The public discourse on climate change has long centred around hope-based narratives pushed by both the media and mainstream environmentalist agents from Greenpeace and WWF to Bill Gates and Al Gore.1 The promises of scientific and technological advance in particular, they argue, give us reason to be hopeful that it is in our hands to halt the incipient climate catastrophe. We just need to roll up our sleeves and get on with it.
In the face of humanity’s apparent inability—on display most recently at COP26 in Glasgow—to adopt the ‘rapid and far-reaching changes in all aspects of society’ required to at least keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C,2 this narrative has come under pressure. More radical climate activists make the case for an affective shift away from hope in the face of global warming towards darker attitudes such as anger, panic, or fear, or, most surprisingly perhaps, despair. The activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has arguably been the most vocal in their call for hope to ‘die’.3 Hope, they worry, obscures the truth about global warming as the single largest existential threat to the planet and hampers the kind of radical action that would be required at least to rein in its consequences. ‘In facing our climate predicament’, they argue, ‘there is no way to escape despair'.4
Reactions have been mixed, both from within and beyond the climate movement. While some fellow activists express enthusiasm about an explicit invocation of despair,5 others worry about its potentially stifling and depoliticizing effects on the public. According to the American scientist Michael Mann, the rhetoric of despair ‘is in many ways as pernicious as outright climate change denial, for it leads us down the same path of inaction’;6 writer and activist George Monbiot even considers succumbing to despair to be a moral failure.7 In the media, XR are frequently portrayed as the ‘eccentric and dangerous merchants of despair’.8
This discursive backlash chimes with a philosophical scepticism about despair that is both widespread and long-standing. According to Euripides’ Amphitryon, despair is the ‘mark of a worthless man’;9 Aquinas considers it ‘the greatest of sins’;10 Kant’s greatest worry is that we might ‘succumb to despair’ in the face of moral obligation;11 Charles Peirce equates despair with insanity.12 And contemporary philosophers juxtapose celebratory accounts of hope as a motivation and source of grit with a view of despair as unproductive, impotent, or nihilistic. Despairing agents, they argue, should either give up on the relevant end or cultivate an attitude, such as hope, that strengthens their resolve rather than undermining it.13 Unsurprisingly, political philosophers tend to agree that ‘a hopeful politics, one based upon a vision of generalized global prosperity and sustainability, best addresses the problems of climate change’.14
The aim of this article is to withstand this wholehearted rejecti