The discipline of hope

I taught human-centered design (HCD) to two groups last month: high schoolers in Ateneo Arete’s Junior Sandbox Program and college scholars with the Department of Science and Technology’s Science Education Institute (DOST-SEI).

Between camps, I caught up with Fr. Jett Villarin, SJ, a climate scientist, who would be interviewed about the coming El Niño. We discussed how he could communicate the magnitude of the event.

I began with questions that all science communication professionals use as part of their strategy: Who exactly was he reaching out to? What were their lives like? How would they experience El Niño as a problem? What could they do about it?

With us was an Arete intern, a communication major who had just finished the mandatory science and risk communication course. She added that simply scaring people wouldn’t work. Guidance would make a message both useful and hopeful.

It’s hard not to be hopeful when you’re around young people fighting to work beyond the world’s tragedies. In both HCD camps, I saw students excited to see the world through the experiences of others. When made to think, they never pouted or implied that I was wrong for countering deeply-held beliefs. They never threw down their tools or threw up their hands to give up on the challenges presented to them. There was so much promise and potential, so many young minds searching for an outlet for both energy and creativity.

I had to confirm something that students had once told me in my Issues in Science Communication class.

“How true is it that your teachers deducted points from your lab reports if your findings didn’t match their expectations?” I asked during the DOST-SEI talk, “And how true is it that you changed your findings so that you still got high grades?”

Their answer, in chorus: “Both true!”

“You’ve been trained for fraud! You won’t do well in science! You’ll do well in Congress, though.”

Laughter to the rafters.

Even with a background of shortcuts and memorization, the students never cursed their teachers or condemned those who had gone to higher-tier schools. They did not focus on their limitations. They did not stop asking questions and reveling in the answers, even if it’s easier to give up and despair rather than hope and dream.

Hope truly is harder to write about, think about, and work on. It’s easier to believe that drugs and video games make people violent, or the youth are lazy, or the world is doomed. It’s easier to curse others with punishment, imprisonment, or even death.

A curse, however, is never mere words. When despair is spoken out loud, it also invites us to imagine only one kind of future: one where anyone can be conveniently erased if they do not conform to the shape of one’s reality.

There is no such thing as a harmless curse. The former president wasn’t just hyperbolic when he called for death; his daughter wasn’t any better when her anger got the better of her. Anger, grief, and impulse neither excuse nor justify condemnation; they do not diminish the power of a curse.

A curse puts a sentence where life still asks questions. It is much harder to ask “why?” Why do people take drugs, resort to violence, or behave in bewildering ways? It could be flawed government infrastructure; broken, wounded families; a culture that prioritizes obedience and conformity at the expense of principles; a combination of more things than one can immediately imagine or know.

Asking why opens us to the possibility that we can fix our problems if we regard each other as human beings rather than vessels of unforgivable sins. “Why” is always an invitation to hope.

Hope asks us to be open to grace and surprise in an uncertain world. It encourages listening. Unlike the intellectually lazy despair, cursing, and condemnation, hope demands imagination. Hope is a discipline.

And hope, like the never-ending questions that one must ask when designing, pursuing the sciences, or wrestling with faith, is understandably exhausting. It means walking with people for a much longer time rather than simply showing up in their hour of need, giving them donations for a photo opportunity, and then walking away when the long-term work is needed.

It means working to expunge corruption by making people less dependent on political patronage, creating infrastructure that responds to their context, and forming people into citizens rather than mere spectators.

As the theologian Karl Rahner, SJ once said: hope is a commitment to an unknown future. We are all unfinished symphonies.

When Fr. Jett and I parted ways last week, our intern said, “Ma’am, it’s so interesting that you’re already experienced professionals, but you’re still brainstorming solutions.”

I had no time to reply then, but my answer would have been: there is no recipe for a humanity that is always changing, but it is our job to keep asking questions. It is our job to hope.

That is how we contribute to the unfinished symphony: we do not sing its conclusion, but we write the notes that keep the music going.

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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu