I’m planning to shift my focus for the next few weeks and start writing about criminal justice in the US. I’ve talked quite a bit so far about our economy and I believe that’s an important topic because it engulfs every issue we face and economistic reasoning has deeply established itself in the process for making policy decisions. Before I continue writing about the many issues that we face as a society, I’d like to take a moment to put into words why I continue to have hope, in spite of the negative social conditions I think and write about regularly.
A few months ago, I read the book Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit. The book is very short and an easy read and gave me a lot to think about. It was first published in 2004, but I read the 2016 version which was slightly updated. Because of its publish date, the examples used were a little dated, but it was a good examinations of some of the issues of the Bush presidency and the poor response to 9/11, as well as past activist movements and what we can learn from them.
Solnit starts out with a great definition of hope:
“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.”
I really love this definition because so much of our public discourse takes away agency from people. I often hear that CEOs must be given high salaries because of market forces, as if market forces are independent of human action and confine the limits of what people are able to do. I often hear that police just need more training after each incident of police violence, as if they cannot be considered responsible for their actions and can only do what they are trained to do. Whenever people protest, they are told every action they take is not the right way to make change, that they must be polite and speak individually to people who dehumanize them and convince them to change (as if people who have shown no inclination to change are not responsible for their beliefs and actions and would do better if only someone told them how). There is a great inconsistency around agency where in some situations, for example when someone commits a crime, they are portrayed as having complete personal responsibility, while in other situations, for example when someone fires thousands of workers, it was due to competitive forces outside of their control, or “the economy” in general.
To me, hope is exactly what Solnit says, it involves taking a hard look at reality, seeing things as they are, and understanding that they can be better and they can be worse, but you need to act if you want a better future. Hope is not eternal optimism, it’s more like the opposite of apathy. To deepen the definition, Solnit includes a great quote from Maria Popova: “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naivete.” I’ve gotten the sense that people cling to the cynical idea that the world can't be any better than it currently is for two main reasons:
Out of fear of making things worse. This is the false belief that not taking action absolves you of responsibility for the consequences. I often hear people argue against change because “there are always unintended consequences”. The issue with this point of view is that:
a) People are always changing, so social systems/relations are always changing and therefore it’s better to make intentional change than to let others control it. Solnit said “No one in the center will remember when they supported what now looks like bad science and engineering, just as few remember when they supported racial segregation or bans on mixed-race marriages. Their amnesia is necessary to their sense of legitimacy in a society they would rather not acknowledge is in constant change.” [emphasis mine]
b) The way we currently do things based on changes that happened before I was born also has unintended consequences and those consequences we are living in are the very things I would like to change. To me, the “unintended consequences” argument is the statement you make when you are ill-informed about an issue and don’t care to think about it. Of course every action has unintended consequences, that’s life and we can’t avoid it. It doesn’t mean we should accept what people did in the past, for example, create mass-incarceration, when we know that mass-incarceration has had so many negative consequences.
Because when your life is fine, admitting the world could be better is admitting that you haven't cared enough to do something. And once you admit it, you must either do something to fix it, or stop believing you are a good person. This is also referred to as cognitive dissonance. When your values conflict with your actions, you must either change your values or your actions to avoid internal guilt or anguish. If you can justify your inaction, you can avoid doing either. Problem solved! This is avoidance of the problem and as James Baldwin said “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced." This doesn’t mean that everyone should act on every little piece of information they get. Learning more about an issue is often the first action one should take, but it should never be the final one.
One part of the book that really stuck with me is when Solnit summarize the research she did for a previous book where she looked at how people respond to disasters. Much of what she noted in the book is summed up in this article entitled Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Population. Both the article and Solnit’s research come to the conclusion that when faced with large-scale disasters, people tend to step up and help others. While authoritarians and elites are paranoid about their status as leaders or their class relations as wealthy individuals and spread narratives of looting and violence to encourage police responses and crackdowns, overwhelming research and case studies show that communities tend to take care of each other when in need. That the looting narrative still exists says a lot about our media and the complete disconnection of the wealthy from their communities. It also shows that there is much to be hopeful about. When people realize that they are facing the same problem, they can and will step up to help each other.
The biggest barrier to the project of helping others are the people who spend their days complicating simple issues and talking about secondary and tertiary affects and creating negative hypotheticals with no evidence to support their claims (remember the “actually wearing a mask might make you more likely to get sick” crowd). As the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci put it, “Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude.” In other words, if someone says “actually this good thing could be indirectly bad” tell them to come back with some evidence and you’ll consider their point. Until then, it’s probably safe to assume a good thing is good.
For all of these reasons, I have hope. I have been slowly gaining a better understanding of our past, and of how the political and economic systems we inhabit were created by people. Anything created by people can be changed by people, and that is a truly empowering thought that keeps me going. Very often, I come across a problem that is new to me and I start thinking about solutions. Then months later I find out someone proposed a solution years ago or even successfully implemented the solution somewhere and the realization that there are so many solutions out there, I just need to learn more also gives me hope.
"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." - Wes Nisker
Love this concept of hope. Keep writing!