I remember a classroom lecture during my doctoral studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute when archetypal psychologist James Hillman spoke of what he called the naivete of hope. Hope was, after all, he said, the one evil left in Pandora’s box when she snapped the lid back shut. His point as I understood it, was that hope is a reliance upon an unknown future that distracts us from the present, from dealing with what is here, right now.

Hillman spoke of the psychology of our nation, the United States of America, describing that it was founded upon hope. People came here with big hopes and dreams to create a not-yet-realized future. He spends much of his time in Europe and was able to offer a perspective  describing that most nations don’t suffer from this hope problem; they are focused differently than we are, more realistic perhaps. I heard the lecture about 14 years ago and retain the sense of what he was saying, but do not quote him directly.

While listening to the news these days, our political disappointments, dealing with people in their private situations, and listening into my own thoughts I have been thinking about this subject again and again. Barack Obama’s campaign was based upon the notion of hope – an “evil” in Hillman’s words.

I cannot argue with James Hillman’s meaning because I can’t know it truly, I am only dealing with words, impressions and inner tensions around the ideas he sharply suggests and what they give rise to in me.

Part of me now wants, truly, to give up on hope, to confront present reality for what it suggests to me for better and for worse. We have entered another country yet again in the spirit of war. And I too feel at war with parts of myself and my history that I can’t seem to resolve. Is it possible to imagine that as a species we are capable evolutionarily of getting it right, that the malevolent forces within the human spirit have not already doomed us beyond the possibility of repair?My tired heart does some days want to give up and settle for what is in the now without imagining an end to it.

That feeling, I find, leads to despair. And I wonder, is despair not the same thing as Hillman suggests that hope is, the belief in an unknown future? Isn’t despair also the imagining of a future, in this case not a brighter one but a failed one.

I believe we all as a species live somewhere on the spectrum of this dilemma, I hear it everywhere I turn. It is not a simple one, whether to chose hope or despair, or figure out where to live in between them. Evidence accumulates on both ends of the spectrum consistently. It is naive to chose one or the other. But I do think we have a choice about what elements of now we chose believe more and give energy to.

I have in my life had hope for the wrong things. I understand the evil of it that sense. But I still believe in hope. Loosening concepts around what is hoped for is necessary, but hope itself is pure, not evil. I choose hope to give my heart to.