Session 7A: Hope, Invisibility and Relation

Session 7A: Hope, Invisibility and Relation
Chair: Wendy O’Brien

On the Hope for the Hope for Those without Hope
Marek Palasinski
Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, United Kingdom

The dawn of the 21st century heralds faster and more dramatic challenges for humans than ever before. The almost daily carnage in Iraq, or the result of the ban on the always sinful use of condoms by the groups dedicated to preconceived notions have been exacerbated by the phenomenon unique to our species and accompanying us for thousands of years – religion. So did it play a part in shattering Fukuyama’s dream of the End of History with the glass of the World Trade Centre. It is almost a cliché that the distorted employment of this source of meaning and consolation is not new to our times.
The Aztec bloody rituals, Crusaders’ persecution of Jews, or religious wars in Europe are just a few examples revealing to what consequences it can lead. How is it that ‘science based on scepticism, investigation and evidence, having to test its concepts and claims is often overshadowed by faith, which by definition defies evidence, is untested and therefore in direct contradiction with science?, asks Richard Dawkins?
One thing remains certain – religion is bound to stay with us and although I find the above question very intriguing, rather than giving it priority, I would like to present how the controlled and careful modification of its salience can be employed with a view to boosting helping behaviour, especially towards the out-group. There is already promising data that under some conditions it can indeed extend the boundaries of social inclusiveness and result in helping action (Reicher, Cassidy, Hopkins and Levine, 2006).
What further multicultural potential it holds and how it can be realised would be elaborated on in the light of the empirical data I have been collecting as part of my multicultural Phd research in psychology.

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The way a people perceive a concept such as hope is the product of several complex factors in its cultural cogito, a product of a philosophy of life that has been, in an ancient culture such as India’s, shaped over millennia. The Hindu mind, which has apprehended the world since Vedic times as a weary place and human existence as a millstone around its neck, is destined to eternally harbour a philosophy of life that is shaped by the ancient and indeterminate web of myth, beliefs and history. This is the philosophy of karma that looks at an individual’s life as the predetermined effect of her/his past actions in an earlier life. The moral law of karma is immutable and prevails through its essential corollary – the samsara or eternal course of births, deaths and rebirths.
Given this framework of the Hindu mind, the rationale offered for any life at the margins is the pre-ordained scheme of things— the vortex of one’s fate, and hence, hopeless. This paper observes how such a view prevails about people with disabilities in India, and explores the double bind faced by Indian women with disabilities in such a world order (given that they are simultaneously subject to disability and gender oppression), how society perceives them, and how most resign themselves to fate following the philosophy of karma.
Paradoxically, the same concept even as it appears irrational and exploitative in maintaining a status quo, enables the women, their families and the community at large to find some kind of meaning. The paper, further, wrests from within Indian philosophy, the feminine principle of Shakti and speculates whether this principle may be harnessed to find answers to questions the Hindu mind is grappling with, and in so doing empower the women themselves.  Such an empowerment is my understanding of hope—a ray of light in the darkness.

What is the relationship between hope and our media saturated societies?  Is there an effect technology has upon human relationships? If so, does this fundamentally change our capacities to live in a state of existential hope?  This research paper seeks to address these philosophical questions.  Drawing upon the work of Gabriel Marcel, I argue that new media technologies have a very serious and potentially harmful effect upon human relationships, and consequently result in a diminished capacity to find vitality and hope in everyday existence.  I focus specifically on his understanding of hope as it is discussed in Homo Viator and his analysis of mass society presented in Man Against Mass Society. I then turn to Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope to imagine how we might learn to cull our contemporary technocratic society for glimmers of hopeful future potentials.  Bloch insists that even in problematic social institutions, there are utopian moments, full of hope.  Drawing on the dialectical tradition of Karl Marx and G.W.F. Hegel, Bloch maintains that these social institutions then, ought to be further explored and taken seriously.  Thus, he enables a critical social philosophy to emerge without the dark pessimism, which ultimately punctuated similar kinds of social philosophical theory by Frankfurt School scholars, Theodor Adorno in particular.  I claim, in keeping with Bloch, that even though we may find ourselves in uncertain, even despairing circumstances, we must continually seek hope, lest the alienation induced by exponentially increasing technological developments, particularly in communications, deform permanently the human face of our relationships.  Thus, this paper seeks to establish a connection between Marcel’s work on the phenomenology of hope and Bloch’s more socially and politically oriented conception of hope through the problematic of mass communications in late global capitalist society.