I’ve always understood hope to be a passive act. I’ve thought of it simply as “hoping for the best,” something that you thought about while you took no concrete actions towards whatever it is you mean by, ‘the best.’ This weeks readings challenged that conception, and really made me examine the ways that I have been thinking and conceptualizing hope.
Rebecca Solnit wrote in her article “Grounds for Hope,” that hope is “the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.” She writes about hope not as something that we think about while we wait for things to work out, but rather knowing that the work that we are doing matters. The work that we are doing will lead to a better future, whatever future we can imagine for ourselves is possible.
This reading was placed directly in contrast with the reading “The Limits of Utopia,” by China Miéville in a really brilliant way. Miéville writes of the dangers of utopia and dystopia, and the dangers of allowing either view of the future to cloud our view of the present and of the work that must be done. “The Limits of Utopia,” begins with the line “dystopias infect official reports.” Miéville is arguing that the view that we have allowed to be shaped for us by mass media, a media often more concerned with making money for the most sensational images it can imagine. He argues that by allowing ourselves to be taken in by these stories, we are forcing ourselves into boxes that restrain what we conceptualize as realistic actions. We cannot allow our perception of realistic actions to be defined by a faulty reality.
This is the essential argument behind Solnit’s piece as well. She writes that “your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power.” People love to paint horrifying pictures of the future. It’s compelling, it’s impossible to look away from. The problem with those pictures, though, is that they are so damn hard to look away from. We cannot be distracted from the reality that we are living through by dystopias that our opponents would like for us to believe. We must have hope. We must have action.
Solnit, R. (2017). Grounds For Hope. Tikkun, 32(1), 30-39. doi:10.1215/08879982-3769066
