Societies around the globe face multiple crises. In this context, is marshaling hope and dreaming up beautiful futures—imagining a world that could be—a useful response, or is it escapism?
Our hopes for a better world can be powerful springboards to action, but when does hope become hopium? And if we, you and I, do depend on our hopes and dreams to keep us going, what happens if our aspirations become long shots or even hopeless? This essay looks at these questions.
Two paths of change
For the longest time, I thought major policy change would be driven by concrete responses to the awful things happening to human and natural communities around the world.
Advocates for change would see new policies, for example, to curb corporate abuses and grab their wrists as they reached for ever more control over our politics. We would see strong action to address the vast social and economic inequalities. We would see measures to build on the hard-hitting clean air and water acts to eliminate the climate-ruining gases spewing from our runaway energy system.
The push for all these and other policy efforts would include what we saw as “non-reformist reforms.” They would look like reforms, but they would contain the seeds of deeper, transformational change—like ditching gross domestic product in favor of new measures of societal well-being.
The victims of the many crises and their allies would find their voices, as would activists for the environment. Meanwhile, I and others would focus on the needed policy analysis, working to develop both reformist policies and the far-reaching prescriptions for the deeper changes that would address underlying causes. I for one have written several books full of policy prescriptions aimed at transformational change.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the revolution.
The efforts at policy-driven change remain ongoing and essential, and I am still involved in them. But you will have noticed that their progress has been terribly slow. Meanwhile, an ominous deepening of what is now called the polycrisis has occurred, most visibly in the climate crisis and in threats to democracy here and abroad. That has led many people to flee the fetters of the practical world, at least in their dreams, and find hope in imagining a world that could be.
Some of this is escapism, but often enough, these fetching worlds are rigorously grounded in biological and historical understandings. For example, one theme is that economic systems must learn from nature’s systems. Ecological economics, industrial ecology, the regenerative economy, and the circular economy all give some definition to this new thinking. Others are dreaming of flourishing worlds of democratic eco-socialism, while still others are looking to Asian religions and Indigenous teachings for modern guidance.
“New, dreamed-of worlds will not compete yet in today’s practical politics. But they are the first blueprints of the future, the playing fields of radical hope, the dreams that stuff is made of.”
One sees in all these envisionings a dramatic change in dominant cultural values: a new consciousness that transcends the old barriers that separate us from each other and humans from nature. The current order increasingly lacks legitimacy, and alternative worldviews that can gain our allegiance are being advocated. As a leading thinker in this field, Jeremy Lent, says, “Once we shift our worldview, another world becomes possible.”
Yes, the new, dreamed-of worlds will not compete yet in today’s practical politics. But they should not be dismissed as woolly, wild-eyed, or impractical. They are the first blueprints of the future, the playing fields of radical hope, the dreams that stuff is made of.
Indeed, one can see a new consciousness at work today across the country. It is bringing concrete change in countless local communities where something new and different is being built. See, for example, the websites for the New Economy Coalition and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and check out their member organizations.
More and more people are searching for something beautiful, even if it is untethered from today’s “political realities.” If current trends continue and blossom, could we enter a world of consciousness-driven change—not piecemeal, practical, and incremental, but fresh, bold, and sweeping? What if enough people joined in John Lennon’s “you better free your mind instead” and the major force bringing a desirable future into the present is a sea change in the public mind? The phrase “consciousness change” would have a whole new meaning.
“Dream on,” the skeptic says. “Yes, we will,” they reply.
Decades of discourse
scientists, economists, lawyers,
and here we are. Stuck.
That discourse cannot do
what must be done:
Reach to the human heart.
The core problems are
greed, arrogance, and apathy,
our dominant values astray.
What we need now is
not more analysis but
a spiritual awakening
to a new consciousness.
So, bring on the preachers and prophets!
The poets and philosophers!
Bring on the story tellers, musicians, artists!
The teachers of ancient wisdoms!
Call them to strike the chords
of our shared humanity,
of our close kin to wild things.
Of hopes and dreams and beyond
Victor Hugo wrote, “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.” If we can first envision a future that works for people and planet, we can begin to make it happen. In one of his excellent novels, Richard Flannagan asks, “What reality was ever created by realists? … What we cannot dream we can never do.”
Such dreams are manifestations of hope; the two are inseparable. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a fellow South Carolinian of my generation, spoke about the importance of hope in 1988 at the Democratic National Convention: “Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high; stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. … Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive!” Jackson knows that hope is like vision—without it, the people perish.
But hope can be treacherous. We should cling to hope, but only hope that is linked to commitment and action, not mere escapism, not hopium.
It takes a lot of hopium
to get me through the day.
There is always more hopium,
and I will take it any way.
I can grow my own hopium.
My mind’s a fertile field.
The less I know, the more I grow.
You cannot beat that deal.
I got a bumper crop last year
when I turned off the news.
Being hopeful was easy when
I took a long news snooze.
There are far worse addictions;
hopium just affects the mind.
Yet in terms of climate worries,
it leaves them far behind.
Dreamy hope, comforting hope,
whenever needed it’s there.
There’s always more hopium
when I’m in my easy chair.
Hope without costs,
hope without consequence,
this hope’s a dope’s dope
in a cauldron of innocence.
Rebecca Solnit saw something else very important about hope. “The grounds for hope are in the shadows,” she writes, “in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect.” Keep hope alive, Solnit says, but link it to action, to inventing a better world. And, importantly, keep hope alive even in the face of total uncertainty that the work it inspires will be fruitful.
But what if one knows for a practical certainty that that work will not be successful and save the day? Here one enters the zone of despair. A lot of people today are despairing.
As I navigate among the various faces I have in this world—the Happy Everyday Me, the Policy Wonk Me, the New Radical Me—I sometimes fall into the zone of despair, and there I find the Despairing Me. I try not to go there, but I stumble.
In this windowless cellar of my mind, I have devastating thoughts, not phantasmagoric apparitions easily dismissed, but thoughts resulting from a calculus carefully tuned to empirical observation of the world spanning many years.
There, I encounter the thought that human enterprise on the planet—ambitious, arrogant, heedless, at times inspiring—has inadvertently created an insatiable contraption that is now devouring the planet at a phenomenal rate that human societies can no longer control.
If this contraption were bringing genuine human satisfaction and well-being while ruining the planet, well, that would be something. We would at least be going down happy. But for an apt description of our current human condition, I cannot but think instead of the lyric Tom Lehrer made famous, “The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.”
Generally, people are unhappy for good reason. Some are unhappy because they are spoiled or misapprehending their circumstances, but for most there are genuine causes of human misery. Hard data support deprivations born in economic disparities, social inequities, environmental decay, climate change, political oppression, invidious discriminations, the failure of education and health systems, the loss of community solidarity and human companionship, and, perhaps most important, the widespread sense of powerlessness and hopelessness in the face of these challenges.
In this bottom chamber of despair, honesty cannot assign a decent probability or even a fighting chance of finding a solution.
Faced with what seems a terrifying situation, human creativity can reach in several directions. First, there is Acceptance. One can accept this fate, hopelessness, with bitter nihilism or with hedonistic abandon or with a calm stoicism. I am told that Marcus Aurelius is all the rage today. Many will opt, as Thoreau noted, to live lives of quiet desperation and make the best of a bad situation. A different tack, waiting for the world beyond, is taken by some religious followers who put their faith in the afterlife, not this one.
Second, there is Denial. It too can take many directions. One can stick to living in the truthiness world free of fact and science and full of fake reality, like believing climate change a hoax. Or one might relax and assume these problems will be easily solved—somehow, someday, soon enough, by someone. This is the hopium solution, life from the easy chair.
Then, there is the only response I and many others can live with: Resistance. In the end, one must act even in the face of hopelessness, warriors defending a sacred place, simply because it is the right thing to do, rebelling beyond hope because the human spirit says with insistence that what is unacceptable—all the suffering, all the loss, all the tears—must not be accepted.
Beyond all our fears, it is.
Beyond grieving and crying, it is.
Beyond even hope, it is.
What then is left beyond?
A collapse of sentiment?
What do they feel:
the Black man in solitary,
the young girl buried
in the rubble of Gaza,
the Amazon dwellers
watching the forest die?
What do we feel, you and I?
Can the mere knowledge
of the world’s desperation
while still in a sheltered space
take us to a place beyond?
I can only speak for myself.
I hunger to strike a blow
so shattering that enthrallment
breaks into a million shards
and falls to the feet of the world.
Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus is an essay for our time. It is also my favorite. Camus says that Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to a dreadful and hopeless task, forever pushing a rock up to the top of the mountain only to see it roll back of its own weight. Sisyphus’ crime was “his hatred of death and his passion for life.” Camus continues, describing Sisyphus’ hopelessness:
“If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. . . .
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He concludes that all is well. This universe, henceforth without a master, seems to him neither sterile nor futile. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
There it is: the struggle toward the heights. I think we can be sustained and carried forward by the struggle, by being engaged in the fight, each as our capabilities and opportunities permit.
The snow lies lightly on the lilacs
round by the kitchen door.
The juncos peck in stone cracks,
endless in their search for more.
I think that is my way too,
to keep the search going on.
What else really could I do
but find new ways to scorn.
As Camus said of Sisyphus
who toiled with his stone,
there is no fate for us
that can’t be beat by scorn.
And so I scorn what passes here today
for equality and justice before the law,
for helping immigrants to find a way,
for promises the troops will withdraw.Oh, purple mountain majesty!
Oh, fruited plains of amber grain!
The machine crushes endlessly
everything for investment’s gain.
And so we search for ways to fight.
We see the beauty of the snow,
but we know to make it right
may require our blood to flow.
We’ve seen the heads bandaged round,
the men and women teared by gas.
Each has earned a special crown.
They know the system will not last.
Scorn, rage, and many actions.
protests coming round the world.
Today we see but a fraction
of banners yet to be unfurled!
* * *
I thank Orion magazine for publishing pieces I have drawn upon in this essay. The poems are from books I have published over the last half-dozen years.
