean, it’s sort of valid for people just going, “I don't want to see a movie with that a**hole in it.” And yeah, like, that's fine, right?
I suppose Adorno’s sort of point about that would be, well, that would be a conflation of that almost like consumer preference—like, I don't want to see something with that a**hole in it—with sort of revolutionary action. So it might actually be potentially a part of getting a better world, right? Potentially. You could argue that.
BLAIR HODGES: Hopefully, yeah.
TOM WHYMAN: Like, it’s a better world if Kevin Spacey isn't acting in movies anymore, yeah, because he does unconscionable, he does very bad things. Like, but that's not a revolutionary act. It's just, it exists within the parameters of a system we have. Because actually—
BLAIR HODGES: But I think hopefully, though, it would like prompt other people to say, this is what he did. Maybe I shouldn't do that either. So maybe there could be like, broader—
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: You know, broader results from having someone kind of serve as an example, I guess.
TOM WHYMAN: That is, I suppose, a kind of historical justification for punishment. So yeah, like—
BLAIR HODGES: I know, and it can go, right, it can go really bad really quick, too, I understand.
TOM WHYMAN: Well, I would also—I mean, you know, in a way, one would hope that you didn't need to imagine your humiliating public downfall when you're kind of thinking, yeah, should not do the thing that Kevin Spacey did?
BLAIR HODGES: “Should I abuse this person? Well, I would hate to not be able to act in a movie!”
TOM WHYMAN: Exactly. Yeah. So but no, maybe, to be honest, maybe there will be like one or two sociopaths who just check themselves, “I mean, I really would like to preserve my public reputation.”
I mean, you're right, there's kind of a legitimate application of this stuff to current consumer preferences. But that's what it is. It's kind of almost like it's a consumer preference.
How can we hope better? – 34:10
BLAIR HODGES: That's Tom Whyman. And we're talking about the book Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster.
So Tom, what are some ways that we can do better at hoping? One of the things you offer in the book is that future generations obligate us to hope, right? That we, in order to make a better world we need to hope, because we need to live better, make the planet better. There's a lot of changes that need to be made systemically, so that we're obligated to hope toward the future. But how do we do better at doing that? How do you hope better?
TOM WHYMAN: Part of why I think future generations inspire hope is because they inspire us to act beyond ourselves, and beyond our selfish inclinations, our selfish desires. So it's almost like a way of, I mean, it is a kind of way of “unselfing” oneself, like you're no longer just doing things because you want to do it. You're doing things because you know your kid needs it. That's significant morally.
But it's not enough by itself, because it might just be, you know, you end up just acting in the interest of your family alone, right, against the world. So I think, in a way, the experience of parenthood is one way in which one can help inculcate a kind of other-oriented moral behavior which would help us transcend the ways in which the world wants us to act selfishly, basically.
The world wants us to think we're just selfish, isolated, rational agents like homo economicus, like you are just inclined to maximize your own selfish gain. As it turns out, a society built on those principles is destructive and will destroy the planet and destroy the whole foundation it's build on.
So we need to find ways of acting less selfishly. Parenting isn't the only way you can do that, but it’s one way you can do that. And children aren't the only thing you can live for that's not yourself, they're one thing that exists that you can live for.
That's what I emphasize in my book is like, yeah, this is one way which might be readily available to some people, which you could be invested in the future. You can also be invested in the future in other ways. You can be invested in the future generations as teacher, as a godparent—there is all sorts of things. You can be invested in your planet or anything beyond yourself. You can be invested in the planet because you love a particular bird or a tree or something.
For lots of people, at any rate, the experiences of parenting are just going to be transformative in the appropriate way. And that's why I think parenthood can be a way to hope better.
BLAIR HODGES: Is that what tipped the scale for you? I mean, you had the questions when you saw that ultrasound, so there was already a baby on the way—
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: —when you were thinking, “was it right to do this?” But now you said you've had another baby. So like, what made that—what are the things that kind of helped you conclude that this is a good thing?
TOM WHYMAN: I think--Yeah. I mean, that argument basically, I mean, the argument I came up with convinced me. In all honesty, God love her, the second baby was not entirely planned.
BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Okay, yeah, that changes the equation a little bit.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah. But we, equally were, we were kind of thinking about it. So.
BLAIR HODGES: But wait, that's interesting, because you guys dealt with infertility for the first baby, didn’t you?
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, we took quite a long time to conceive, yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: You kind of talked about that hope being dashed. Like, you were hoping and then it wouldn't happen. And a lot of people experience that. That's interesting that the second one was a completely different experience, then—it was more of a surprise.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah. But that's almost their personalities, the kids, like, so my son, he's wonderful. He can be, he's very stubborn. He can be difficult. My daughter is much—she also can be, you know, obviously she's a baby, she can be difficult, but she's just done everything really quickly.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, yeah. So you still have the same kind of feeling of like: parenthood matters. It gives you personal fulfillment. And it also turns you to think more broadly than yourself, is kind of what it sounds like?
TOM WHYMAN: So yeah, I do think that.
But I would emphasize, this is a book that I wrote before, you know, I did finish the book after becoming a parent, but I wrote most of it before I became a parent. And I think, certainly with—and I also finished it literally just before COVID, like, just before the first lockdown I submitted it to the publisher. So I would say, there are ways in which the world—certainly there are ways in which the family works now, there’s a way that raising children works, that does incentivize certain forms of selfishness in ways I hadn't anticipated.
And either that can be the selfishness of thinking, “well, you know, I've got to get my child into the best daycare or the best school.” That's part of it, like my child has to succeed more than your child. That kind of selfishness. Thinking of success as a zero-sum game, which carries along across for generations.
But it could also be kind of the selfishness of just thinking, “I'm exhausted, I've been looking after kids all day, I don't have to do anything. I don't have to, you know, pay attention to whatever important thing I have to pay attention to, I just deserve some downtime.”
It's not good for, maybe, building the kind of base of activist resistance one might imagine you'd need in order to combat the climate crisis, for example. I do think, you know, in a better world those things would be mitigated through things like childcare, and more investment in schools. But we don't live in that world. So, yeah!
Temptations of pessimism – 39:00
BLAIR HODGES: This is where it's easy to become pessimistic. And I wanted to ask you, it's hard not to look at the scope of problems we face right now and be tempted to say, “I'm just one person, and to solve this is a group project, and the group is not doing good.”
So where do you generate hope in the face of that? I mean, COVID is a perfect example of it, where we just couldn't really get collectively together enough to confront it in a meaningful way. So where do you generate hope in the face of that easy pessimism—and it's pretty easy to come by.
TOM WHYMAN: COVID was, it's this very strange situation where, almost, “solidarity” became not associating with one another, so it became very difficult for any sort of progressive activism to happen around COVID. And obviously, we've seen lots of right-wing conspiratorialism around COVID. People who have had no problem associating with one another because they think it's all a hoax. If you've accepted we might make each other sick, then it becomes a very difficult thing to get together.
So that has been a challenge. Just before COVID happened the Labour Party in the UK had been led by sort of left-wingers and they've been—you know, I was hopeful that we might have a government that was going to have more policies be beneficial in the ways that I think, or that we might have the policies that I would like. But we didn't have that, we got defeated in the general election and then COVID happened and then the labor hierarchy shifted. And there wasn’t really much resistance to that because everyone was locked in their houses. It wasn't so much dealing with that defeat because everyone was locked in their houses.
That was really difficult. And I'm not—I still think there's sort of like hope in future generations and things like this, but I struggle more now since I wrote the book to think about how one might put it into practice. And I'm more kind of—I understand more why so many men who've had children are sort of so grumpy and resigned to everything. [laughs] I sort of understand that paternal cynicism that I think is sort of familiar from older men. I worry that it's so easy just to get caught into that and just to think, “well, I've done my bit, I've contributed to the gene pool, just see what these other people do, it has nothing to do with me anymore.”
Like, it's a problem. So yeah. I'm sorry I can't say anything more hopeful.
BLAIR HODGES: You've written this whole book about hope. But in the end, we found out, you know, that things are still really tricky! [laughter]
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, I think that's fair. In a way that’s one take-home message I would like readers to have from the book. Like, you know, I cannot as a philosopher, actually tell you if it was good or bad for you to have a child. In a way, you as a parent have to put it into action for yourself. So yeah, like, that is terrifying. But it could also be beautiful.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I think this is where experience does more than any of our thought can do. We sort of have to experience and live it. We can think and talk and argue and reason. But in the end, I think you're right.
And well, this is where hope comes into it, then. Like if you hope that it's a good decision, then you live toward that hope. And that's what hope is.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, and there's almost in a way, if you want to put a kind of philosophical spin on it, there is something almost “later Wittgensteinian” about hope like, you know, Wittgenstein tried to finish philosophy with The Tractatus, which he wrote when he was young, and then he realized a kind of perfect kind of logical system of meaning he develops from the Tractatus was just—couldn't really be satisfactorily applied to real life. So you have to get into the rough ground of experience where things are uncertain, and you don't really know what anyone always means, and the world does involve ambiguity. And yeah, that's why hope is an important concept.
BLAIR HODGES: That's why hope will keep mattering.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: I like it. Alright, that's Tom Whyman. And today we talked about a really fun book. Well, it's not really fun. [laughter] It's just very interesting. You know? There's a lot—there's some heavy thought in here, Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster.
All right, Tom. We're going to take a quick break and come back for the best book recommendation and that'll wrap it up.
Act break – 42:46
[Email from Kate Davis which Blair reads during the act break]
I have been thinking a lot about this episode (which seems like a good sign!). I think Tom’s explanation of Adorno would be really interesting to put into conversation with a feminist ethic of risk or survival.
I wrote a note to myself on a post-it when I was first doing the audio that says, “Revolutionary acts happen within a larger system because that is all we have!”
Sharon Welch said that to stop fighting, even when success is impossible, is to die, and I was thinking about that quote as I edited this episode.
I think sometimes what seem like smaller fights, or issues that appear to be tangential, are still really part of the big fight, you know? Yes, it can be important to recognize our own relative small power in the face of overwhelming odds, but even so, even if there were no chance of winning, the fight is still important and worthwhile, and I would say it is still revolutionary.
[Lyrics from Tim Minchin’s “Naughty,” in Matilda: The Musical.]
In the slip of a bolt, there's a tiny revolt;
the seed of a war in a creak of a floorboard.
A storm can begin with a flap of a wing.
The tiniest mite packs the mightiest sting.
Every day starts with a tick of a clock.
All escapes start with the click of a lock.
If you're stuck in your story and want to get out
you don't have to cry, you don't have to shout.
Even if you’re little you can do a lot,
you mustn’t let a little thing like “little” stop you.
Nobody else is gonna put it right for me.
Nobody but me is gonna change my story.
Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty.
Best Books – 46:23
BLAIR HODGES: It's Fireside with Blair Hodges. We're here with Tom Whyman, and Tom, we want a best book recommendation from you. It could be something you read recently. It could be something that changed your life. Just any kind of book, what would you recommend people check out?
TOM WHYMAN: Am I allowed to say two books?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! Just say two. I will say one guests said like 20, but—[laughs]
TOM WHYMAN: It's gonna be, I think I should, actually I'll recommend one I read recently, and I'll recommend one which comes up in in my book.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, perfect.
TOM WHYMAN: So one which comes up in Infinitely Full of Hope which I think people should read is Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. So I talk about Jean Rhys's writings quite a bit in chapter two of my book, so if people don't know, she was originally from the Caribbean, from Dominica, in terms of her British family, and spent most of her life in Britain, and she wrote this sort of colossally sad kind of quartet of memoirs about her life as a kind of adjacent to a sex worker, a sort of like, down and out faux-respectable but not quite kind of women in the late 20s and 30s. Good Morning, Midnight is the last of those books. It's about this woman who gets given some money by a lover and goes to Paris, and she's just, she's just sad in Paris. And reflects on kind of the loss of her—based on a kind of real experience Rhys had with the effects of the loss of her child and things like that. It's a really sort of wonderful and sad book. And if you want to feel sad, I would recommend reading Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys.
And then later on, she's more famous for writing this book called Wide Sargasso Sea, which is kind of like the ultimate take on Jane Eyre. But her quartet of memoirs memoirish fiction is wonderful. Everyone should read it. It's better than Wide Sargasso Sea.
BLAIR HODGES: And well that's number one, for the sad folks out there, check that book out.
TOM WHYMAN: Yeah, the sad folks. Number two, if you want to be happier, I would recommend the best book I've read this year, Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Sort of starting from around like Christmas, New Year, last year I got really, really into Pynchon. And, you know, if you're in the right mood for it, he's just—people can have all sorts of opinions about Pynchon, but like, he's just really funny. And Mason and Dixon in particular is brilliant. It's sort of about Mason and Dixon who drew the titular line up, and about the sort of heroic pointlessness and monumentousness of drawing this line across the United States, basically, and sort of what does this mean, like, because of the limits of enlightenment, and all sorts of things.
Mason and Dixon are both from the UK where I'm from. Dixon was from the northeast of England, where I live. And there are extended passages which are set in the town where my wife-slash-partner went to school. And what's fascinating about this—because it’s Thomas Pynchon in America, who knows anything about him, really, but you know, American writer—is like, before they even mentioned the name of a town, I knew where they were, it's absolutely fascinating. It gets it so accurate in this sort of comic novel where it almost doesn't matter where it's set. And what he also gets accurate is the way everyone talks to each other, everyone's obsessed with the minutiae of their own accents. And somehow—he's obviously spent a lot of time there in this place, Hereworth where my partner grew up, and it's insane to me.
But yeah, it's a wonderful, wonderful comic novel. So yeah. If you want to feel happy read that, if you want to feel sad read Good Morning, Midnight.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I haven't ever read any Pynchon. So I'll have to add that to my list.
TOM WHYMAN: Definitely, definitely. Mason and Dixon, Against the Day—yeah, both of those are the best ones in my view.
BLAIR HODGES: Great. Well, thanks a lot. Tom. You left me feeling just as ambivalent about hope as when we started so—[laughter]
TOM WHYMAN: Cheers, yeah. Great. Yeah. There you go, that's fair. That was the idea.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, thanks a lot, it was fun. I'm still a hoper. I guess. Yes.
TOM WHYMAN: Exactly. Yeah. Good.
Outro – 57:42
BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.
Alright, another episode is in the books, the fire has dimmed, but the discussion continues. Join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. And I’m on Facebook as well. You can leave a comment at firesidepod.org. You can also email me questions, comments, or suggestions directly to blair@firesidepod.org. And please don’t forget to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts if you haven’t already.
Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistants, Kate Davis and Camille Messick, and also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges.
Our theme music is “Great Light” by Deep Sea Diver, check out that excellent band at thisisdeepseadiver.com.
Fireside with Blair Hodges is the place to fan the flames of your curiosity about life, faith, culture, and more. See you next time.
[End]
NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.