An Artist Needs to Write Us a Better Story About the Future

March 9, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

To make the hard decisions around climate change, we need the pull of a compelling story that tells us about all the great things that will follow and the ways we’ll be rewarded when we do.

Because changing the ways we live and work will be hard, disruptive, (and given the nature of change generally) uncomfortable, we’ll need to want, really want, what comes after if we’re ever going to bite all the bullets that we should be biting already.

So far, there’s not been enough biting—and the clock is ticking, at two seconds to midnight or whatever, like a cattle prod—because our imaginations have yet to be captured by a version of the future that gives us enough to look forward to so that all those necessary changes, “our adopting simpler lives fueled by windmills etc.,” will finally feel like they’ve been “worth it” when everything settles down again.

Or to illustrate with a different, supposedly dumb animal, if we’re ever to get through the maze of our fossil-fueled obstacles and over the desire to consume our entire planet, we’ll need a really strong whiff of the new cheese in the middle—and our twitching noses just haven’t picked it up yet.

That “we” is you and me of course, a really specific and fairly small number of Earth’s nearly 8 billion inhabitants. That’s because (as Rebecca Solnit wrote about so well this week):

By saying ‘we are all responsible’ [for the environmental catastrophe], we avoid the fact that the global majority of us don’t need to change much, but a minority needs to change a lot. This is also a reminder that the idea that we need to renounce our luxuries and live more simply doesn’t really apply to the majority of human beings outside what we could perhaps call the overdeveloped world. What is true of Beverly Hills is [simply] not true of the majority from Bangladesh to Bolivia.

So the people who need to be convinced by a better story are the relatively few of us who either live in this “overdeveloped world” or in gated communities with gun turrets in the less-developed parts of it.

We are the ones facing the hardest, most disruptive choices. But, says Solnit, the only stories about what comes next and how we’ll get there are coming from scientists, with their mind-boggling charts and “climate models” and speculative technologies. Her call is for artists—on the scale of Dickens—or science fiction writers who can tantalize us with the promise of marvelous tomorrows instead of paralyzing us into “deer in the headlights” with their views of dystopian ones. (We really are like cattle, rats and deer.) Solnit also goes on to describe some of what these new storytellers should be weaving into their narratives and how they should go about doing so, but before we turn to her remarks a few words about the images—they’re photo collages—in my post today.

Because he includes “us” as passive spectators in our own disaster narratives, a 30-something visual artist who’s working in Brussels captures “where many of us are these days” quite affectively: tourists viewing their own apocalypse, swimming while the surrounding hills burn, jumping into the unknown when we could be helped to know (and even look forward to) whatever’s down there.

The artist’s name is David Delruelle, and by capturing today’s mood with his brilliant juxtapositions it’s almost like he wants to jar us out of our dumb-animal complacency. If you’re as captivated as I am by his work, here’s a link to a catalog that features more of it and another to a 4-minute video about the creation of these surreal visuals.

_{“La Boîte Verte (The Green Box)” or swimming while the rest burns.}

The Solnit essay in The Guardian this week says it was adapted from a speech she gave at Princeton last November but in all the ways that matter it’s the most recent child of her 2004 book, Hope in the Dark. That book’s important arguments showed how history is written by committed individuals who find the conviction to take the next small step, in difficult times, towards a goal that seems beyond reach and may never materialize. That’s why the brand of “Hope” that Solnit writes about there needs to find its conviction to act “in the Dark” instead of waiting for the imminent victory of a rising sun.

Her Guardian essay describes the folly of expecting the battle against climate change (or whatever we’re up against) to unfold like a Hollywood action movie, yet that is what many of us seem to be magically thinking. (We won’t have to make difficult decisions. All we’ll need to do is wait for somebody else to sort things out and turn the lights back on.)

These movies also encourage the myth that our salvation will come in battles, fought by loners, with “the capacity to inflict and endure extreme violence,” while the skills that we’ll ACTUALLY need (according to Solnit) are “solidarity, strategy, patience, persistence, vision and the ability to inspire hope in others.” At the same time, the rescuers that will save us “are mostly not individuals [at all], they are collectives—movements, coalitions, campaigns, civil society [and]….We are sadly lacking in stories in which collective actions or the patient determination of organizers is what changes the world.”

A similarly fanciful lesson “from our [‘entirely inadequate,’ she’d say] films and fictions” is that there will be “a sudden victory, a celebration, and the trouble [will be] over.” From her own activism and from writing about social change for decades, Solnit has learned that “[c]hange often functions [more] like a relay race, with new protagonists picking up where the last left off,” citing the following example for resonance:

In 2019, a Berkeley city councilwoman decided to propose banning fossil-gas connections in new construction, and it was passed by the council unanimously. This small city’s commitment to all-electric new buildings could seem insignificant, but more than 50 other California municipalities picked it up, as did the city of New York. The state of New York failed to pass a similar measure, but Washington state succeeded, and the idea that new construction should not include gas has spread internationally.

The trick, as she describes it in Hope in the Dark, is to maintain your convictions and your hopes for the desired outcome at each stage of our real-world rely race, because without reserves of endurance during periods of uncertainty (and lots of new blood joining the chain), we often abandon our victories and concede our defeats too quickly. In that book, Solnit illustrates the quandary as well as our way out of it through this example, about the struggle for pay equity for women:

[A] cranky guy wrote in that women used to make sixty-two cents to the male dollar and now we made seventy-seven cents, so what were we complaining about? It doesn’t seem like it should be so complicated to acknowledge that seventy-seven cents is better than sixty-six cents and [at the same time] that seventy-seven cents isn’t good enough, but the politics we have is so pathetically bipolar that we only tell this story two ways: either seventy-seven cents is a victory, and victories are points where you shut up and stop fighting; or seventy-seven cents is ugly, so activism accomplishes nothing and what’s the pint of fighting? Both versions are defeatist because they are static. What’s missing from these two ways of telling is an ability to recognize a situation in which you are traveling and have not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and to fight, in which the world is always being made and is never finished.

In her Guardian essay, Solnit introduces a dozen additional themes for inclusion in a story about the future that might motivate us to intensify our struggle against climate change in the ways that we need to—including these:

_{– how ending “an era of profligate consumption by the few that has consequences for the many means changing how we think about [and imagine] pretty much everything: wealth, power, joy, time, space, nature, value, what constitutes a good life, what matters, how change itself happens.” It’s both the challenge and promise of radical reinvention.

– how “we’ve largely won the battle to make people [who are like us] aware and concerned” already, but that the story also needs to mobilize us to take the necessary actions now (like cutting back on our consumption and valuing nature differently) for the sake of a future that can pull us towards it while never being a certainty.

– how improving our literacy about profound and fundamental change in the past (like the transformative nature of the Industrial Revolution, or even more recently, the rise of the smart phone) can fuel the effort to produce equally profound and fundamental changes for the sake of our future.}

Each of these elements is part of a new story that will need to take us beyond the crisis of climate change to a world that we want to live in far more than the one we’re living in today. That story also needs to show us how to “break things we’re attached to” in order to get there, while dazzling us with the promise of its wonders and fullness once we arrive. Because as Solnit says so well in this, the heart of her remarks:

Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. This is as true of climate chaos as anything else. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change. Some are habits of mind, some are industry propaganda. Sometimes, the situation has changed but the stories haven’t, and people follow the old versions, like outdated maps, into dead ends.

We need to leave the age of fossil fuel behind, swiftly and decisively. But what drives our machines won’t change until we change what drives our ideas. The visionary organizer Adrienne Maree Brown wrote not long ago that there is an element of science fiction in climate action: ‘We are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle’….

[And since we are,] for too long the climate fight has been limited to scientists and policy experts. While we need their skills, we also need so much more. When I survey the field, it’s clear that what we desperately need is more artists.

What the climate crisis is, what we can do about it, and what kind of a world we can have is all about what stories we tell and whose stories are [engaging enough to be] heard.

_{“Great Mountain Fire” or jumping into the unknown.}

In reviewing old posts that I’ve written about the challenges facing the health of the Earth—including the hazards of climate change, global warming and biodiversity loss—I was surprised by how hard I’ve been looking for that new story (or at least some key themes) that will mobilize me to reduce my consumption, find new forms of gratification (beyond eating the planet), stop the environmental damage I’m causing, restore what I can mend (like how to bring rabbits, or certain kinds of birds back to my backyard), discover new ways of living and working, and help to build a future that’s more satisfying than the one I’m anticipating today. So in closing, I’d like to add a few of the storylines and themes that I’ve considered to the ones that Rebecca Solnit is proposing.

_{– how something called “the Clock of the Long Now,” which calculates time 10,000 years into the future, operates as a kind of “act of faith” in our long-term prospects, and how we reaffirm that belief and the value of such a clock whenever we invite a new baby to join us down here. (Bringing a Child Into a World Like This, April 24, 2023).

– how we’re finding new ways to cover the costs to industries and workers of changing today’s harmful environmental practices. Demonstrating a kind of “virtuous economic circle,” this is a storyline about New England’s lobster industry, a declining right whale population, and how valuing the whales’ contributions to ocean health differently could finance changes in lobster trapping so current methods no longer endanger these migrating giants. (Valuing Nature in Ways the World Can Understand, November 13, 2019).

– how the UK’s government has gotten behind a breathtaking proposal to value nature like an asset, and natural systems like portfolios of assets, so a dollars & cents world can finally join in finding sustainable solutions to biodiversity with “a common grammar” of economic costs and benefits. (Economics Takes a Leading Role in the Biodiversity Story, February 21, 2021).

– and how the future can look better—more interesting and far more promising—when we put ourselves in that future and look back at how far we’ve come, because we’re finally experiencing the combined impact of the much smaller changes we made in the 2020s in areas like battery technology, urban design and soil management. (A Different Future Will Get Us Out From Under the Cloud, September 19, 2021).}

Particularly as our political landscape degraded and the pandemic surged—that is, when the future seemed particularly bleak over the past few years—I dove into these stories to see if I could find in them “some hope in the dark” for me and maybe for you. And there was a kind of glimmer in the growing realization that our imaginations in the face of environmental peril might indeed see us through these daunting challenges.

Now if only I were enough of an artist to write the compelling story that could help to carry humanity to a more sustainable finish line. Or that someone far more talented could.

This post was adapted from my January 29, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

A Deeper Sense of Place is Like an Anchor in Turbulent Times

June 13, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

In a much quoted phrase, Rebecca Solnit said that: “Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.”

I tried to track down where Solnit said this, but (apparently) once something that you’ve said becomes “a famous quote” it tends to live in the ether alone, untethered to its origin. But it doesn’t really matter, because so much of Solnit’s writing over the past 30 years has been about what it means to fully inhabit a particular place—like the boat above, locating itself within the present, as well as by longitude and latitude, memory and destination, under the stars and above the depths of the sea.

Solnit is a kind of wandering minstrel and storyteller who rouses her readers into awareness (and even to action—like in Hope in the Dark), by drawing on her own deep engagement with the world. As an observer of turn-of-the-century life, she has written field guides that almost anyone who has read them seems to want to follow.

These field guides embody what Solnit means by Sense of Place: a lived experience that includes the present time, memories and dreams about particular pasts and futures, along with the stories of others who share the experience of those places with you.

Why does this almost cosmic sense of geo-location matter? Maybe it’s because we’re so unmoored today, with facts themselves in flux, mobs at war with one another, and 24/7 cycles of news and social media commentary that usually gravitate towards the “unsettling” while failing to put “what’s being blared about” into any kind of meaningful context.

As it becomes harder to find perspective or comfort–a useful frame for lived experience–it’s always possible for us to sink down deeper and more nurturing roots and to gaze into more promising horizons by the conscious act of locating our living and working within the rich variables of the particular places where they unfold.

Rebecca Solnit helped me to do this in a very specific way a couple of years ago. Among her many writings are a series of travel books about U.S. cities she’s been drawn to (like San Francisco and New York) and they include her insights about them along with telling points of view from others like local musicians, autobiographers, oral historians and weather experts. Each of these storylines is accompanied by detailed maps that follow each angle or interest from actual place to actual place in these cities. So before I returned to New Orleans two years ago, I took her Unfathomable City: a New Orleans Atlas (with all its maps and previews of coming attractions) with me.

Here she is, writing (with her co-author) about their intentions for this book in its opening essay:

We have mapped New Orleans and its surroundings twenty-two times, sometimes with two or more subjects [or areas of interest] per map, but we have not drained the well with these few bucketloads.

Instead we hope we have indicated how rich and various, how inexhaustible is this place, and any place, if you look at it directly and through books, conversations, maps, photographs, dreams and desires.

One of these extraordinary maps eventually brought me to New Orleans’ “cities of the dead” and, more particularly, to Holt Cemetery, which is the City’s potter’s field (or place where those who can’t afford a traditional burial, put their loved ones into the ground). I included a picture essay about my visit there in a 2019 post called A Living Rest. From her field guide, I discovered that local families have picnics at the gravesites, refreshing them with flowers, momentos and messages as they honor and continue to correspond with their family members for months and even years.

Solnit has not written a travel book about Philadelphia, but her curiosity led me to a potter’s field closer to home at a time when a disproportionate number of my neighbors were dying unvaccinated and a charitable corner of Chelten Hills Cemetery seemed to be exploding with activity every time I passed by.

In Same World Different Stories from a couple of months ago, I posted pictures from Chelten Hills potter’s field and talked about how that visit and what I took away from it deepened my appreciation of the place where I live, while at the same time it got me thinking about my own mortality and how it will be marked in the ground and on other peoples’ memories.

_{This picture shows how a Gingko’s fan-shaped leaves turn yellow just before, in a mad rush, they drop down all at once- like a loose pair of pants.}

Another sense-of-place marker for me is the Gingko tree that nestles in the armpit of a majestic Tulip next to my house.

Before we get to his sense of the extraordinary place where he currently resides (below), novelist Richard Powers wrote memorably about trees in general, and about Gingko trees in particular, in The Overstory, a book that won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction two years ago:

Adam looks and sees just this: a tree he has walked past three times a week for seven years. It’s the lone species of the only genus in the sole family in the single order of the solitary class remaining in a now–abandoned division that once covered the earth—a living fossil three hundred million years old that disappeared from the continent back in the Neogene….
The fruit flesh has a smell that curdles thought; the pulp kills even drug-resistant bacteria. The fan-shaped leaves with their radiating veins are said to cure the sickness of forgetting. Adam doesn’t need the cure. He remembers. He remembers. Gingko. The maidenhair tree….
Its leaves leap out sideways in the wind…. It falls from one moment to the next, the most synchronized drop of leaves that nature ever engineered. A gust of air, some last fluttered objection, and all the veined fans let go at once, releasing a flock of golden telegrams down West Fourth Street.

In this single tree, Powers conjures familiarity (“he has walked past [it] three times a week for seven years”); its deep roots in time (“back to the Neogene”); its awful and magical properties (“a smell that curdles thought” while it’s “said to cure the sickness of forgetting”); its mythical moniker (“the maidenhair tree”) and perhaps its greatest trick (“the most synchronized drop of leaves that nature ever engineered”).

I now recall all of those things when I walk under the dual archway of Tulip and Gingko on the northwest edge of my house as it marks the season’s time every year in my own particular place.

It depends on when it’s cold enough, or cold enough for long enough, or when it gets subsurface signals from the Tulip that presides over everything that lives under its massive canopy that the time has come for your leaves to fall.

How will Philadelphia’s warming, its longer “Indian Summers,” effect the great drop when it finally happens in a month or so? I want to be ready, because in most previous years, I’ve tried to stand below its rain of yellow softness, as soft as this because none of its leaves have lost their cooling moisture yet and their skin still feels supple, a light kind of velvet. They’ll blanket me (and sometimes Wally) with everything below them in a shag rug of Asian fans. Nothing else feels quite like it.

The Gingko that lives here is a time piece, but not of the 24-hour variety. It has some deeper, environmental clock in the complicated network where it lives. This time of year, I keep some of my time by it too.

_{We’re hard-wired to navigate through space and time too.}

M.R. O’Connor’s Wayfinding: the Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (2019) looks to neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how our ability to navigate through space and time gives us an essential part of our humanity. But before climbing the evolutionary ladder to our human ancestors, she begins by discussing the extraordinary geo-location and time-keeping abilities of migrating birds and animals.

For example, humpback whales can travel thousands of miles before returning to the inlet or estuary where they were born. Bird species like flycatchers, blackcaps and buntings appear to adjust their flight patterns to the pole star when flying at night. Honeybees may visit hundreds of far-flung flowers during their miles of daily travel but still manage to find their way back to their hives by nightfall. Some dung beetles, desert spiders and cricket frogs have been found to use stars in the Milky Way like a compass. As O’Connor recounts, nearly every insect, bird and animal that’s been tested has demonstrated the ability to orient itself to the earth’s geomagnetic fields.

Humans have retained some of these capabilities to navigate through space and time while (sadly) allowing others to atrophy, because like all capabilities they require regular use and exercise. The “wayfaring” of O’Connor’s book title comes from American psychologist James Gibson, who used the word as a kind of informal shorthand for spatial navigation. “There [is] no separation between mind and environment, between perceiving and knowing,” Gibson wrote. “Wayfinding [is] a way that we directly perceive and involves the real-time coupling of perception and movement.”

To read O’Connor’s book is to find out about the remarkable navigational abilities of tribal peoples like the Inuit of Arctic Canada, the Australian Aborigines, and the native peoples of the Marshall Islands and Hawaii who learn to navigate thousands of miles of featureless ocean without maps or modern technologies. Their skills could be our skills if we made the effort to develop them.

We find our extraordinary sense of place through the integrative functions of our brain’s hippocampus, which enables us to “locate ourselves” through various points of view, prior experiences, memories of traumatic and nurturing events as well as by recognizing our goals and desires. Particularly while we’re asleep, the hippocampus helps to organize where we’ve been and hope to navigate tomorrow into a meaningful and sustaining narrative. Key to these inner workings may be the time-and-space orientations that we first developed as children, with early home life exerting a disproportionate influence on how comfortably we navigate the rest of our lives. O’Connor writes:

Often the places we grow up in have an outsized influence on us. They influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us — they are our source of subjectivity as well as a commonality by which we can relate to and identify with others.

These formative influences give us the perspectives that we use to test all new points-of-view. They show us (or never quite manage to teach us) how to navigate romance or office politics, how to encounter a stranger or weather a global pandemic. Towards the end of her book, O’Connor gets almost poetic while discussing the navigational aptitudes that we either nurtured at an early age or can learn to nurture today from deep within the temporal lobe of our evolutionary brains and out into the big, wide world around us.

Navigating becomes a way of knowing, familiarity, and fondness. It is how you can fall in love with a mountain or a forest. Wayfinding is how we accumulate treasure maps of exquisite memories.

Building our wayfinding capabilities can enable us to deepen our sense of place and to take more satisfaction from life as well as work by becoming more alive to the places where they’re located.

_{Mist, moss and branches that are busy returning to earth in an old growth forest.}

While Richard Power’s The Overstory is about our external interactions with the natural world and our attempts to re-establish a restorative kinship with it, his new book, called Bewilderment,, is about the internal changes that need to occur in us if we’re ever to “come to our senses” and avoid an environmental catastrophe.

In this flipside of his earlier story, Powers uses his skills as a storyteller and student of science to show the impacts that the natural and social environments around us—that is, how the deep sense that each of us nurtures in the places we inhabit—can transform not only our personal well-being but also our collective ability to champion the health of the natural world for its own sake and for the sake of our interdependence with it.

To illustrate his ambition, Powers refers to a structural metaphor in a sweeping conversation he had with Ezra Klein 12 days ago in The New York Times. In the same way that “[we] shape our buildings and ever afterwards they shape us,” building our sense of place could change much that ails us today while preserving the restorative balances of our natural environments.

For example, Powers recounts how he moved, fairly recently, to one of the last places in North America unchanged by human “development,” a patch of old growth forest in the Smoky Mountains of Kentucky. He says of that journey:

[W]hen you stumble across an 1,100 or 1,200-year-old tree that’s as wide as a house and as tall as a football field, it puts a different context on your dinner table conversations with humans who are trying to [fend off aging and] escape death.

Untrammeled nature provides a time scale that’s beyond any individual’s concerns about living longer, having new conveniences or consuming one more Amazon delivery.

[W]hen I first went to the Smokies and hiked up into the old growth in the Southern Appalachians, it was like somebody threw a switch. There was some odd filter that had just been removed, and the world sounded different and smelled different. And I could see how elevated the species count was…. it’s really the first time in my life that I have lived where I live…

In his life before, Powers was always striving to be as productive as possible, “waking up every morning and getting 1,000 words that I was proud of.” But since moving East and publishing The Overstory,

my days have been entirely inverted. I wake up, I go to the window, and I look outside. Or I step out onto the deck — if I haven’t been sleeping on the deck, which I try to do as much as I can in the course of the year — and see what’s in the air, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what’s happening out there now at 1,700 feet or 4,000 feet or 5,000 feet.
You know, how much has it rained? How high are the rivers going to be? What’s in bloom? What’s fruiting? What animals are going to be at what elevation? And I just head out. I head out based on what the day has to offer….
I can’t really be out for more than two or three miles before my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to keep it all in my head long enough to get it down on paper.

For the first time in his life, Powers is sharing his sense of place with the natural world that’s around him. It’s not just a tonic for writers, it’s also a sensation that’s available wherever a sliver of nature is available to enter into a kind of kinship with everyday.

Of course for Powers, it’s not just the birds, animals, insects, trees and plants in this magical place, it’s also the people he can influence and collaborate with in his noble (or quixotic) quest for both inward and outward-facing transformation. In other words, what he’s selling is not only for those who will read and be changed by his books, it’s also to mobilize his fellow conservationists so that one day every one of us might be able to amplify the kinds of personal benefits that find Powers thriving in an old growth forest.

The largest single influence on any human being’s mode of thought is other human beings. So if you are surrounded by lots of terrified but wishful-thinking people who want to believe that somehow the cavalry is going to come at the last minute and that we don’t really have to look inwards and change our belief in where meaning comes from, that we will somehow be able to get over the finish line with all our stuff and that we’ll avert [an environmental] disaster, as we have other kinds of disasters in the past.
And that’s an almost impossible persuasion [or rose-colored mindset] to rouse yourself from if you don’t have allies. [But] I think the one hopeful thing about the present [moment] is the number of people trying to challenge that consensual understanding and break away into a new way of looking at human standing…. [I believe] there will be a threshold, as there have been for these other great social transformations that we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades, where somehow it goes from an outsider position to absolutely mainstream and common sense.

In The Overstory and Bewilderment, we are invited to enter the “contraption” of two books that transform us while we read them. In different ways, each of them show us how enabling an external sense of place reinforces the same qualities that we use internally to organize time, space, memory and hope for the future. Powers’ genius is to argue that when the bond is strengthened like this, we’ll finally be able to start caring for the natural world as much as we’re caring for ourselves.

I’ve written about “sense of place” in other posts recently. Here are some links if you want to check them out for the first time or revisit them again: Technology Is Changing Us (how reliance on navigational technologies like GPS—that give us directions and destinations but no relational context—are causing us to lose, through disuse, capabilities that were once hardwired into being human); A Movie’s Gorgeous Take on Time, Place, Loss & Gain (The Dig is a story about using the history and experience of a particular place to bring what its inhabitants need most into the future that they most want); and Embodied Knowledge That’s Grounded in the Places Where We Live and Work (learning from people who are living and working on the edge of degraded environments so we also can start to embody some of the physical knowledge they have been gaining in order to survive in the years to come).

This post was adapted from my October 10, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Communities Rise From the Wreckage

July 22, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

J. M. W. Turner, “Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth” (1805)

Some days it’s good to be reminded.

I saw the aftermath of a terrible car and motorcycle accident a few days ago, and couldn’t help being caught in its blast radius because its impact reverberated almost to my doorstep.

From the epicenter, I heard the wailing of civilian rescuers huddled over what was surely the rider, the motorcycle he’d been on strewn in pieces a few feet away. Several cars had stopped already and knots of onlookers were clustered at the intersection’s nearest corners.

Traffic had backed up for much of the very long block and was throbbing to break through. One neighbor or pedestrian wearing a bright green shirt took to the center of the street, not embodying “Go” but shouting just the opposite: “You’ll have to turn around,” as one car defiantly entered the empty, opposing lane to push through his impatience. “Really,” the Green Man countered, “are you in such a hurry that you’re willing to risk more injuries?”

At their confrontation I thought of going back inside, but feeling his protectiveness too I strained for a look at the aura of assistance that was closer in than this spontaneous traffic monitor who was bravely putting himself between his own safety and more cars that were feinting to get through.

Just then, an equally improvised town crier–perhaps sensing the ambivalence of our sympathies– shouted: “It was an illegal turn, the motorcycle was not at fault” because she too may have been assuming that it was. In the murmuring that followed, it also became clear that the illegal turner had fled the scene, which made the witnesses and passers-by seem to move even closer in, as if to shelter the body that had been left alone in the middle of two city streets. Surely, it wasn’t just moth-to-flame interest that held us here. I tried to gather my vaguer explanations before another driver tried to power through the threads and associations or the sirens arrived.

They ended up converging on what Fred Rogers had said one day to a kid who regularly visited his Neighborhood:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’

Some years ago I’d been in the middle of a different accident when I hit a dog who’d run into the road and a whirlwind of help, rubbernecking and road rage had spun around me as I cradled that dog in the middle of an even crazier intersection. It added up to one of my worst and best days for many of these same reasons. I can still feel strangers hovering over me, trying to hold back the traffic like a gathering storm, helping.

People help because it allows them to draw on their ability to act–that is, to take matters into their own capable hands–before “experts,” like the police, the ambulance crews, the tow truck drivers who have been on the lookout for wreckage, show up. It’s also acting on the common bond they feel with the fallen, maybe remembering when a stranger had helped them or sensing an as-yet unrealized potential to intervene in the same way themselves.

During days like today when selfish and mean can seem front and center, there’s always hope to be found in the helpers. I, for one, never trust that they’ll come, but they still, always seem to. It’s the surprise of grace. And they were there again this week, gathering around a body that had been hit and broken before it was abandoned.

Fortunately, fatefully, these expressions of shared humanity are everywhere when we look for them, from the most extreme circumstances to the most mundane. Writer Rebecca Solnit described “improvisational communities of help” around earthquakes like the tremor that destroyed much of San Francisco more than a century ago, hurricanes like Katrina that ravaged New Orleans, and the terrorist attack on 9/11 in New York City. A half a year ago, I wrote about a helping community that materialized in a Walmart parking lot after a terrible fire had nearly obliterated a place that could no longer be called Paradise California without shaking your head.

In a new article, Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis has created “a record for analysis” out of the information that still exists about survivors of shipwrecks over a period of 400 years (from 1500 to 1900), drawing tentative conclusions about their post-wreckage collaborations and potentially opening up new ways of assembling “data sources” for testing by social scientists.

In today’s post, there is more on Solnit’s observations about human nature and Christakis’ thoughts about cooperative behavior after tragedy.

Tracking on Christakis’ research, the pictures here are of turbulent seas and the inevitable shipwrecks, all by perhaps England’s greatest painter, J.M.W. Turner. Each one invites us to imagine what comes next and to be continuously surprised by how good that can be.

J. M. W. Turner, “Shipwreck Off Hastings” (1825)

1. Spontaneous Helping Communities

Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster alerted me to how average people became rescuers during several of the worst catastrophes in American history. She explains it, in part, by how “diving in to help” brings a sense of confidence and liberation that is lacking in people’s private lives. For these civilian rescuers, it’s almost experienced as enjoyment:

…if enjoyment is the right word for that sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive. We don’t even have a language for that emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological….The desires and possibilities awakened are so powerful they shine even from wreckage, carnage, and ashes.

It’s as if we can see better versions of ourselves as leaders, problem-solvers, caring adults and members of a flesh-and-blood communities shining through.

Speaking with any assurance “about life today” is always risky, but it does seem that we exalt “minding your own business” as an excuse today for not getting more involved while building as much insulation as we can afford between our private and public lives. It may explain low voter turn-out, general political apathy and cynicism, our involvement with arms-length communities (like Facebook) instead of real ones where we have to get our hands dirty and look our neighbors in the eye, and the time we spend in echo-chambers that reinforce our sense of “us vs. them” But at exactly the same time that our private lives seem paramount, Solnit’s argument is that we also crave more meaningful engagement than we’ll ever find living behind safety glass.

It is this longing that has a chance to be satisfied when regular people find themselves helping during a car accident or other emergency. We suddenly feel more fully alive than we felt before. Solnit analogizes the fullness that regular people feel under these circumstances to the solidarity and immediacy that soldiers often experience during wartime.

We have, most of us, a deep desire for this democratic public life, for a voice, for membership, for purpose and meaning that cannot be only personal. We want larger selves and a larger world. It is part of the seduction of war William James warned against—for life during wartime often serves to bring people into this sense of common cause, sacrifice, absorption in something larger. Chris Hedges inveighed against it too, in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning: ‘The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidity of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.’ Which only brings us back to James’s question: What is the moral equivalent of war—not the equivalent of its carnage, its xenophobias, its savagery—but its urgency, its meaning, its solidarity?

The clutch of men and women kneeling over and attending to the victim sprawled on the intersection near my front door were finding it.

It’s why the Green Man turned himself into a traffic cop right before my eyes. He was finding something that he needed too.

J. M. W. Turner, “Long Ship’s Lighthouse, Lands End” (1834-5)

2. How Shipwrecked Survivors Came Together Time After Time

In the course of his research about how people behave in social networks, Nicholas Christokis ran an experiment using data he gathered about shipwrecks that took place over the span of four hundred years. He wanted to know how survivors who had “narrowly escaped death and were psychologically traumatized,” often arriving on remote islands “nearly drowned and sometimes naked and wounded” came together (or broke down) as a network of survivors. His findings tended to prove his theory that we carry “innate proclivities to make good societies” even under the most extreme circumstances.

His “Lessons from Shipwrecked Micro-Societies” appeared in the on-line platform Quillette a little over a week ago. Christakis acknowledged many of his experiment’s limitations up front:

The people who traveled on ships were not randomly drawn from the human population; they were often serving in the navy or the marines or were enslaved persons, convicts or traders. Shipboard life involved exacting status divisions and command structures to which these people were accustomed. Survivor groups were therefore made up of people who not only frequently came from a single distinctive cultural background (Dutch, Portuguese, English and so on), but who were also part of the various subcultures associated with long ocean voyages during the epoch of exploration. These shipwreck societies were [also]…mostly male.

Still, given the similarities and differences among these survivor groups in terms of race, gender and hierarchy, it is noteworthy that they rarely devolved into a state of selfishness, brutality or violence in their quest to survive. Instead, they tended to model fairness and cooperation in their interactions, a reduction in previous status divisions, noteworthy demonstrations of leadership and the development of new friendships.

Survivor communities manifested cooperation in diverse ways: sharing food equitably; taking care of injured or sick colleagues; working together to dig wells, bury the dead, co-ordinate a defense, or maintain signal fires; or jointly planning to build a boat or secure rescue. In addition to historical documentation of such egalitarian behaviors, archaeological evidence includes the non-separation of subgroups (for example, officers and enlisted men or passengers and servants) into different dwellings, and the presence of collectively built wells or stone signal-fire platforms. Other indirect evidence is found in the accounts of survivors, such as reports of the crew being persuaded, because of good leadership, to engage in dangerous salvage operations. And we have many hints of friendship and camaraderie in these circumstances.

Christakis is best known for demonstrating how networks of strangers can promote positive behaviors and even altruism through “the contagion” that their influence exerts in the course of their interactions. His new book Blueprint: the Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society makes the additional argument that our genes affect not only our personal behaviors but also provide the drive to join together “to make good societies” whether they are in on-line networks or in the communities where we live and work. The encouraging data from shipwreck communities that Christakis summarized in his article is part of that argument.

In what can seem like a mean-spirited and selfish time, there is hope to be found in the circumstantial evidence that “helping one another” may be hardwired into our genetic programming.

There is hope to be found every time that regular people pitch in to help instead of walking by or refusing to get involved, not because they’re heroic or brave but because they experience something akin to enjoyment and even liberation by doing so.

Whenever hope in the future seems to be flagging, look for the helpers. There are several reasons that they’re always around.

This post was adapted from my July 21, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Building Confidence in the Future

November 18, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The future was on my mind a lot this week, probably because several stories were arguing for its importance and vulnerability.

Some of it was the mid-term election, which the press kept reminding us was about choosing our political future, as if we’d be able to get it right or wrong in one fell swoop. Now with the hype behind us, it looks like all we’ve done is kick the can down the road.

Then there was the centenary of “the Great War,” and all the future-talk back then. “Making the world safe for democracy” was what Woodrow Wilson promised as he navigated us from continental isolation to European battlefield that first time, going back again 20 years later, and on to Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. It’s what keeps us in the tribal mess of Afghanistan today–maybe safer, but not quite safe.

What am I voting for, fighting for, working for if not for what I hope? Is it to be safer tomorrow? To make one thing better? To change even more about the world than that? So far this week, 2018 seemed an ill-suited time to build much confidence in the future.

But then came the future as apocalypse. A place that its Gold Rush settlers had called “Paradise” was incinerated, burning many of those who were living there today beyond recognition. The future for the survivors who remained was also stripped bare: of homes, belongings, neighbors, pets, of familiarity and routine.

Still, a less blackened way to think about the future came from what happened next. It was not a government rescue or a swell of self-reliance, because most of the survivors live on fixed or limited incomes, with little fat to fall back on. Instead it was how quickly people in nearby towns moved beyond “the transmission of thoughts and prayers” to an outpouring of generosity.

In another irony for Paradise, just when their hopes for the future seemed obliterated a new community gathered around those who remained–even as more wild fires continued to bloom in the east. This short video clip captures some of the outpouring this week, dressed (either improbably or not) as a Sexy Panda food truck.

Regular people recognized themselves in their neighbors’ tragedy and spontaneously gathered to start building their future together, not by offering “pies in the sky” from afar but in a Walmart parking lot where displaced families had fled and are still living out of their cars. FEMA, the National Guard, and “the local authorities” may think they know better, but a future that’s worth having is usually created when one capable person cares for another.

As Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities:

much societal effort goes into withering us away from [our] fullest, most powerful selves. But people return to those selves, those ways of self-organizing, as if by instinct when the situation demands it. Thus disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation, to new roles and an unnerving or exhilarating sense that now anything is possible.

As if by instinct, some of that improvisational euphoria was visible in Walmart’s parking lot this week. The helpers felt empowered by their involvement while the survivors found the ability to tap into their own reserves of autonomy and generosity, telling me and everyone else who was listening that “We will make it.”

Over the summer, National Public Radio launched an occasional series where it asked listeners to identify songs that were “the most uplifting in their experience.” This week, NPR profiled one of them, Simon & Garfunkel’s “American Anthem,” and recorded listener reactions while the song played in the background. When I caught the Morning Edition segment over coffee, I was overtaken by the wistfulness in its college-boy lyrics and ethereal delivery and by how others still felt it too.

Cathy, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America…

Cathy, I’m lost, I said though I knew she was sleeping
And I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike.
They’ve all come to look for America

All come to look for America

For me, the song transports because you can feel the movement of the bus in its rhythms and catch glimpses of the country not as a whole but in its particulars: Pittsburg, Saginaw, the New Jersey Turnpike.

As a people, we are also more interested in where we’re headed than in where we’ve been. So I wasn’t surprised when one listener said: “For me, getting to know America is more about the questions that we ask than the sort of sureness that we might reach in our own experience,” or that another added: “I think all of us are still searching for America and hoping to find it and define it and give it meaning. And we all do that in our own way.” In this gem of a song, “looking for America” is looking for the future and wanting (so very, very hard) to believe in what we will find.

In Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World, Robert Kaplan was also “looking for America” when he set out on his road trip across the country a couple of years ago. He tells us he found it near the border between Nebraska and South Dakota when he visited Mt. Rushmore. This is what he saw there:

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt: the four greatest presidents at the time of the 150^thanniversary of American independence in 1926, when [Gutzon] Borglum [the sculptor] began his work here. The granite insures that the work will stand undiminished for at least a thousand years. After I have driven across the continent into the wilderness, Mount Rushmore offers me revelations in person that all the photographs of it cannot. For Mount Rushmore overwhelms precisely because of where it is located, not on the Capitol Mall but atop a mountain in the West, part of the original Louisiana Purchase, bearing the promise of the continent that was the upshot of pioneer optimism. An optimism that, in turn, was driven by democracy and the breaking down of European elite systems that these four presidents did so much to originate and secure. The culmination of the American story—one that Washington and Jefferson began—has more to do with the West than the East.

These carvings, despite their inhuman size, are strangely not oppressive or totemic. They do not intimidate or call to mind some tyrannical force. There is light and not darkness in the eyes of these presidents. Each is looking into the future, it seems…The result…is a myth of light that puts into some tragic perspective…the darkness rained [by white settlers and soldiers] on the native inhabitants and their way of life in these same hills. (the italics here are mine)

For Kaplan, it is in the tension and contradiction between America’s loftiest ideals and its worst inclinations that hope in the future lies. In another irony, he finds the confidence that can ultimately win out in a popular gathering place a few miles away.

[I]n the adjacent tourist trap of Keystone, South Dakota, many of the waiters and waitresses are from places as diverse as Ukraine, India, Nepal and so on. They are trying to make it and stay in America—yes, still the land of opportunity. Whereas at the [Mount Rushmore] viewing terrace there was whispering and outright silence, here the tourists—who include immigrants from Asia and Latin America—are all chattering away, exchanging notes and competing with one another to tell just how far and through how many states they traveled in order to get here. The license plates in the parking lots are from every part of the country. Keystone, snaking and ramshackle, is like a vast hostelry at an ancient pilgrimage site. The great and nearby monument has shown them what they all have in common.

I see the arc of my journey here. It has purpose. There is nothing eccentric about driving slowly for weeks on end, from one side of the continent to the other. Keystone reveals to me exactly what I am doing, since what I am looking for actually exists.

At a time when we are criticizing many of our monuments, this may seem a odd moment for Kaplan to celebrate one of them. But at their best, a country’s monuments can be symbols not of oppression or hypocrisy but of aspiration. They can say: despite its contradictions, America is still trying to grapple with its complicated legacy and to discover a hope-filled future where the frontier still stretches out in front of it.

The Walmart parking lot near Paradise, California this week.

Like the new and recent Americans who were celebrating their commonality in Keystone South Dakota, there are always opportunities to ground our hopes.

Without the talking heads in the media, the “thought leaders” in universities and think tanks, or (really) any of the elites awakening us to what seems “right” or “necessary” to them, we can declare our hopes by driving to wherever someone whose humanity we recognize needs us right now.

As John Berger, one of my heroes, has said: “hope is not a guarantee for tomorrow but a detonator of energy for action today.” It is a way to escape the daily distractions that anesthetize us, to battle our cynicism or despair, and to claim the practical, close-to-the-ground confidence in the future that drives all good work.

This post was adapted from my November 18, 2018 newsletter.

Good Work’s Foundations

September 2, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I saw rooms full of models of imagined buildings and cities at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this week. The artist was Bodys Isek Kingelez from central Africa. Pictured above is one of his futuristic building models. They reflect “dreams for his country,” known during his life as the Belgian Congo and later as Zaire. Kingelez said he was envisioning “a more harmonious society” than he saw around him.

Artists are sometimes better at envisioning than the rest of us. It can be even harder for us to bring a better future into our day-to-day work—but when we do, our hopes pull us forward, particularly as we struggle to realize them.

Acting on what we hope for is one of good work’s foundations. So are acting out of our aim for both generosity and autonomy on the job. I’ve been thinking about demonstrations of generosity, autonomy and acting on hope this week from teacher/writer Roxanne Gay, actor/rap artist/omnivore Riz Ahmed, and activist/public intellectual Rebecca Solnit, respectively—3 powerful voices with a lot to say about how we spend our time and talent every day.

Generous Judgment

Generosity is about acknowledging the autonomy or self-determination of others (like co-workers, clients/customers, suppliers, members of your business and non-profit communities) in the course of your work.

You probably know comic Louis C.K. Highly acclaimed, his semi-autobiographical cable TV show Louis and stand-up comedy specials have won 6 Emmy awards, a Peabody, and star-struck interviews at places like Fresh Air. To me, his comedy seemed deep, subtle, smart, and self-aware. Until late last year, when he was “outed” by several women who worked with him, it seemed that Louis C.K. could do no wrong. They accused him of pretty egregious conduct that reminded me of apocryphal stories I used to hear about neighborhood “flashers,” only this time much worse, because he was not the sicko stranger in a trench coat. Instead, several in his reluctant audience had tied their careers to his.

As the story came out (on the heels of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose and others), I was surprised by the “not enough” of his public reactions and the suggestions around them that he had previously tried to bully his accusers into silence. Well this week, less than a year after the revelations first surfaced, Louis C.K. returned to a thunderous reaction “on the come-back trail.” The crowd that felt lucky enough to be at a NYC comedy club for his unannounced performance was reportedly ecstatic.

Clearly, Louis C.K. didn’t know how to handle the “world of hurt” around his abusive conduct when it first came out and was similarly clueless when he concluded “that all had been forgotten” and “it is time for everybody to just move on.” In a New York minute, Roxanne Gay told him otherwise.

It might have been easier for Louis if his comeuppance hadn’t been in the New York Times. But she didn’t just excoriate him. She met him like she acknowledged his intelligence, his talent, his fans who might still learn from what she was about to say. Instead of writing him off as a perverted loser, Gay told him what he (along with others who don’t know but need to hear) what should be done by adults who behave this way. It was a gift he may not have deserved, but it was a judgment that was elevated by the light that she brought to it.

“If Louis C.K. doesn’t know what to do when he’s caused this kind of damage, then I’ll try to explain it,” she seems to say—so he can make it right this time, and others like him can learn what they need to do too. Anger followed by patience in that New York minute was an act of generosity. Indeed, it’s a balance that elevates nearly everything that Roxanne Gay does.

While you should read her entire commentary, this is Gay on Louis C.K.’s “comeback road”:

How long should a man like Louis C.K. pay for what he did? At least as long as he worked to silence the women he assaulted and at least as long as he allowed them to doubt themselves and suffer in the wake of his predation and at least as long as the comedy world protected him even though there were very loud whispers about his behavior for decades.

He should pay until he demonstrates some measure of understanding of what he has done wrong and the extent of the harm he has caused. He should attempt to financially compensate his victims for all the work they did not get to do because of his efforts to silence them. He should facilitate their getting the professional opportunities they should have been able to take advantage of all these years. He should finance their mental health care as long as they may need it. He should donate to nonprofit organizations that work with sexual harassment and assault victims. He should publicly admit what he did and why it was wrong without excuses and legalese and deflection. Every perpetrator of sexual harassment and violence should follow suit.

Moral condemnation is easy but describing the “road someone needs to take back” requires a comprehension of the pain that was caused, the actions that would be necessary to alleviate it, as well as the belief that he could act on your advice. Most judgments fail to include these components, but Gay’s has all of them.

The Christian lesson of the crucifixion is infinitely more powerful because it is followed by the resurrection. We’re expert at crucifying people today—at work, and otherwise—but too often seem to be unconcerned about their ability (and ours) to rise afterwards. It’s not about forgiveness but the hard-won path to change.

The last time I wrote about Roxanne Gay on this page was in January.

Creative Autonomy

Autonomy is actively making the most out of what you have, identifying what is important to you, and putting yourself on the line to achieve it. Autonomy is self-determination.

In the limited series The Night Of (on HBO), Riz Ahmed played two roles: the role of a Pakistani student wrongly imprisoned at Riker’s Island for murder and a role beneath his acting that involved you as a viewer in a separate dialogue. You could feel Ahmed’s intelligence, focus and humanity whispering through his role—his interior life giving the 6 episodes counterpoints beyond the writing, directing and acting. (“Whatever he was saying and doing, he was always simultaneously maintaining a second conversation with you about what both of you might be thinking.”)

A profile with that line and additional suggestions about Ahmed’s perspective was this week’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine. You can sense what’s unique about him from the first impressions that Ahmed made on his profiler about his jobs as an actor and musician, pathfinder, role-model and activist.

It’s not that he doesn’t get animated. He does. Talking with Ahmed can be a little like sparring, a little like co-writing a constitution, a little like saving the world in an 11th-hour meeting. He interrupts, then apologizes for interrupting, then interrupts again. He can deliver entirely publishable essays off the top of his head. He pounds the table when talking about global injustices, goes back to edit his sentences minutes after they were spoken, challenges the premises of your sentences before you’re halfway through speaking. This is what happens when you cut your teeth on both prep-school debate teams and late-night freestyle rap battles, as Ahmed has. He is like someone who wants to speak truth to power but now is power — famous enough, at least, to have people listen to his ideas. He is like someone very smart who also cares a lot. He is like someone who doesn’t want to be misunderstood.

Not surprisingly, much of Ahmed’s edge comes from being a Pakistani-Brit, rising from one competitive lower school to another. Along the way, he felt his separateness as a South Asian but always “believed that the flag of Britain should and would obviously include him.” That is, until Al Qaeda’s attack on Twin Towers, which happened the month he matriculated to university and made it even more burdensome to be a Muslim. It was there that he made a critical life choice.

[H]e found himself at Oxford University, just after 9/11 — a brown kid surrounded by the acolytes of seemingly ancient white wealth, who sometimes did have a way of talking to him as if he were a shopkeeper. Rather than retreating into Oxford, he decided to make Oxford come to him. He started organizing parties that celebrated his music and cultural touchstones, parties where he would get on the mic over drum ’n’ bass records. Soon enough, the event he co-founded, “Hit and Run,” moved to Manchester and became one of the city’s leading underground music events.

What could have been angry rejection and a retreat to the company of other South Asian Muslims instead became his invitation for Oxford to join a broader conversation that he was sponsoring. It was a place where he mashed up Pakistani melodies and rhythms with British rap (just as rap was rising to become the most popular music in the world.) As Lena Dunham observed about him, he combined the bravado of someone in the hip-hop world with the intensity of someone who’s mounted a barricade.

Creating this platform was a singular act of personal autonomy (as well as generosity towards others) that has informed Riz Ahmed’s work ever since. He wants to initiate a conversation that’s big enough for him and for everyone else. It’s a theme that shines through every corner of his remarkable story. I hope that you’ll enjoy digging into more of it.

Living Your Vision

Envisioning is living the future that you hope for through your work.

I read Rebecca Solnit’s “Hope in the Dark” traveling to and from New York City. In a nutshell, it’s about living what’s important to you, even though there is no assurance or even likelihood that the better world you’re working for will get any closer as a result. As her title says, it’s hope in the dark.

Americans in particular tend to want more certainty than that. We’re not accustomed to a continuous struggle for a better world or trying to “live our hopes”–particularly when they may never be realized–every day. Instead, we tend to respond to a crisis/problem/challenge, declare victory or defeat, and go home to wait for the next one to demand our attention. Our responses are generally to emergencies that interrupt the normal flow of our lives. We don’t tend to see struggling for what’s important to us as a daily commitment.

Solnit argues that treating struggles for justice, fairness, freedom, for greater opportunity, self-determination or a healthier planet as isolated emergencies results in abandoning our victories while they’re still vulnerable and conceding our defeats too quickly. When we’re committed to achieving what’s truly important to us, Solnit argues: “It is always too soon to go home.”

She illustrates her point by recounting a story she wrote several years back about pay equity for women:

[A] cranky guy wrote in that women used to make sixty-two cents to the male dollar and now we made seventy-seven cents, so what were we complaining about? It doesn’t seem like it should be so complicated to acknowledge that seventy-seven cents is better than sixty-six cents and that seventy-seven cents isn’t good enough, but the politics we have is so pathetically bipolar that we only tell this story two ways: either seventy-seven cents is a victory, and victories are points where you shut up and stop fighting; or seventy-seven cents is ugly, so activism accomplishes nothing and what’s the pint of fighting? Both versions are defeatist because they are static. What’s missing from these two ways of telling is an ability to recognize a situation in which you are traveling and have not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and to fight, in which the world is always being made and is never finished. (italics mine)

It is because the struggle is never easy and never done that Solnit quotes the poet John Keats, who called the world with all of its suffering “this vale of soul-making.” While “Hope in the Dark” is mainly Solnit’s call to continuous political activism, her arguments apply equally to declaring what’s important to you though the work that you do, that is, to any kind of acting on your convictions. To borrow the force of her argument, your jobs become “toolboxes to change things,” places “to take up residence and live according to your beliefs,” and, as Keats would say, “vales” where your soul is made because it is where a sense of meaning, purpose and wholeness (as opposed to partial victories or defeats) can be found.

If you’re unfamiliar with Rebecca Solnit, “Hope in the Dark”‘s 100-odd pages would be a splendid introduction. Her “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster” such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina is a beautiful argument that we’re far more and far better than we often think that we are.

Note: This post was adapted from my September 2, 2018 newsletter