The mistake of pessimism

From Rebecca Solnit's *Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild
Possibilities*, in which a criticism often made on the right makes more
sense coming from the left side of "the Left":


"...Hope is a door, or rather a vision of a door, a belief in a way
forward that is not open to all people at all times. Yet it sometimes
seems that the desperate are more hopeful than the official spokespeople
for radical politics -- that, say, undocumented immigrants persevere in
locating doors while the anointed spokespeople go for the rhetoric of
beating one's head against the wall. Despair demands less of us, it's
more predictable, and, in a sad way, it's safer.

Sometimes radicals settle for excoriating the wall for being so large,
so solid, so blank, so without hinges, knobs, keyholes, rather than
seeking a door. Hope, Bloch adds, is in love with success rather than
failure, and I'm not sure that's true of a lot of the most audible
elements of the Left in this country. The only story many radicals know
how to tell is the one that is the underside of the dominant culture's
story, more often than not the stuff that never makes it into the news,
and all news has a bias in favor of suddenness, violence, and disaster
that overlooks groundswells, sea changes, and alternatives. Their
premise is: the powers that be are not telling you the whole truth. But
the truth they tell is also incomplete. They conceive of the truth as
pure bad news, appoint themselves the deliverers of it, and keep telling
it over and over. Eventually, they come to look for the downside in any
emerging story, even in apparent victories -- and in each other:
something about this task seems to give some of them the souls of
meter-maids and dogcatchers. (Of course, this also has to do with the
nature of adversarial activism, which leads to obsession with the enemy,
and, as a few environmentalists have mentioned to me, with the use of
alarmist narratives for fund-raising.)

Sometimes these bad-news bringers seem in love with defeat, because if
they're constantly prophesying doom, actual doom is, as we say in
California, pretty validating. But part of it is a personal style: I
think that this grimness is more a psychology than an ideology. There's
a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving
results, one that sometimes seems to make the Left the true heirs of the
Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of
one's own virtue rather than the realization of results. And puritanical
because the somber pleasure of condemning things is the most enduring
part of that legacy, along with the sense of personal superiority that
comes from pleasure denied. Despair, bad news, grimness bolster an
identity the teller can affect, one that is masculine, stern,
disillusioned, tough enough to face facts. Some of them, anyway. (Some
of the facts remain in the dark.) There are a lot of situations in which
the outcome is uncertain, but for some reason tales of decline and fall
have an authority that hopeful ones don't. Buddhists sometimes decry
hope as an attachment to a specific outcome, to a story line, to
satisfaction. But what remains, I think, is an entirely different sort
of hope or faith: that you possess the power to change the world to some
degree, that the current state of affairs is not inevitable, that all
trajectories are not downhill.

Walls can justify being stalled; doors demand passage. Hopefulness is
risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and
the possible... To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one
that might be considered feminine or childish or sweet. Sometimes
despair or grimness calcifies out of honest idealism, disappointed again
and again, out of pain at the atrocities unfolding. Other times that
tale of gloom seems to come from the belief in a univocal narrative, in
the idea that everything is heading in one direction, and since it's
clearly not all good, it must be all bad. 'Democracy is in trouble,' is
the phrase with which an eminent activist opens a talk, which is true,
but it's also true that it's flourishing in bold new ways in South
America and in grassroots movements around the world. It's important to
denounce the wall, to describe its obdurate impenetrability. Before a
disease can be treated, it must be diagnosed. But then the question is,
what prescription, what cure, what chance of recovery, what alternative?

c/o M

On 22 juin, 12:07, Martha Bridegam <bride....DeleteThis@pacbell.net> wrote:
> From Rebecca Solnit's *Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild
> Possibilities*, in which a criticism often made on the right makes more
> sense coming from the left side of "the Left":
>
> "...Hope is a door, or rather a vision of a door, a belief in a way
> forward that is not open to all people at all times. Yet it sometimes
> seems that the desperate are more hopeful than the official spokespeople
> for radical politics -- that, say, undocumented immigrants persevere in
> locating doors while the anointed spokespeople go for the rhetoric of
> beating one's head against the wall. Despair demands less of us, it's
> more predictable, and, in a sad way, it's safer.
>
> Sometimes radicals settle for excoriating the wall for being so large,
> so solid, so blank, so without hinges, knobs, keyholes, rather than
> seeking a door. Hope, Bloch adds, is in love with success rather than
> failure, and I'm not sure that's true of a lot of the most audible
> elements of the Left in this country. The only story many radicals know
> how to tell is the one that is the underside of the dominant culture's
> story, more often than not the stuff that never makes it into the news,
> and all news has a bias in favor of suddenness, violence, and disaster
> that overlooks groundswells, sea changes, and alternatives. Their
> premise is: the powers that be are not telling you the whole truth. But
> the truth they tell is also incomplete. They conceive of the truth as
> pure bad news, appoint themselves the deliverers of it, and keep telling
> it over and over. Eventually, they come to look for the downside in any
> emerging story, even in apparent victories -- and in each other:
> something about this task seems to give some of them the souls of
> meter-maids and dogcatchers. (Of course, this also has to do with the
> nature of adversarial activism, which leads to obsession with the enemy,
> and, as a few environmentalists have mentioned to me, with the use of
> alarmist narratives for fund-raising.)
>
> Sometimes these bad-news bringers seem in love with defeat, because if
> they're constantly prophesying doom, actual doom is, as we say in
> California, pretty validating. But part of it is a personal style: I
> think that this grimness is more a psychology than an ideology. There's
> a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving
> results, one that sometimes seems to make the Left the true heirs of the
> Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of
> one's own virtue rather than the realization of results. And puritanical
> because the somber pleasure of condemning things is the most enduring
> part of that legacy, along with the sense of personal superiority that
> comes from pleasure denied. Despair, bad news, grimness bolster an
> identity the teller can affect, one that is masculine, stern,
> disillusioned, tough enough to face facts. Some of them, anyway. (Some
> of the facts remain in the dark.) There are a lot of situations in which
> the outcome is uncertain, but for some reason tales of decline and fall
> have an authority that hopeful ones don't. Buddhists sometimes decry
> hope as an attachment to a specific outcome, to a story line, to
> satisfaction. But what remains, I think, is an entirely different sort
> of hope or faith: that you possess the power to change the world to some
> degree, that the current state of affairs is not inevitable, that all
> trajectories are not downhill.
>
> Walls can justify being stalled; doors demand passage. Hopefulness is
> risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and
> the possible... To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one
> that might be considered feminine or childish or sweet. Sometimes
> despair or grimness calcifies out of honest idealism, disappointed again
> and again, out of pain at the atrocities unfolding. Other times that
> tale of gloom seems to come from the belief in a univocal narrative, in
> the idea that everything is heading in one direction, and since it's
> clearly not all good, it must be all bad. 'Democracy is in trouble,' is
> the phrase with which an eminent activist opens a talk, which is true,
> but it's also true that it's flourishing in bold new ways in South
> America and in grassroots movements around the world. It's important to
> denounce the wall, to describe its obdurate impenetrability. Before a
> disease can be treated, it must be diagnosed. But then the question is,
> what prescription, what cure, what chance of recovery, what alternative?
>
> c/o M

Pessimism *is* a mistake, it feeds on itself: "an effect can become a
cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in
an intensified form, and so on indefinitely."
B.