The philosopher John Rawls developed the idea of the veil of ignorance – that we should design society so that we would choose to live in it, even if we did not know what position we would hold.
What was meant as a political thought experiment can, I think, be turned into a historical parlour game. Think of a time and ask which society you would choose to live in. At some points, Egypt might be the obvious answer, at others China. Spain would probably be in with a shout, Britain too. Perhaps even France would briefly make the list. Today the answer would probably be the Nordic States. Unless long, dark, cold winters are a deal-breaker.
At no point, however, would, I think Russia be the right answer. And not just for the long, dark, cold winters. The Russian state has rarely evinced much care for those in its care, and the period in which it claimed to, it decided the best way to achieve that was to lock millions of them up.
Little wonder then that a certain gloominess seems to have entered the Russian soul. Coming third in the list of countries with the highest rates of deaths due to alcohol does not suggest a nation of shiny, happy people living their best lives. As an internet meme has it, an English author might say he would die for honour, a French one for love, an American for freedom, a Russian would merely say, “I will die”. And pour out another vodka.
It was a surprise, therefore, to come across the following quote attributed to Chekhov recently. “Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.” Not only is it not gloomy, it is almost, well, hopeful. The bad times will pass and good days are ahead.
Nature, we know, has its cycles. The barrenness of winter turns into the fecundity of summer. The leaves fall in the autumn and grow again in the spring. We cannot have one without the other. The bare tree is just the price we pay for the fruit tree.
There is an instrumentalism here, though. We appreciate the former because, at some stage in the future, it will give us the latter. It will satisfy our needs. We appreciate it not for itself, but for what it might do for us, its barrenness an unfortunate prerequisite for the good stuff to come. It is an appreciation of potential, not of actuality. We appreciate what it will be, not what it currently is. Compare it to a puppy. No-one loves the little fur-ball they bring back from the pet-shop because it will be a guard-dog/hunting-dog/companion in the future, they love it for what it is today, no matter how mal-coordinated and incontinent that reality is. We love it as a puppy, not as a dog-to-be.
Hope, they say, is not a strategy. They might be right about this, they might be wrong. A glance at Russian history suggests, at the least, it is not a good strategy. Yet hoping is what Chekov is asking us to do. Hope that the browny-gray collection of branches and twigs will turn green. Hope that it will bud and bear fruit. Why not? It always has before.
Past performance, investors are told, is not a guide to the future. Not all dogs live their expected spans – the puppy my parents had when I was born didn’t make it to four. Not all trees bear fruit. What then? Have they not let us down, betrayed us in some way?
A silly thought. No-one has ever had a contract with a fruit tree. Or at least not one that would stand up in any court.
Hope generally has a good reputation. “Dum spiro, spero” (while I breathe, I hope) was my maths teacher’s only Latin quote, trotted out with increasing regularity when he discovered I was proposing to study Classics. It is only at the entry to Hell itself that, in Dante, we are supposed to abandon it.
But not always. “Fear keeps pace with hope,” wrote Seneca. “Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us, instead of adapting ourselves to the present.” Hope deals with an uncertain future, a future which may not eventuate. How would Chekhov have felt if, come the summer, his tree had not borne him the fruit he expected? Better? Or Worse?
At heart, we know this. Our hopes may not come true, leaving a dark void where once had lived a bright future. Better, perhaps, not to give them the chance. To let hope stay hope rather than risking failure in trying to turn it into reality and ending up with nothing but despair. This is hope’s paradox – cling to it too tightly, elevate it, protect it and you can fail to do the things which might fulfil it.
Although Seneca frames his argument in terms of time, he hints at another dimension. We should, he says, “adapt” ourselves. For hope is not just a matter of present and future, it is about inside and outside. What we want, and what there is. We fear what we don’t want, and hope for what we do. Chekhov hoped that the tree would turn itself into a form he would find more congenial, for hope is just desire with a better PR team.
There is a Japanese story about a young man who goes to a fencing school asking to be admitted. Sceptical, the master summons one of his students to duel with the stranger who defeats him easily. He summons another. Same result. Finally, he summons his star pupil. He loses too. “You must have had training” the master tells the newcomer. “No. I have never touched a sword before,” he replies. “I have only taught myself not to fear death.”
A bit Hollywood, perhaps. Such radical ego-death (mirrored, interestingly, in the Eastern Orthodox concept of kenosis – emptying) is probably beyond most of us. Dedicated spiritual practices are hard to fit in around a nine-to-five so we are fated to remain the centre of our universes.
But this comes at a cost. A perennial nagging dissatisfaction, a need for things to be different, a frustration they are not and a fear they never will be. We are blinded to the present when we are dazzled by the future, the prospect of the fruit hiding the beauty of the bare branches. The beauty doesn’t stop being there, hope means we just fail to see it.
Perhaps Dante got it wrong. It’s heaven that abandoning hope gets you to, the heaven of the everyday.
A heaven with bare trees.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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When would I like to live in the past? Any civilization or era would be fine as long as wealthy and near the top of the pile – it might not last, but at least there might be some enjoyment. Even the sunlit uplands of the lost, even recentish, British heyday weren’t perfect for many, but at least there was some contentment and little desire to rise above one’s circumstances and become a sleb or be constantly ‘educated’ by the elite.