Feeling the weight of a world? Lessons in hope and the power of freudenfreude

Ideas53:59A Guide to Hope, Learning and Shakespeare: Scholar Shannon Murray

*Originally published on Nov. 13, 2023.

For many, the world is feeling darker these days... even hopeless.

ScholarShannon Murrayis an advocate for hope and suggests the practice can't be passive.

"[Hope] requires engagement and a clear-eyed understanding of the way the world is before any attempt to make it better."

Murray is an award-winning English professor at the University of PEI. This year, an annual lecture on hope was established in her honour. For the inaugural lecture, Murray presented Shakespeare's Guide to Teaching, Learning and Hope.

She explored what Shakespeare can offer us in terms of lessons in patience, empathy, hope, freudenfreude, and about how The Bard's words have become the narrative soundtrack of her own life.

Here are some excerpts:

On hopefulness

We talk about hope and we need to think seriously about what it is when we have to imagine that the world can be better than it is.

Lisa Dixon, Jessica Riddell and I were finishing our book, Shakespeare's Guide to Hope, Life and Learning in 2020. And gosh, there was a lot of op-ed ink spilled about hope through those early pandemic years. Our experience was that talking and reading and writing about the nature of hope made us more hopeful. The second thing I want to say about hope is that I'm not thinking of a passive, 'it's all good' approach to crisis. The hope we advocate for is active. It requires engagement and a clear-eyed understanding of the way the world is before any attempt to make it better.

The term we use is critical hope and is the kind of hope you'll read about in the work of Paulo Freire or bell hooks or Ira Shor. I'll quote from our introduction:

Hope requires that we become comfortable with the difficulty of knowing in order to move forward into the future, into the unknown. Hope is fuelled by values of integrity, of ethical and moral responsibility, of citizenship and engagement. We argue that teaching itself is among the most hopeful of vocations because you must live in a world where you cannot see the impact you may make in some distant future. You may never access and do it anyway. In other words, the hope we talk about is hard work.

On fraudenfreude and schadenfreude in Shakespeare

Shakespeare does have a lot to say about learning, about informal teachers, about those people who explicitly tell or perfectly model new and better ways of being in the world. For example, he gives us characters who radiate one of my favourite academic virtues, 'freudenfreude.' You certainly met its evil twin, 'schadenfreude' the delight and the misfortune of others. But freudenfreude is its heroic opposite. It's a delight in the joys and successes of others. And Shakespeare gives us lots of examples, though mostly in his comedies, not so many in the tragedies. In Shakespeare's tragedies, schadenfreude leads to cruelty, undermining depression and death. Freudenfreude leads to happily ever after. So let that be a lesson to us.

If you are the Iago jealous of the promotion Casio got and hating the joy Othello has in his new marriage, and especially if you act on it, you will be stabbed. The inability to take pleasure when others succeed comes from the idea of scarcity. That if someone else has a success, has joy, then there must be less for us. And there are sometimes good reasons for that feeling.

In zero-sum games where only one person can get a job or a scholarship or an award, it can feel like universities are more places of scarcity than abundance. But an envious Iago and Othello or a competitive and vengeful merchant like Shylock or Antonio in Merchant of Venice, all of whom take some pleasure in seeing others fall. They end up isolated, bereft, stabbed. In Shakespeare's plays, schadenfreude does not pay.

On the gift ofappreciation

When I took on my first administrative job, my academic mentor, who was also my dad, gave me one piece of advice. Keep a box of notecards on your desk and anytime you hear anything good about anyone you work with, send a card. Emails are also good but real mail is special.

If nothing else occurs to you, you could try what Ann Braithwaite and I do. We took to doing it a few years back when we realized how much that we do goes unnoticed and unmarked. We periodically write to each other something that just says 'You're doing good work and UPEI is lucky to have you.' We started it as a joke, but even knowing that each time we get the message, it feels really good.

There's some research that suggests our own students will be more resilient, less depressed, generally happier if they practice freudenfreude. So let's model it for them. Do we find ways to celebrate the successes of our colleagues in our classes to boast about their awards, books, tenure, amazing anything? Andthis article by Julie Fraga in The New York Times from 2022 is a good place to start with the benefits to us and our students of freudenfreude.

Listen to the entire lecture by downloading theIDEAS podcastfrom your favourite podcast app.

*Transcript edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Mary Lynk.