Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark

The time when you don’t need hope is when your hopes have been fulfilled. Hope is for when you don’t have what you need and for when things are not OK. It is the belief that liberation might be possible that motivates you to make it more possible, and pursuing hope even when it doesn’t lead to the ultimate goal can generate changes that matter along the way, including in yourself.
‘Another, more beautiful America is rising. Trump will be resisted‘, The Guardian, 30 December 2016

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2004; this revised edition Haymarket Books 2016)

The paragraph quoted above from Rebecca Solnit’s article on the election of Donald Trump is also a reasonable summary of Hope in the Dark‘s central argument.

First published in 2004 by Nation Books, a small publisher whose motto is ‘Challenging power, one book at a time’, this book challenged the power of the bleak sense of defeat and despair that threatened to overwhelm many progressives after the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. In three subsequent editions new chapters have been added, but the book is essentially rooted in its time – the millennium was new, the invasion of Iraq was fresh, the younger Bush had been elected twice. There was almost as much reason for gloom then as there is now, when the results of that invasion are still laying waste to thousands of lives, and a man who inherited vast wealth and who has never held political office is about to be inaugurated as president of the United States.

Any number of inspirational quotes could be extracted from this book and pinned to the fridge door. For example, on page 20:

There are those who think that turning the official version inside out is enough. To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice antiauthoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream’s ‘everything’s fine’.

On page 24:

Political awareness without activism means looking at the devastation, your face turned toward the centre of things. Activism itself can generate hope because it already constitutes an alternative and turns away from the corruption at the centre to face the wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges or at your side.

and page 24 again:

Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

or, just to show that the quotes aren’t limited to the early pages, from page 80:

Paradise is not the place in which you arrive but the journey toward it.

But it would misrepresent the book to leave it at that. Solnit is more than a crafter of superior inspirational quotes.  She’s also a long-term activist and a historian. She has an argument: it’s a mistake to take any defeat as final, because the future is inherently dark, in the sense of unknowable; it’s a mistake to take any defeat as complete, because you can never know the effect of any action you take – tiny actions lay the groundwork for future victories, and indeed all victories build on myriad earlier actions that met with defeat at the time. The stories we tell make a difference to our possibilities. It’s a mistake to swallow whole the mainstream version of history – if you ‘pay attention to what they tell you to forget’ (to quote Muriel Rukeyser, another great US writer and activist) things look a lot less grim. The middle part of the book considers recent US political history and finds cause for hope (that is to say, not certainty of better things to come, but the possibility of them if one acts) in the new, joyful, animated forms of resistance that were developing in the US around the millennium. The note added in 2016 adds quite a lot to this list.

It’s a short book. I recommend it for anyone who finds themselves transfixed by the latest Trumpism in the US or Duttonism / Turnbullism in Australia.