But, crucially, to locate substantive hope in the victory of Jesus Christ isn’t to assert an absence of limits on human ability. Human beings are finite and that finitude presents itself in various limitations and weaknesses across all human persons. If pessimism is a decadent luxury of those with little to lose and a characteristic deformation of conservative thought, can its opposite be a characteristic deformation as well?
If so, then the problem is not simply the abstract matter of whether or not change is theoretically possible. It’s also a matter of change’s requirements and whether or not political subjects can recognize and organize themselves to reckon adequately with them. This is a real and a difficult problem as there is no dependable self-correction intrinsic to human beings. The problem of fallenness, that is, complicates any desire to effect such change. Substantive hope must reckon with the fact that human beings are not only capable of acting against their own self-interest but that they routinely do so.
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