Hope In The Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that demand that we act.”

Solnit defines the subject of her book away from the naive injunction to look on the bright side and thereby trust in the passive idea of hope, where everything will turn out well regardless. Instead, she urges a path of action toward a good outcome and suggests that everyone can play a role in things turning out for the better.

“Amnesia leads to despair in many ways. The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view. In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or they can change.”

In this passage, Solnit points out that the danger of not remembering past social and political changes is that you think the status quo is immutable. The mere knowledge that change has been achieved makes it easier to envision future change. Thus, the status quo that some authorities would like us to believe is immutable is a temporary and easily conquerable phenomenon.

“Total victory has always seemed like a secular equivalent of paradise: a place where all the problems are solved and there’s nothing to do, a fairly boring place. The absolutists of the old left imagined that victory would, when it came, be total and permanent, which is practically the same as saying that victory was and is impossible and will never come.”

Solnit draws an unlikely parallel between the religious far right’s ideas of the world as a fallen Eden and the old left’s search for a world where all problems are solved. This paradisical state would be an inactive one and is such an impossibility that reaching for it leads to disillusionment and inaction. Solnit rejects the idea that the only victory is a total one.