Composing a Further Life

(epigenesis) of hope in infancy. There must be moments in even the most felicitous infancy when, at some level, a crying child begins to despair that help will ever come; then gradually the repeated experience of relief builds up a protective barrier against despair that can last a lifetime and is a basis for resilience. For some, this becomes trust in a benevolent cosmos or the foundation of faith, but hope plays a role at every stage of the life cycle. Infants whose care is so inadequate that it does not support the beginnings of hope may not survive.
    The word hope came to the fore for Americans during Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency in 2008, this time with an emphasis not on infancy or early childhood (infants can neither vote nor canvass) but on young adults. And this time the issue that subliminally represented the erosion of hope, even though it developed after the campaign began, was the financial crisis of that year. Still, every election challenges us to consider what it is that we hope for. Barack Obama reawakened an interest in politics in a whole generation of young people who had increasingly been coming to the conclusion that their lives would be harder and more limited than those of their parents and that the political process was something they could not affect and so was not worth paying attention to. No small part of this achievement was the way it echoed in renewed hope for all ages.

    FIGURE 1
Erik H. Erikson: The Eight Ages of Man
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    Hope and the need for a renewal of hope is an issue for older Americans as well. 9 When the economy slows, Americans who have retired must hope that the savings and benefits they have worked for and counted on will be there for them—indeed, we hope for better coverage and less red tape. Many of us hope to continue working and earning—unemployment is especially grim in late middle age—and even more of us hope to continue contributing to society. Meanwhile, we hope to live as healthily and autonomously as we can, and to die peacefully and with dignity. Many hope for an afterlife or for a reunion with loved ones beyond death, but this is not the business of politicians.
    Whatever our faith or present life expectancy, however, there are hopes that go beyond this life. We would like to see our children and grandchildren prosper, the communities and institutions we have built develop and flourish. We would like future generations to be able to travel and to be greeted with friendship rather than enmity. We would like to see the natural world as we have known and loved it endure. Will the same birdsongs sound twenty years from now? Do we want the beaches fouled with oil sludge when we can no longer visit them? We would like our grandchildren—not only biological grandchildren but the children of neighbors and friends, future generations—to have the same rights and opportunities we have had, whether we are there to see it or not. And if our rights have ever been denied, we would like them affirmed and realized for the future. We hope to see the wounds of past injustices healed. We hope for peace and must resist sowing dragons’ teeth from which future enemies will spring.
    Hope makes a good political slogan because history suggests that, for the fulfillment of these specific hopes, we must look to the political process to ensure a framework within which citizens are given honest information and can make responsible choices. As a nation, we need to think of the long term, beyond the lives of the living. Hope, nurtured in infancy, provides the courage to think ahead for the sake of grandchildren and great-grandchildren fifty or a hundred years down the road, and hope is a necessary ingredient of any long-term commitment. The Granny Voter effort that my friends and I initiated was cautious about using the word itself, because our effort was nonpartisan, but in our push for longer-term thinking we were proposing action in the name of hope for the future.
    Every cultural tradition includes a theory of how what has been treasured in the past is transmitted to the next generation, and this depends upon having an understanding of how human lives unfold, how the transitions are made from one stage to the next, often through rituals or ordeals, and how the torch is passed from generation to generation. How extraordinary it is to look at a newborn infant, helpless and totally dependent, and affirm that this child, growing and developing step by step,