Reason Not to Despair: A Conversation with Tom Whyman
Alexander Dumas once wrote that all human wisdom could be summed up in two words, “wait and hope.” In his new book, Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster, British philosopher Tom Whyman spends time dissecting the latter. Infinitely Full of Hope is a book about fatherhood, which is to say it’s a book about hope. Whyman flexes his Ph.D. in philosophy by treating us to an academic analysis and argument for hope that is directly tied to the story of how he and his wife came to have their first child. If that sounds like a heady slog, it isn’t. Whyman has a knack for breaking down philosophy until it is digestible and engaging as well as for finding inspiration in less-conventional philosophical sources—well-known theorists like Kant and Theodore Adorno are quoted in the book, but so are It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Greta Thunberg.
Though written pre-COVID, disaster is heavy on Whyman’s mind because, like many millennials, his life has been punctuated by generation-defining disasters. “I can count out my life in economic disasters,” he muses at one point in the book. Tuition hikes, precarious employment, homeownership becoming a pipe dream, Brexit, the impending climate apocalypse—millennials have lived through a lot. “Our era is so bad,” Whyman writes, “that we have doomed every future generation in advance.” And: “Life in the world our children will inherit will be flooded, blazing, parched, unstable, and brutally short—if it is even able to exist at all.” In the face of all this uncertainty, Whyman asks (in a preface addressed to his son), “Is a good life really even possible: for you, for any child born today...for anyone who might one day be alive in this world at all?”
Whyman proposes hope as an answer to an impossible question, and this book, partly a memoir and partly a theoretical work, is a delivery system for that message. The cover is a playful riff on Paul Klee’s monoprint “Angelus Novus,” a prized possession of German Philosopher Walter Benjamin. In this version, illustrated by Kieryn Tyler, a father and son appear as an identical pair of colorful smiling squiggles, lightly touching hands. “I hope this text is in some way an adequate expression of the love I have for both of you,” Whyman writes, addressing his partner Edie and their son Iggy. This book is an expression of a father’s love, which parents will recognize means it is also innately an expression of anxiety and hope for his child and the future he will live in.
In March, Whyman and I had a long talk from our respective quarantine zones—me in Los Angeles, him in Gateshead, England, where he lives with his family—to discuss philosophy, fatherhood, and why he hates the trolley problem.
Naomi Elias: The format of this book is interesting. It’s a memoir about your journey to fatherhood and also a philosophical exploration of the very concept of fatherhood. What made you decide to combine these two topics?
Tom Whyman: One thing I’m suspicious of in philosophy is any sort of pretense or stance of neutrality. Philosophers often like to pretend they’re saying something more neutral or more universal than they are, but in fact, they have quite a finite perspective. I mean, the academy and the history of philosophy have been from the finite perspective of white European men for the most part and, obviously, that’s my perspective too, but when you make it explicit, I think the idea is you can open it up in ways where the reader feels more confident to challenge your ideas. You’re sort of showing your workings in terms of what experience you’re presenting alongside your ideas. I don’t think philosophical ideas are separate from life. I think philosophers themselves mislead people when they pretend they are. You can say something more valuable, hopefully, by unpacking your perspective and making it explicit on the page.
NE: You mention in the acknowledgements that the seed idea of this book comes from a 2019 piece you wrote for the now-extinct website The Outline. I went back and looked at the title, “It is perfectly moral to bring children into a shitty world.” Can you talk about that claim, which I’ve encountered from many people my age, that it’s unethical to have children now due to climate change or whatever and why you reject it?
TW: Well actually The Outline piece, the sort of seed piece, was a different piece which I think is called “Is it hopepunk to have a baby?” The shitty world one was something I wrote while I was writing the book. They’re definitely related. It’s one of the guiding questions of the book. One of the arguments for why you shouldn’t have kids is that it’s bad for your carbon footprint, right? Human beings pollute and the fewer human beings there are, the fewer polluters there are, so it’s more green to have fewer kids. That’s a really weird argument because it treats having a child as being a kind of token of your own consumption like eating a steak or taking an international flight. A child is its own human, its own sort of new beginning. In the book I talk about this concept of natality—a word I borrowed from Hannah Arendt—which is the new beginning inherent in birth. When a new human life comes, it transforms the world in a certain way. When human beings act, we do transform the world. Just because we’re making all the mistakes we are now, doesn’t inevitably mean that future generations are going to make those same mistakes.
On a certain level that’s fatalistic because it sounds like you’re saying one reason we should have kids is because they’ll do things better than we’re doing and, you know, we can just leave it to them. No, that’s not really my argument. My argument is that by having those possibilities, the possibility that future generations will exist and will live differently from us, we ourselves have something to orient ourselves towards. Your hopes for your life don’t only have to be about what you as an individual can achieve but also, what all future generations in general can achieve which then becomes, “What can we achieve as a society?” Obviously, I’m not arguing that having kids is the only way to participate in society. But, having had a child, I feel more inclined to be actively involved in society—well, obviously, that’s literally illegal at the moment—but, you know, it sort of ties you into it more. Also lots of people can participate in the raising of a child so you don’t have to have a biological child to see hope in future generations. I guess ultimately if you want to boil that into a sentence, my argument is that I think we can be too tempted to despair just because things are bad right now but children give you a reason not to despair, so it’s quite nice in that sense.
NE: I fully agree with you when you say in the book, “the bleakest dystopia of all is the childless one from Children of Men.”
TW: Oh, yeah. There’s an interesting exploration [of the movie] in the first chapter of Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. His argument there shows you that because this dystopia is literally futureless, it makes it impossible to live in the present as well. I guess the point I make in the book at various points is we need to be able to lay claim to hope in some way, to claim some sort of futurity, in order to be able to act at all in the present.
NE: Speaking of hope, Infinitely Full of Hope is a kind of book-length answer to a question you pulled from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: “What can I hope for?” What interested you about that question specifically? There’s a trio of questions that you mentioned he had but that’s the one you focus on.
TW: The first two questions—What can I know? and What should I do?—they’re the bread and butter of philosophy departments. Kant introduces the three questions as one so they sort of feed off each other. If we only know what we can know and what we ought to do, then we’re sort of missing something, right? We need to know what we can hope for in order to know what knowledge and truth and right action are worth. That’s why I was so interested in the concept of hope. When I was writing, as I expected to become a father, I was interested in just well, what’s my life worth? What’s the point of me existing? It felt more meaningful to me when I was about to become a father because I sort of felt I haven’t done enough to justify myself, so how can I justify bringing new people into the world as well? Knowing what you can hope for is important for understanding why you’re in the world, why you’re doing anything to begin with.
NE: The title of the book is borrowed from a Kafka quote. Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia is heavily cited. How did you select which philosophers, theories, and texts you’d engage with to answer Kant’s question?
TW: I suppose it relates to my answer to the last question because I was guided by, for the most part, who I was thinking about anyway and whom I’m most interested in, the thinkers and writers whose ideas had formed the substance of my own life. When you study philosophy for a living, your memories of where you were at a certain time are sort of filtered through who you were reading. I wrote a bit in the book about how my encounter with Adorno was formative for me.
The other way I picked some of the texts is that they are the established philosophical literature on hope. So people like Jonathan Lear, who I wrote about in the book, and some other authors who’ve written academic philosophical work on hope, I cited them because that’s sort of the academic canon. It’d be what’s on your reading list if you did a course on hope so I had to respond to them in some way.
NE: One of the things I really responded to in this book was the way you talk about hope. You say that hope has a despairing point similar to how water has a boiling point. Can you explain that concept?
TW: The account of hope I’m going for in the book was one I wanted to be compatible with the pessimism that I’m in a way more naturally inclined towards and also, you know, any accusations of Pollyannaishness or being too hopeful or blindly hopeful was something I wanted to avoid. I suppose what I was trying to capture with that image is when you hope for something, there’s a concrete possibility for action that might be associated with that hope. Hope is the sort of thing which emerges when we are at least some degree powerless. So, there’s always going to come a point when perhaps whatever you’re hopefully oriented towards, you might come to believe that all possibilities of action are now closed off to you and that’s when hope is going to give way to despair.
NE: What I liked about it was I found parallels between your definition of hope and prison abolitionist/activist Mariame Kaba’s belief that hope is a discipline. You kind of both talk about hope not being something you have, but something you practice.
TW: Oh, definitely. I mean, I’ve not come across her work. It sounds really interesting. I’m definitely in broad agreement with that. Hope is something I think is going to have to have concrete relations to practice because otherwise it’s just sort of trite. It becomes sort of wishful thinking if it’s not a discipline. You know that Greta Thungburg line, “I don’t want you to hope, I want you to panic”? One interpretation of that line would be, well, if you’re just hoping, you’re just sort of fobbing me off with something. You kinda see what she’s getting at.
NE: There’s a quote in the book that I wanted you to kind of unpack. You say, “‘Masculinity’ can be cited as an easy synecdoche for everything that is wrong with our world.” Can you talk about what you mean and speak to how it informs the kind of father you’re trying to be to your son?
TW: Yeah, I mean, to be clear, that’s not my view, it’s just sort of a view that you encounter. It’s relatively commonly held. People just point to certain things that go wrong in the world and say that’s just men doing bad or whatever. But even though that’s not my view, I can see where it’s coming from, the image of toxic masculinity invoked in that sort of thinking. Certainly for me, becoming a father has been very affirming of my own masculinity as I understand it. I’m raising a son and I suppose I’m interested in how we might think about traditionally masculine roles in different ways so we don’t perpetuate toxic dynamics. I don’t know if that’s possible, but it’s something I’m interested in. My gender is meaningful to me and I would like to find ways of bearing it less shittily than some people do. I’m interested in how that’s possible. I don’t have any answers to that question as yet. But I explore it in the book through things like Kafka’s letter to his father where you get this sort of image of this very bad dad. We can look to examples of the sorts of masculinity that aren’t doing good in the world and think, “How do we do differently to that?” Kafka’s dad, for example, is very possessive and withholds his love from his children in order to control them and in Kafka’s understanding, that has made it impossible for him to live independently of his father, or live happily independently of his father. That’s the opposite father of what I’m trying to be. I want my son to be able to live happily independently of me. I want to equip him to be able to do that. I want to equip him to be able to act transformatively in the world, which is something human beings can do.
NE: These last two questions are not really tied to the book. They’re more about you being a philosopher. So, The Good Place made moral philosophy cool and kinda mainstream. As a professional philosopher, is that fun for you or is it exhausting to hear people discover something like the Trolley Problem for the first time in like 2020?
TW: [laughs] Well, I’m not a fan of the trolley problem. The way that it’s taught in philosophy 101 type courses encourages you to think of ethics in exactly the wrong sort of way. One of the thinkers I cite in the book, Elizabeth Anscombe—ironically, Philippa Foot, who was the first philosopher canonically to introduce the trolley problem, was a friend of hers—but Anscombe thought you should never do ethics in thought experiments because they present you with a problem you would never experience in the real world and then sort of invite you to choose between competing philosophical options as if you’re at a market or something. As a first year undergraduate you’re meant to stick with them as if, if you were ever really presented with a situation and acting on the categorical imperative or acting to maximize utility, it would actually help you or would actively inform the way that you behaved. So, I’m not a fan of the trolley problem. That doesn’t have much to do with The Good Place. Students every now and then mention The Good Place to me. One of my adjuncts and one of my first year students, a very good student, talks about The Good Place quite a lot, and listens to a Good Place podcast I think which he’s cited in essays. It’s a nice gateway drug into the discipline, definitely. I’ve seen the first two series; it’s pretty good.
NE: I was excited to read your book, but I was nervous because I took like one philosophy class in college. But I found you’re a very approachable philosopher. I liked a recent tweet of yours, “I don’t live according to any ethical system. I live under capitalism and have a small child. I just do what I need to in order to be able to pay the bills and have at least 2 hours to myself every evening.” I think grounding the book in realism, questions about fatherhood and stuff that other people who are non-philosophers deal with, is helpful to readers.
TW: Thank you. I mean, I later corrected my statement a little bit. Ethics isn’t about having an ethical system and having a set of rules, necessarily. It’s about knowing how to live well in the world as you actually find it. Maybe some rules are sometimes helpful to some people, but to me it doesn’t mean following abstractuals. What did you think of the book in general by the way? I’m interested to know your thoughts.
NE: I really liked it. I don’t interview people unless I like their book. I thought that you tied things together in a way that made sense and I like when people are able to break down big concepts for me.
TW: Thanks, I’m glad to hear that. I mean, back to the first question, actually, in terms of why did I write this from my own perspective, this is a way of tying stuff together and also grounding stuff in realism as you say. Again, if you assume this very philosophical view from nowhere, then it becomes much harder to talk to people and to say things that are meaningful to people. Of course all of this stuff is very discouraged in academic philosophy departments. In a way, writing a book like this is like a loud proclamation to everyone that I will almost certainly never get a tenure track job. But, you know, it just means I wrote it in the spirit of hoping for other things.
Tom Whyman (@HealthUntoDeath) is a philosopher and writer who lives in the north east of England. He has taught at a number of UK universities, and was a contributing writer at The Outline.
Naomi Elias (@naomi_elias) is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared online and in print at a variety of publications including The Nation, Longreads, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Brooklyn Rail.