Discuss: Our Storied Future

This essay claims: “you cannot base a revolution on the bad things the status quo forgot to mention. [[Forgot??! or is this some kind of cynical irony?]] You need to tell the stories they are not telling, [as is happening more and more, via the internet, but more despicable obscene off-stage lies are spread there too, in the grossest ways], to learn to see where they are blind, to look at how the great changes of the world come from the shadows and the margins, not center stage, to see where we’re winning and that we can win something that matters, if not everything all the time.

Thus the Latin American intellectuals: having survived coups, gone into exile, faced off dictatorships, seen their countries taken over by generals and neoliberals, seen destitution and death squads, they understand that cynicism is naïve and hope is radical.  ....

Yes, the last statement is true, but aside from the tiny marginal gestures of Buddhist monks or some saintly gesture of a single compassionate giving person or perhaps some small powerless group, just where today are progressives “winning” in the globally dominating US CENTER of expanding imperial power? What activity in the US is a basis for progressive hopes even at the margins?  Maybe we can see a few tiny environmental gains (despite huge losses, some of them in the name of environmental sanity)? 

  Let’s see how solidly the potential for a continuing social revolution in the US against racism and feminist ideals/hopes is tested and remains hopeful in the struggle between Obama and Hillary and between their supporters and the bigotry of the US populace at large…. who depend upon bigotry to maintain their false sense of superiority. 

A race and class and gender war is certainly going on but that story is ignored or denied, is not just off center stage, but effectively obliterated.  The mass media makes its external traces into a horse race sufficiently open for profitable gambling but, as they maintain and thus make generally happen in this their created world, dependent on star jockeys and elite expensive breeds of horses. 

All our metaphors cannot make despair go away, nor, as it happens, stop the generating of new consoling metaphors and stories, like the concept of radical hope (i.e., that without any rational or evidentiary basis).  I have been moved, after all, by this essay’s pleas, but perhaps most, these days, by John Berger’s seeing “undefeated despair” as the living and sustaining cultural/personal expression of those doomed to repeated, unending disappointment, as are the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (no longer labelled that and so, practically speaking, the concept disappears as a basis for effective public action….). See Berger’s essay entitled with that powerfully descriptive expression in HOLD EVERYTHING DEAR (2007).

Sorrowfully, neither naively nor cynically, with radical hope that recognizes its baselessness in publicly effective collective action, we are necessarily resigned to stories of feeble gestures at allowable margins.  Such acts are initiated, of course, for selfish reasons of creating/preserving a self-tenable, self-sustainable self-image while the global power system ignores the powerless and keeps on destroying itself and us all. Keep hope alive will be our epitaph, expressing our undefeated, despairing hope for love, peace, justice and hope for all. ATB, JOP

(I lost a longer essay, with a few more points, because my session timed out. Maybe that was a good thing…)

I agree with Solnit’s tendency to reject our strict cultural distinctions—representation vs. reality, contemplation vs. action. Indeed, I think they often fail us.
But the distinction between hope and despair—even cheap despair and real hope—doesn’t help either.
It leads us, for example, to point at certain people and say really cynical things like, “Despair is a luxury.” In the face of real despair, we wouldn’t dare say that. And in the face of destructive luxury, it doesn’t really help anything to say that anyway.

Whether in hope or despair, if we’re specifically interested in the attitude that makes a better difference, we shouldn’t make another strict distinction. Hope and despair are meaningless without each other. Real hope comes from knowing despair. Despair can give way to hope. The posture of possibility, the constructive posture, comes from both (and I find hope and despair just come flat out all at once!).

John Oliver Perry asked: ”...just where today are progressives “winning” in the globally dominating US CENTER of expanding imperial power?”

You’re right that “progressives” are making no real impact, but you miss the point.  Progressives are those who continue to believe (and perhaps strive for) social/economic/political progress – in other words a more enlightened version of the same old story.

Solnit’s essay is a tribute to those who are crafting a new story, or at least taking possession of the language and metaphors and images (the vision) that springs from contemplation and fuels action.

The problem is not that we are enacting a good story badly, but that we are living a self-defeating (and world-destroying) story.  Real change always comes from the margins populated by visionaries and mavericks and revolutionaries, and is easily overlooked by those acclimatized to the atmosphere of RealPolitik and blinded by the cloud of cynicism.

Making art in the face of despair is, itself, an act of hope.  And using art and language to craft a new story (a story that many millions are enacting in the multitudinous margins of the world), is the only hope for a sideways shift into a life-affirming zeitgeist.

A sideways shift, indeed! I have always thought there were parallel universes, this being just one of many possible versions of reality, albeit the “commonly” agreed upon one. I enjoy and appreciate Solnit’s ways of looking at things. Just posted a review of her book, “Hope in the Dark,” in my blog at http://goodwordswan.wildflowerstew.com

Dear Friends,

Let us remember that an ordinary fellow named Noah built the vital Ark that saved life as we know it. It took a remarkably large number of self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe to construct the colossal, now sunken wreckage known as the Titanic.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001

What a great sentence, Ms. Solnit:  Despair makes no demand upon us; hope demands everything.

I loved this piece and synthesized an essay at my blog, highwayscribery, which is here…

http://highwayscribery.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html#5089211599521209734

Thank you, Rebecca Solnit, for your insights and poetic languaging. You spark my brain to rethink and rejoice.  I see the world falling apart in so many ways - all my 67 years of life - and continue to hope.  I work with teenagers whose only negatives are dramatic - but there is always hope - perhaps untested - but very present!  What are we without our hopes and dreams?  Life is incredibly resilient.  Thank you for that confirmation!