"A prisoner of hope"

Dr. Cornel West

Rob Bell was just at our school a few weeks ago, and I had the privilege of interviewing him. At one point, he quoted Dr. Cornel West. The context of his proclamation was around optimism, primarily that hope was not the same as being optimistic. Furthermore, that he could not get away from hope because he was a prisoner of hope. 

I was very intrigued by this quote, so I decided to find it. (Don't you just love the internet!) The quote comes from a commencement address at Wesleyan College 20 years ago this Spring. (By the way, this whole website is a good reference for other inspirational commencement addresses.) Here is the speech in full:

• "An Abiding Sense of History"

In essence, Dr. West argues that we, especially as Americans, need to recover an abiding sense of history. History teaches us that we constantly strive against evil but also that evil and injustice has consistently been a part of history. Regardless of the situation, hope has remained. But hope is not optimism or some kind of overriding feeling. Hope is knowing what is right, good, and just and acting on that conviction. Hope opens the future for something different, even if that is not what we know or see. Here is my favorite quote, and the context of the line that Bell referenced:

... there is a need for audacious hope. And it’s not optimism. I’m in no way an optimist. I’ve been black in America for 39 years. No ground for optimism here, given the progress and regress and three steps forward and four steps backward. Optimism is a notion that there’s sufficient evidence that would allow us to infer that if we keep doing what we’re doing, things will get better. I don’t believe that. I’m a prisoner of hope, that’s something else. Cutting against the grain, against the evidence. William James said it so well in that grand and masterful essay of his of 1879 called “The Sentiment of Rationality,” where he talked about faith being the courage to act when doubt is warranted. And that’s what I’m talking about.
     Of course I come from a tradition, a black church tradition, in which we defined faith as stepping out on nothing and landing on something. That’s the history of black folk in this country. Hope against hope. And yet still trying to sustain the notion that we world-weary and tired peoples, all peoples in this society, can be energized and galvanized around causes and principles and ideals that are bigger than us, that can appeal to the better angels of our nature, so that we, in fact, can reach the conclusion that the world in incomplete - that history in unfinished, that the future is open-ended, that what we think and what we do does make a difference.