Politics, Religion, Hope: Contemporary Theoretical Perspectives

Abstract

In this period of pandemics, the environmental crisis, and fraying of political consensus, the question of hope is especially pressing. Is hope reasonable or is it necessary, and for what and for whom? Is it only the property now of right-wing populists, using the rolling economic, immigration, and pandemic crises, and the new affordances of social media, in the cause of reactionary revolt against the social and cultural gains of the last centuries, such as the inclusion of women and other minorities, as well as awareness of ecological depredation? Dowe find ourselves in a Yeatsian time, wherein proverbially, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats 2016, 33), or does the stretching and failing of contemporary paradigms announce new, more affirmative possibilities? What resources for hope can we find in the great religious and political traditions, whether Islamic, Jewish, Christian, or other? Does the instrumental and ideological use of these traditions disqualify them as sources of renewal and reorientation? Likewise, are there existing resources within the political paradigms of liberalism, democracy, republicanism, or socialism which can be looked to resolve the present symptoms of despair, alienation, and incivility, or must entirely new political models be imagined or looked to? Are more two-sided theoretical assessments of these traditions, as sources of both corruption and catharsis, dominion and liberation, needed if we are to build new coalitions capable of addressing the crises, or is hope necessarily open or blind, committed to holding open the possibility that something absolutely Other must occur? Critical theorising in the last decades has been engaged in a significant process or processes of rethinking, as Marxist-Leninism’s credibility as the alternative to regnant capitalism declined, and then failed after 1989. At the same time, the absence of any serious systematic opposition has enabled parties of business globally to prosecute their neoliberal ambitions, of universal commodification and marketisation, with unprecedented success. Societies have become increasingly economically unequal, wealth has become more concentrated, organisational structures have become more corporatized, and as the pandemic has shown in countries like the US, the state has been divested of its democratic capacities to better the lives of citizens. The resulting alienation has produced pools of discontent from which right-wing populists draw, promising a simple solution to these widespread problems by scapegoating minorities, targeting the remnants of the social democratic “elites” in the educational, governmental, and community sectors, conducting vitriolic