Acts of Hope: As Antidotes to the Fear of Despair
A Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit, is a wonderful and powerful little book on the meaning and value of hope. Solnit identifies the sources of our despair, darkness and defeatism and persuasively reasserts our need to accept, acknowledge and come to terms with it.
Solnit argues that acceptance of the negative in our lives is critical for action and counter-action – she draws perhaps in that respect (consciously or unconsciously) from the Zen Buddhist (and other) traditions of living with negativity, despondency, and darkness where it arises rather than trying to escape it. It's here that Solnit comes into her own, giving concrete examples of how seemingly insignificant acts of humanity, protest, and dissent – as an inculcation or even internalisation of the negative in our lives – leads to real, tangible, and meaningful change.
Solnit’s particularly important idea is that threads of change are often interwoven, whereby a person’s actions impact far wider than originally envisaged. She reminds me of a discussion in Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Art of Living in which he notes that the verb ‘to be’ is misleading “because we cannot be by ourselves, alone” and that there is inherently a deep interconnectedness between us and everything else. We are in that sense as human beings a continuation of many things: of the peaceful or violent (?) becoming of the universe, of long processes of human evolution, of our parents and ancestors, of plants and animals (cultivating, consuming, and becoming them in death). Ultimately, we are a product, each and every day, of the interaction and inter-being with others. As Solnit eloquently puts it:
“After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes-vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork — or underground work — often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists, and participants in social media. It seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.”
Solnit accepts that small actions may not be immediately measurable in our metrics and databases in terms of impact or outcome. She identifies exactly where hope lies; as a mental disposition compelling one to action and perhaps vice versa. She is crystal clear about what hope is not:
“It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.”
The mental disposition of hope then, when it manifests as action, is not always appreciated, understood, or accepted. In fact, quite the opposite. The spur to action and innovation may be ridiculed, deemed completely unrealistic and may not necessarily be measurable in immediately foreseeable or tangible material outcomes:
“Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.”
It is in action that hope has value particularly as a cure to unwarranted confidence in what will happen next: that the darker manifestation of art, privilege and power will remain inevitable or unassailable. Whilst Solnit does not touch upon it directly, there is an element of radical acceptance in several of her books: accepting (though not agreeing with) things you cannot or choose not to change as a first step. Solnit, however, confronts us by radically curtailing and narrowing the circle of what exactly we think we are unable to change.
"Change is rarely straightforward… Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds."
In Hope in the Dark, Solnit traverses and transcends many disciplines locating the concrete manifestation of an active hope that has fundamentally changed the landscape in which human beings live – and she cites the (ongoing) successes of feminism, equality, democracy, and anti-war inspired actions (rooted often in protest) that have impacted millions of lives. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Letter to a Young Activist encapsulates what exactly awaits us when we operate in the space of hope:
“Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts — adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take "everyone on Earth" to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.“
Solnit is overly focused on action and outcome – perhaps a necessary focus given her genuine and sincere commitment to activism and meaningful change – but there is something deeper beneath the book touched upon more directly by Hanh and others. Hanh believes we have a tendency (particularly in supposedly modern thought) to think in terms of doing rather than in terms of being. And he attempts to reconcile this disconnect by suggesting that we need to be peaceful, compassionate, loving and joyful for any action to be grounded in any sense: “Our quality of being determines our quality of doing” – longevity, sustainability and ultimately success depend upon it.
Solnit does, however, complete the circle in her own radical reimagining of hope – that it is rooted in venturing outward, beyond ourselves and our limitations and, ultimately, being prepared and ready for uncertainty. That too requires cultivation and refinement of being.
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.”
Echoing Prof. Cornel West, who has made a life-long and “non-negotiable” commitment to “being a hope” rather than ‘having hope’, Solnit says that without action our hope lays the grounds for reaffirming and internalising despair. The book helps us understand not just what a hopeful disposition is but how it's cultivated and what its ultimate (and ongoing) results are.
I would highly recommend Solnit’s short read: important to the socially conscious (and unconscious) today as much as it was when first published.
This is the third of ten very short takes on books that helped shape the forthcoming: ‘A Constitution of the People’. (With thanks to J.J.J. for a review of the post, suggestions for new literature and helping spur further thoughts – views mine alone as are errors and omissions).