…Is the provocative title to a book by Loyal Rue…who would name their child “Loyal” is another topic, as well as whether this name in itself messed up the life of the child enough to determine his position about “God”, whatever he conceives It to be.
I am not proposing here to make a chapter by chapter book discussion. I just wanted to share a passage which struck me based on my recent history on this site. He says that:
“Implicit in a person’s goal hierarchy are the following principles:(1) to ameliorate goal-incongruent encounters, and (2) to sustain or enhance goal-congruent encounters.”
This will remind some of Freud’s Pleasure Principle, only here “pleasure” is echoed with “goal”, so that 1 can be seen as the drive to relieve discomfort or displeasures, and 2 as the drive to sustain comfort and/or pleasure.
He says that these “meta-goals” generate “coping-process”, what I would call coping mechanisms, and which are divided into two sub-processess.(1) Is action in the world, problem focused strategy- what one might do or think if presented with an emotional (potential action) experience. You see a bear running at you and you feel the emotion fear, and the sub-process is to run like hell. (2) Are emotion-focused strategies, and these coincide with an inability, a powerlessness to solve the actual problem. The author says that:
“the point(…) is not to alter the world directly, but to alter some aspect of the self.”
This reminds me of Nietzsche ideas on “sublimination” or the redirection of emotion. The example Rue gives are: to distract oneself from an emotional feeling, to alter one’s goal hierarchy, and reappraising the original encounter. Then he says that:
“There exist several so-called emotional states that might be more appropiately classified as coping strategies. Hope, for example, is widely recognized as a distinctive emotion. We might wish to say that hope is in the lineage of desire, and therefore qualifies as a secondary emotion. But hope is not consistent with the appraisal pattern for desire- that is, it is not sustained by an appraisal for positive future expectations. Indeed, it is desire in spite of negative or highly uncertain future expectations, the very appraisal feature that decomposes desire in favor of sadness. Hope is desire where there should be none. In other words, a more coherent way to see hope as a viable mental state is to view it as an artifact of the coping process.”
…“to alter some aspect of the self…” That stayed with me.
As some of you might have read in my humble rant, certain facets of religion, which are constructed as universal to religion but which really are not, can come under criticism. Hope has been one of those aspects. It has been tied to “pride”, “ego” and “sin”. And it was interesting to me that “Hope” was understood by Mr Rue as a coping mechanism that seeks to re-arrange some aspect of the self. And even more that “Hope” is not tied to desire and expectations but that it is independent of desire and expectations.
Just as Hope is a coping mechanism, we can consider Religion as another coping mechanism, which is likely to be persuasive when the encounter facing us is with some situation which we cannot alter…if I cannot run away from the bear (broken leg) then at that point I become very much religious and in my fear pray to God for deliverance from this danger. To pray, to hope, are ways in which religion allows us at least the illusion of indirectly negotiating our problems which we cannot directly affect.
To go further with Hope; it is desire where there should be none. But why is that? Because that “hope” com,es tied to new narratives, new conceptions of how the world works, which are originated indirectly- not from direct experience with the world as is, but with a Reality behind the apperance of reality. The point to alter some aspect of the self is a means to alter also something in the world. This is that “reappraisal of the original encounter”, that he spoke about. He wrote that “hope is not consistent with the appraisal pattern for desire-”
But that should be examined. One hopes because one defers to something that is outside of our cognition but which is real. I hope that I get a job, even if I have been turned down several times and have no reason to expect, based on my experience, that this should change that, because deep down I also recognize that my past and present, which are available to my experience or recollection, are missing something. I avoid sadness by an appeal to the Unknown, an unknown that could delivered precisely the unexpected. This is a re-apparisal. It is also possible to match this to self-regulation, meaning that then Hope would be hope in something still Unknown, but with which we can negotiate. “I give you X and in return you give me Y”. X can be something that is hard for us, like loving our enemies. In fact Rue deals with Christian agape love, the love of those who are unlovable, again, as another coping mechanism, which it might be, but because it offers a trade, and therefore serves as a means to “cope” or “solve” a given “problem”. We pray, we love, we hope, as an idirect set of means to reach a direct end, a goal.
To Hope is is to expect in spite of reality, to expect where said expectation is unwarranted, and this expectation in the face of uncertainty (faith) we offer God as a sacrifice, as a self-sacrifice, a modulation of our self, a deference to something Greater yet Unknown.
What do you all think?