On Change, from Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
Hope in the Dark (sections quoted here from the 2004 edition)
Chapter 10
Changing the Imagination of Change
A lot of activists see to have a mechanistic view of change, or perhaps they expect what quack diet pills offer, "Quick and easy results guaranteed." They expect finality, definitiveness, straightforward cause-and-effect relationships, instant returns, and as a result they specialize in disappointment, which sinks in as bitterness, cynicism, defeatism, knowingness. They operate on the premise that for every action there is an equal and opposite and punctual reaction, and regard the lack of one as failure. After all, we are often a reaction: Bush decides to invade Iraq; we create a global peace movement. Sometimes success looks instant: we go to Seattle and shut down the WTO, but getting to Seattle can be told as a story of months of organizing or decades of developing a movement smart enough and broad enough to understand the complex issues at hand and bring in the ten thousand blockaders. History is made out of common dreams, groundswells, turning points, watersheds- it's a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect, and that peace movement came out of causes with roots reaching far beyond and long before Bush.
Effects are not proportionate to causes- not only because huge causes sometimes seem to have little effect, but because tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences. Gandhi said, "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." But these stages unfold slowly. As Adam Hochschild points out, it took more than three-quarters of a century to abolish slavery in Britain and the United States from the time the English Quakers first took on the issue (which slaves themselves had taken on from the beginning, of course). Only a handful of activists who began working against slavery in the late eighteenth-century lived to see its nineteenth-century conclusion, when what had seemed impossible suddenly began to look, in retrospect, inevitable. And as the law of unexpected activist consequences might lead you to expect, the abolition movement also sparked the first widespread women's rights movement, which took about the same amount of time to secure the right to vote for American women, has achieved far more in the subsequent eighty-four years, and is by no means over. Activism is not a journey to the corner store, it is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
~~
From the Chapter 1
Looking into Darkness
On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, "The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think." Dark, she seems to be saying, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake one for the other. Or we transform the future's unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. But again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.
Who, two decades ago, could have imagined a world in which the Soviet Union had disappeared and the Internet had arrived? Who then dreamed that the political prisoner Nelson Mandela would become president of a transformed South Africa? Who forsaw the resurgence of the indigenous world of which the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico is only the most visible face? Who, four decades ago, could have conceived of the changed status of all who are nonwhite, nonmale, or nonstraight, the wide open conversations about power, nature, economies, and ecologies?
There are times when it seems as though not only the future but the present is dark: few recognize what a radically transformed world we live in, one that had been transformed not only by such nightmares as global warming and global capital, but by dreams of freedom and of justice- and transformed by things we could not have dreamed of. We adjust to changes without measuring them, we forget how much the culture has changed. The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay rights on a large scale last summer [2003], a ruling inconceivable a few decades ago. What acceleration of incremental, imperceptible changes made that possible, and how did they come about? And so we need to hope for the realization of our own dreams, but also to recognize a world that will remain wilder than our imaginations.
If the Amazon Reader will work for you, read on. If it won't, buy a copy of the book [I found mine at Alibris.com for $1.99.] If you really want a copy and can't afford it, I'll send you mine. But please, please. Go, read. Breathe. Then add your increment. Even the smallest person...
Chapter 10
Changing the Imagination of Change
A lot of activists see to have a mechanistic view of change, or perhaps they expect what quack diet pills offer, "Quick and easy results guaranteed." They expect finality, definitiveness, straightforward cause-and-effect relationships, instant returns, and as a result they specialize in disappointment, which sinks in as bitterness, cynicism, defeatism, knowingness. They operate on the premise that for every action there is an equal and opposite and punctual reaction, and regard the lack of one as failure. After all, we are often a reaction: Bush decides to invade Iraq; we create a global peace movement. Sometimes success looks instant: we go to Seattle and shut down the WTO, but getting to Seattle can be told as a story of months of organizing or decades of developing a movement smart enough and broad enough to understand the complex issues at hand and bring in the ten thousand blockaders. History is made out of common dreams, groundswells, turning points, watersheds- it's a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect, and that peace movement came out of causes with roots reaching far beyond and long before Bush.
Effects are not proportionate to causes- not only because huge causes sometimes seem to have little effect, but because tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences. Gandhi said, "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." But these stages unfold slowly. As Adam Hochschild points out, it took more than three-quarters of a century to abolish slavery in Britain and the United States from the time the English Quakers first took on the issue (which slaves themselves had taken on from the beginning, of course). Only a handful of activists who began working against slavery in the late eighteenth-century lived to see its nineteenth-century conclusion, when what had seemed impossible suddenly began to look, in retrospect, inevitable. And as the law of unexpected activist consequences might lead you to expect, the abolition movement also sparked the first widespread women's rights movement, which took about the same amount of time to secure the right to vote for American women, has achieved far more in the subsequent eighty-four years, and is by no means over. Activism is not a journey to the corner store, it is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
~~
From the Chapter 1
Looking into Darkness
On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, "The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think." Dark, she seems to be saying, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake one for the other. Or we transform the future's unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. But again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.
Who, two decades ago, could have imagined a world in which the Soviet Union had disappeared and the Internet had arrived? Who then dreamed that the political prisoner Nelson Mandela would become president of a transformed South Africa? Who forsaw the resurgence of the indigenous world of which the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico is only the most visible face? Who, four decades ago, could have conceived of the changed status of all who are nonwhite, nonmale, or nonstraight, the wide open conversations about power, nature, economies, and ecologies?
There are times when it seems as though not only the future but the present is dark: few recognize what a radically transformed world we live in, one that had been transformed not only by such nightmares as global warming and global capital, but by dreams of freedom and of justice- and transformed by things we could not have dreamed of. We adjust to changes without measuring them, we forget how much the culture has changed. The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay rights on a large scale last summer [2003], a ruling inconceivable a few decades ago. What acceleration of incremental, imperceptible changes made that possible, and how did they come about? And so we need to hope for the realization of our own dreams, but also to recognize a world that will remain wilder than our imaginations.
If the Amazon Reader will work for you, read on. If it won't, buy a copy of the book [I found mine at Alibris.com for $1.99.] If you really want a copy and can't afford it, I'll send you mine. But please, please. Go, read. Breathe. Then add your increment. Even the smallest person...