Pandora's Hope

 

Lawrence Alma-Tadema's water-colour of an ambivalent Pandora, 1881

Hope was the last item in a box of evils, in Greek mythology. When Prometheus stole fire from the gods for the sake of human beings, Zeus (king of the gods) took revenge by sending Pandora to the earth with a box that contained all the evils. The last item in the box was hope. Interestingly, hope does not escape from the box while all the (other) evils did because Pandora closed the lid on realising that she was condemned to bring evils to the human world.

The story has found numerous interpretations. Is hope yet another evil? The ultimate evil? Or is it retained in the box because human beings are condemned to live without its benefits? Did the gods want frustration to be the human lot? Why did they then put hope into the box in the first place?

Well, we can go on asking any number of questions when we are dealing with myths and scriptures. Let us be more realistic and look at our given situations.

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” as Alexander Pope sang. Life would have been quite unbearable without hope. We live (endure?) each day in the hope that tomorrow will be better. We wake up each morning these days hoping to hear better news about the pandemic. Hope – without it how much more wretched would our lives be?

Yet hope can be an evil, a terrible one at it too. Hope can render us lazy and inert. It can deceive us with the promise of the pie in the sky. Religions often do just that. Most religions teach us to endure the pains here on earth so that we will be rewarded for all that many times more in the next life. That sort of hope is an evil inasmuch as it supports the evils here implicitly. It is asking us to accept the evils without protest, without struggle, without efforts to mitigate them.

Our hopes should be pragmatic. Hope should lead us to positive action that can mitigate the evils we are confronted with. Hope should be a “confidence in a certain process of growth and development,” as philosopher Gabriel Marcel said. It is not enough to sit and hope that the pandemic will ebb and go away; we need to do our bit for that. Hope, in other words, is a sincere effort to mitigate the evils around us. Otherwise, it is a curse.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 375: "Hope was the last item in Pandora's box." What are the thoughts triggered in your mind by this statement? #Hope