We are living through a revolt against the future.
The future will prevail.
I love Anand Giridharadas’ statement above, one of three gateway quotes leading into Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End – Notes on a World of Change, which I recommend if you’re feeling hope-starved — which probably describes most of us at this point.
Solnit has a gift for finding viable avenues to hope. She doesn’t indulge in wishful thinking and doesn’t make predictions. Just the opposite: “I have always drawn my hope from the past, not from the future, from the way the past shows us how change works, how what once seemed impossible becomes actuality.”
Within the unfriendly confines of current events — conditioned by the media news cycle to look no further than the present — we often find scant signs of hope. But Solnit reminds us, with abundant examples, of the remarkable changes we have witnessed in our lifetime. Indeed, so much has changed in that time that our current political upheaval should be viewed more as a desperate reaction by a dying world order.
“We have won enough,” she writes, “that we are in, what is to some, the unfamiliar position of defending an imperfect and incomplete revolution against backlash and counterrevolution. … What we’ve been living through is backlash. It’s not the engine of history. It is the revolt against the engine of history.”
And that engine has had greater impact than we realize.
“The transformation of everyday life has, in recent decades, been revolutionary in its scope, its reach into every arena of life,” Solnit says, “from how we produce energy to how we think about food and nature and human rights.”
She characterizes this transition as moving away from the disconnection and alienation of the old order to a worldview of interconnected interdependence.
“My generation,” she writes, “is a bridge generation, a rider clinging to the back of a runaway horse of change. We were born in the midst of the Black civil rights movement, as decolonization in Africa was gathering force, before the great waves of feminist and queer rights movements were launched, before the environmental movement arose … before the reassertion of Indigenous presence became such a powerful influence on settler-colonialist worldviews, born in an old world that was tolerant of the old cruelties and repressions, the old story in which so many stories were buried and silenced, the old story of domination and control over nature and much else. …
“As the imagined barriers came down that separated animals from humans, humans from nature, men from women, that constrained what gender is and what sexual relations should be, that segregated races, that legitimized and enforced hierarchies, some of us welcomed and benefitted from a more fluid and open society. Others insisted that without fixed categories and a sort of border patrol around them, chaos had been loosed, and what had spilled out of the containers needed to be stuffed back in. But the changes came anyway.”
She traces the surprisingly widespread impact of Asian spirituality — Buddhism, yoga and meditation in particular — on Western culture, beginning in the 1950s and ’60s, as well as celebrating a Native American revival, reasserting itself after somehow surviving five centuries of cultural and spiritual genocide. She cites the oil pipeline protests and the remarkable popularity of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s unlikely book, which has sold 1.6 million copies, despite a very unsexy title, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” about plants no less, bringing together her knowledge of nature and her scientific background. The book’s success, Solnit says, “speaks to the appetite for this worldview.”
The environmental movement has prompted the biggest change of all, preaching the good news of One Earth and the interrelated web of life, fortified by Martin Luther King’s “network of mutuality” (beloved community), bolstered by scientific discoveries, the space program, the saner side of the internet and social media, Gandhi’s soul force (satyagraha) and nonviolent resistance, the Dalai Lama’s campaign of compassion, Desmond Tutu’s gospel of racial reconciliation, Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness (peace in every step) — all of it, Solnit says, creating “a vision of a better way … the opposite of alienation, estrangement, segregation, disconnection, as the antithesis to the existential loneliness and strife of … capitalism and the ideology behind privatization, social Darwinism, consumerism, individualism as separateness or selfishness.” A better vision is taking its place, a worldview based on interconnection. “I believe that this vision equips us to prepare for the next [era],” she says, “and to leave behind the last one.”
It’s happening. Has been happening. Will continue to happen, even though progress can be frustratingly incremental — with surprising leaps forward, followed by setbacks like our present political catastrophe — because the old world order resists the future with all its might.
But the future will prevail, a new worldview, emphasizing “we” over “me.”
If you’re looking for hope, you can’t do better than this short, very readable book.