44 pages • 1-hour read
Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, graphic violence, and death.
Reconciling Faith, Morality, and Scientific Discovery
Goodall’s first-person account traces her personal search for meaning and purpose. As Goodall charts her various ups and downs with faith over the course of her life and career, she examines the possibility of reconciling faith, morality, and scientific discovery.
Born into a Christian family, Goodall grew up believing in the Christian God—a conviction which afforded her comfort, peace, and security. She was “never forced to attend church” but was “taught the importance of human values such as courage, honesty, compassion, and tolerance” (3), which would stay with her throughout her life. However, Goodall’s later encounters with injustice, violence, and death challenged her understanding of the divine. Her scientific research in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park also evolved how she thought about truth, justice, and morality. By laying bare her ongoing journey towards spiritual enlightenment, Goodall captures how her desire for understanding is an innate part of the human experience.
Goodall’s detailed descriptions of her time in the Gombe forests and observing chimpanzees particularly captures how the divine might be found in the natural world. In Chapter 5, for example, she remarks, “I was getting closer to animals and nature, and as a result, closer to myself and more and more in tune with the spiritual power that I felt all around” (72, emphasis added). She details all of the intricate aspects of primate behavior she witnessed, her experiences walking through or camping in Gombe, and the many reveries such experiences elicited. The more time Goodall spent immersed in the natural world, the more honed her spiritual understanding became. In communing with animals and nature, she was communing with a divine force that seemed to govern all of life. Goodall thus argues that scientific discovery and spirituality can be complementary forces instead of rival conceptions of the world.
By first rendering her own experiences in such detail, Goodall is able to translate her private life to a more universal, spiritual context. In the latter portions of the text, Goodall considers how humans might promote peace. She urges her reader to similarly connect with the natural world so she might first understand herself, and in turn, better relate to others. Spirituality and morality, she argues, are not distinct from science; these fields of thought are all entangled. Once the individual acknowledges that she is a small part of a larger story, she might achieve a higher, more enlightened way of being.
Overcoming Grief, Fear, and Despair
While Reason for Hope is an account of Goodall’s time observing chimpanzees in Gombe, it is also an account of Goodall’s encounters with grief, fear, and despair, and the story of how she learned to cope with these facets of human experience. Throughout the text, Goodall embraces consistently acknowledging the positive and negative aspects of life, offering insight into how to overcome grief, fear, and despair.
Goodall’s ability to hold that life’s sorrow does not negate life’s joy conveys her capacity for deep thinking and enlightened regard for the balance between good and evil. Goodall’s description of her visit to Cologne Cathedral embodies her perspective on human suffering and personal loss: “To me it was a message symbolizing the ultimate power of good over evil. […] the once beautiful city, reduced to ruins because one man’s lust for power had plunged Europe into a brutal war, was a compelling reminder of human evil” (31, emphasis added). While the ruins spoke of humanity’s capability for cruelty and violence, the cathedral represented the possibility of overcoming such evil. The same is true of Goodall’s later reference to the plant growing out of the Auschwitz bunker: From the ruins of violence and suffering came evidence of new life.
Goodall experiences firsthand what it means to emerge from sorrow with hope when her second husband Derek Bryceson dies. Although she knew “intellectually that death follows life” (151) she was unprepared for the devastation of watching Derek weaken and pass away. In the weeks and months following, Goodall would find herself immobilized by despair: “I was grieving, suffering—and angry. Angry at God, at fate—the unjustness of it all” (160). With time, however, Goodall discovered that returning to the natural world could heal her broken heart and lead her on a new life path. Spending time alone back in Gombe reminded Goodall of death’s ubiquity, while offering her peace of mind: “Time spent in the forests, following and watching and simply being with the chimpanzees, has always sustained the inner core of my being. And it did not fail me then” (169). Being in the wild pulled Goodall out of herself and grounded her in the mystery and beauty of nature. Although she still missed Derek, she was learning to commune with the spirit world through nature—and thus to make peace with her own loss.
Goodall translates her experience of loss to larger issues of fear and despair. She argues that just as the natural world awakened her to a new phase of life—compelling her towards a life of environmental stewardship—she similarly argues that a return to the land can help put all human suffering into perspective. In the latter chapters of the text, she speaks against consumerism, materialism, and selfishness, holding that such patterns of thought divorce the individual from others and render life’s struggles unbearable. Moving away from the self and towards nature and community, she implies, can heal any grief, fear, or despair.
Compassion and Hope as Resistance to Violence
Goodall’s examinations of human nature compel her to seek answers to historical patterns of cruelty, violence, and destruction. While she has often heard of or witnessed many appalling human actions in her time, she nevertheless seeks to offer her readers hope for the future. In doing so, she advocates for compassion and hope as resistance to violence.
Throughout the majority of the text, Goodall locates her explorations and arguments within the context of her own experience. For example, she depicts her first encounters with violence—discovering photographs documenting the Nazi death camps—in acute detail to convey how deeply the Holocaust impacted her sense of justice and humanity. She goes on to relay her own quest for meaning once she began to denounce the God she’d been raised with. If, she began to wonder, “the human species [is] so destructive,” so “selfish and greedy and, sometimes truly evil […] there can be no underlying meaning to the emergence of life on earth” (xiv). In short, Goodall became hopeless when she realized how inexplicable human violence could be. Her personal struggle to reconcile humans’ senseless brutality towards each other led her to consider what people can do in the face of violence and injustice.
In the latter chapters of the text, Goodall turns her discussion from more personal topics to broader sociopolitical concerns. She assumes a more assertive stance. As the text’s title suggests, Goodall holds that there are always reasons to hope, even in the face of suffering. These reasons, she explains in Chapter 15, “are fourfold: (1) the human brain; (2) the resilience of nature; (3) the energy and enthusiasm that is found or can be kindled among young people worldwide; and (4) the indomitable human spirit” (233).
Goodall expounds upon each of these “reasons for hope,” explaining just how important hope is to human survival. At the core of hope, Goodall argues, is love. If humans learn to love one another—beginning in their own communities, workplaces, and families—they will in turn spread love. To Goodall, love is a form of compassion, a decision to pay attention to others’ misfortunes and to support them through these struggles. If humans exercise their capacity for empathy, Goodall holds that human society might pursue change and create a more peaceful world.
Goodall’s Epilogue reiterates her argument that hope, compassion, and empathy are antidotes to violence within the context of a post-9/11 society. While she acknowledges how flimsy hope can feel in the face of great suffering, she also holds that getting “involved in something positive” can be “the best way to cope in times of anxiety, distress, and fear” (282). For Goodall, giving talks on hope post 9/11, offered her a sense of grounding in an otherwise chaotic world. She translated her sorrow into tangible compassion. In turn, she was able to offer others hope.
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