It has been several months now since I saw Gus Van Sant’s Milk. But upon seeing a preview for the film on CNN the other day, I was reminded of one of the things that disturbed me about the film (the other, more general complaint I had had to do with its failure to develop Milk’s character outside the sphere of his political career).
Now, the preview highlighted what seemed to be one of the films rather trite mantras, repeated several times by Milk throughout the film: “You gotta give’m hope! You gotta give’m hope!” What could be more innocent, more warm and fuzzy even, than the invitation to hope—hope for justice, equality, and so on. However, I would argue (against a longstanding tradition to be sure) that when employed within the context of a struggle for social-political emancipation the rhetoric of hope actually serves the interests of those seeking to maintain the status quo. Despite its prevalent use within political discourse today—especially amount liberals like myself—the word hope hardly signifies a secular humanist notion. Rather, its meaning is largely determined by Christian theology, where it signifies the believer’s attitude toward salvation, the time of judgment, the paruosia, God, etc. In its classical formulation, found in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, it is said that hope always concerns that which is unseen and always yet to come, since, after all, ‘hope that is seen is not hope at all.’ Just as Kant demonstrates that the lack of theoretical (rational) certainty of God’s existence is the condition of possibility for genuine religious faith, so too the futurity and unavailability of what is hoped-for is the condition of possibility of hope. If God showed up for dinner, you’d no longer have the oppurtonity to have faith in God. If emancipation were to occur, you’d no longer be able to hope for it.
One can only hope for that which is in principle yet to come. The problem, then, with the use of hope in political discourse is that deferment, delay and unavailability belong to its very structure. (To cite that all-too-often cited passage from Marx—which, of course, is less of straightforward critique of religion than it is usually made out to be—we might say that it is not religion in general but more precisely its theological principle of hope that is an opiate for the masses.) “So, yes,” the oppressive forces of establishment will say, “please give’m hope
