David Byrne on the new sin of Hope

I went to an art show recently of Drawings by David Byrne and Dave Eggers. The show was crowded and overwhelming but the drawings of animals were clever and cute and so I stayed and walked around awhile. The first thing I picked up was this book, "The New Sins" by David Byrne. It lists and explains sins we commonly mistake for virtues. (According to Byrne's website, the book was "originally placed anonymously in hotel rooms during the 2001 Valencia Biennial" and then later placed in light boxes in bus kiosks in Syndey and Toronto.) When I read this passage on Hope, I knew I would have to stand in the twenty minute line of hipsters and journalists snapping up Dave Eggers' drawings, hoping to be seen as cool and ironic. I ignored the drawings and bought the book, which I quote here at length:

Hope

(....)

Hope allows us to deceive ourselves into thinking that life is parceled into discrete chunks -- that our lives are stories with beginnings, middles and ends. That there IS narrative, linearity, and not chaos, chance and luck.

Chaos is beautiful. Hope deceives us into thinking that it is something evil and unnecessary, something to be avoided at all costs. Hope is therefore a way of keeping people blinded, ignorant, and servile, ignorant of the true and mystical beauty of the universe, a universe which is meaningless and amoral. Hope and its handmaiden, Science, maintain that the universe is governed by Laws.

The laws of gravity, of thermodynamics, of motion, electromagnetism and mathematics have been proven time and time again to be only temporary frameworks and support structures. However, these laws, every one invented by men, are merely diabolical scenarios that need to be revised every century, sometimes more often than that. They reflect hopes and faiths that matter will indeed fall, cool, still and eventually disperse. But if we are continually dismayed, it is only because we have not come to love hopelessness. We have not accepted the Beauty of the Universe.