Mayo 03, 2006
Beyond Hope
In the latest issue of Orion Magazine we are brought an excerpt from Endgame, the upcoming new book by Derrick Jensen, one of my favorite authors to make it their business to meticulously describe exactly what's wrong with western culture and civilization. The excerpt is on a subject I've seen him write and speak about before at great length, but it's nice to see it in this form. It's about the problem with hope.
When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.
I've had many conversations with people about Jensen's position on this. It's hard for some to wrap their heads around the idea that hope can be bad.
I think it's a very priveleged position to think that it's always neccesarily bad, but I don't think that's what Jensen is saying. Certainly as a survivor of a brutal childhood full of abuse he understands that in some situations hope is what keeps you alive and carrying on. Hope is a useful tool for certain situations, like fear and pain and computers and hammers and dynamite. But like all tools it can turn into an overused crutch that actually hinders the user. Certainly people with lots of power like we middleclass white gringos can afford to stop hoping so much and start actually doing more.
Posted by steev at Mayo 3, 2006 06:47 AM
this tiny excercpt and your gloss on it seems to me to be confusing "hope" with "denial" and "sloth."
hopelessness will not get middleclass white gringos to pay more taxes and vote for something other than (the promise of) personal wealth. Hopelessness and the belief that Armageddon precludes personal and political responsibility are one and the same (the why is a complicated and long argument, but, for example, http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/144222_wink17.html
)
politics is _also_ about hope. why do you think the protestors on monday were wearing white? want to take a guess at how many of them would describe themselves as Christian in culture if not conviction?
anyway, my .02 cents.
do you not have time to read the Jensen article? it's shorter than the SeattlePI one you link to.
i kind of assume when i link and quote that people are going to read the original context but maybe i shouldnt think that. i shouldn't have included the quote, i guess, just the link.
i think your point is well taken but you're thinking of a different audience. Jensen starts off his article saying "THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We're fucked. Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have —or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective—to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group of plants or animals. Sometimes they're reduced to trying to protect just one tree."
so... he's not talking to Mr and Mrs dick and jane cognitive dissonance taxpayer and how to get them to give a shit, he's talking to people who already give a shit, but are putting a little too much faith in outside forces like judges, the forest service, property rights, lawyers.... understand that this is a guy who writes at the beginning of one chapter of his book "A Language Older Than Words" that every morning he wakes up and thinks about whether he will write that day, or go blow up a dam. "so far, I have decided to write," he says....