It's a worldview, but one informed by experience and the knowledge that people have power; that the power people possess matters; that change has been made by populist movements and dedicated individuals in the past; and that it will be again.
Dissent in this country has become
largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing
what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us.
But even
in English, a robust minority tradition can be found. There are a
handful of books that I think of as "the secret library of hope." None
of them deny the awful things going on, but they approach them as if
the future is still open to intervention rather than an inevitability.
In describing how the world actually gets changed, they give us the
tools to change it again.
Here, then, are some of the regulars in my secret political library of hope, along with some new candidates:
Monks, Slaves, Prisoners and the Power from Beneath
When
the monks of Burma/Myanmar led an insurrection in September simply by
walking through the streets of their cities in their deep-red robes,
accompanied by ever more members of civil society, the military junta
which had run that country for more than four decades responded with
violence. That's one measure of how powerful and threatening the
insurrection was. (That totalitarian regimes tend to ban gatherings of
more than a few people is the best confirmation of the strength that
exists in unarmed numbers of us.)
After the crackdown, after
the visually stunning, deeply inspiring walks came to a bloody end,
quite a lot of mainstream politicians and pundits pronounced the
insurrection dead, violence triumphant -- as though this play had just
one act, as though its protagonists were naïve and weak-willed. I knew
they were wrong, but the argument I rested on wasn't my own: I went
back to Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence,
and the Will of the People, by far the most original and ambitious of
the many histories of nonviolence to appear in recent years.
When
it came out as the current war began in the spring of 2003, the book
was mocked for its dismissal of the effectiveness of violence, but
Schell's explanation of how superior military power failed abysmally in
Vietnam was a prophesy waiting to be fulfilled in Iraq. Schell himself
is much taken with the philosopher Hannah Arendt, whom he quotes
saying, in 1969:
"To substitute violence for power can
bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by
the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own
power."
I hope that his equally trenchant explanation of the
power of nonviolence is fulfilled in Burma. Schell has been a diligent
historian and philosopher of nuclear weapons since his 1982 bestseller
The Fate of the Earth, but this book traces the rise of nonviolence as
the other half of the history of the violent twentieth century.
That's
what books in a library of hope consist of -- not a denial of the
horrors of recent history, but an exploration of the other tendencies,
avenues, and achievements that are too often overlooked. After all, to
return to Burma, much has already changed there since September:
Burma's greatest supporter, China, has been forced to denounce the
crackdown and may be vulnerable to more pre-Olympics pressure on the
subject; India has declared a moratorium on selling arms to the
country; a number of companies have withdrawn from doing business
there; and the U.S. Congress just unanimously passed a bill, HR 3890,
to increase sanctions, freeze the junta's assets in U.S. institutions,
and close a loophole that allowed Chevron to profit spectacularly from
its business in Burma.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu
Kyi was elected as Burma's head of state in 1990 and has, ever since,
been under house arrest or otherwise restricted. She nonetheless
remains the leader of, as well as a wise, gentle, fearless voice for,
that country's opposition. Since the uprising, her silencing has begun
to dissolve amid meetings with a UN envoy and members of her own
political party; some believe she may be on her way to being freed. The
Burmese people were hit with hideous, pervasive violence, but they have
not surrendered: small acts of resistance and large plans for
liberation continue.
The best argument for hope is how easy it
ought to be for the rest of us to raise its banner, when we look at who
has carried it through unimaginably harsh conditions: Nelson Mandela's
Long Walk to Freedom recounts his unflagging dedication to his
country's liberation (imperfect though it may still be); Rigoberta
Menchu dodged death squads to become a champion of indigenous rights, a
Nobel laureate, and a recent presidential candidate in Guatemala; Oscar
Oliveira proved that a bunch of poor people in Bolivia can beat Bechtel
Corporation largely by nonviolent means, as he recounts in
!Cochabamba!; and Nobel Laureate and Burmese national icon Aung San Suu
Kyi radiates -- even from the page -- an extraordinary calm and
patience, perhaps the result of her decades of Buddhist practice. She
remarks, toward the end of The Voice of Hope, a collection of
conversations with her about Burma, Buddhism, politics, and her own
situation, "Yes I do have hope because I'm working. I'm doing my bit to
try to make the world a better place, so I naturally have hope for it.
But obviously, those who are doing nothing to improve the world have no
hope for it."
For a book about those who did their bit
beautifully long ago, don't miss Adam Hochschild's gripping Bury the
Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. It
begins with a handful of London Quakers who decided in the 1780s to
abolish the institution of slavery in the British Empire and then, step
by unpredictable step, did just that. It's an exhilarating book simply
as the history of a movement from beginning to end, and so suggests how
many other remarkable movements await their historian; others, from the
women's movement to rights for queers to many environmental struggles,
still await their completion. If only people carried, as part of their
standard equipment, a sense of the often-incremental, unpredictable
ways in which change is wrought and the powers that civil society
actually possesses, they might go forward more confidently to wrestle
with the wrongs of our time, seeing that we have already won many times
before.
Indians, Environmentalists, and Utopians
One
spectacular book along these lines already exists: Charles Wilkinson's
Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. For us non-native
people, Native Americans became far more visible during the huge public
debates around the meaning of the Quincentennial of 1992 -- the 500th
anniversary of Columbus's arrival in this hemisphere. They reframed the
history of the Americas as one of invasion and genocide, rather than
discovery and development. But the story was not a defeatist one;
simply in being able to tell their own stories and reshape their
histories, native people of the Americas demonstrated that they were
neither wholly conquered, nor eradicated; and, since then, the history
of the two continents has been radically revised and indigenous peoples
have won back important rights from Bolivia to Canada.
In the
United States that reclaiming of power, pride, land, rights, and
representation began far earlier, as Wilkinson's book relates. A law
professor and lawyer who has worked on land and treaty-rights issues
with many tribes, he begins his story of ascendancy with the 1953
decision by the U.S. government to "terminate" the tribal identities,
organizations, and rights of Native Americans and push them to melt
into the general population. This represented an aggressive attempt at
erasure of the many distinct peoples of this continent and their
heritage. Told to disappear, "Indian leaders responded and by the
mid-1960s had set daunting goals… at once achieve economic progress and
preserve ancient traditions in a technological age…. Against all odds,
over the course of two generations, Indian leaders achieved their
objectives to a stunning degree."
Wilkinson's monumental history of the past half-century concludes:
- "By
the turn of this century Indian tribes had put in place much of the
ambitious agenda that tribal leaders advanced in the 1950s and 1960s.
They stopped termination and replaced it with self-determination. They
ousted the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] as the reservation government
and installed their own sovereign legislatures, courts, and
administrative agencies. They enforced the treaties of old and, with
them, the fishing, hunting and water rights. Nowhere have these changes
been absolute and pure. In most cases the advances represent works in
progress, but they have been deep and real."
Late this November,
Canada set aside 25 million acres of boreal forest as a preserve to be
managed, in part, by the Native peoples of the region, a huge
environmental victory for the largest remaining forest on Earth -- and
for all of us. How did it happen?
I am still looking for an
environmental history with the strength and focus of Blood Struggle or
Bury the Chains. An exhilarating 2006 article in Orion magazine by Ted
Nace describes how a bunch of North Dakota farmers killed off
Monsanto's plans to promote the growing of genetically altered wheat
worldwide. The essay concludes:
- "On May 10, 2004, Monsanto
bowed to the prevailing political sentiment. It issued a curt press
release announcing the withdrawal of all its pending regulatory
applications for [its genetically altered] Roundup Ready wheat and the
shifting of research priorities to other crops."
We need books
on victories like this, books that tell us how this dam was defeated,
this river brought back from being a sewer, that toxin banned, that
species rebounded, that land preserved.
In fact, a broader
history with some of those threads did appear this year, geographer
Richard Walker's The Country in the City: The Greening of the San
Francisco Bay Area. It describes generations of struggle to preserve
something of the richness of this extraordinarily diverse region by
defeating some of the most awful proposals most of us have never heard
of -- to, for example, completely fill in the San Francisco Bay -- back
in an era when water and wetlands were just real estate waiting to
happen.
The book does justice to a whole unexpected category
of unsung heroines -- the often-subversive affluent ladies who have
done so much for the environment and the community -- then moves on to
document the emerging environmental justice movement that took on
toxins, polluters, and the overlooked question of what ecology really
means for the inner city. It's a great, hopeful history of a region
that has long created environmental templates and momentum for the rest
of the nation -- and Walker makes it clear that this trend was not
inevitable, but the result of hard work by stubborn visionaries and
organizers.
A decade ago, Alan Weisman wrote a profile of a
town in the inhospitable savannah of eastern Colombia, a miraculous
community in which that unfortunate nation's turmoil and our age's
environmental destruction was replaced by a green, utopian approach
that involved reinventing the roles of both technology and community.
It worked, though Weisman ended his 1997 book, Gaviotas: A Village to
Reinvent the World, on a prophetic note of caution:
- "[The]
fading of the Cold War has revealed clearly that a far more
incandescent and protracted battle -- a potentially apocalyptic
resource war -- has been stealthily gathering intensity throughout the
latter part of the twentieth century…. Yet a place like Gaviotas bears
witness to our ability to get it right, even under seemingly
insurmountable circumstances."
Weisman's deservedly successful
2007 bestseller, The World Without Us, takes an extreme approach to
getting it right, by showing how the planet might -- in part --
regenerate itself if we were to go away, all of us, for good. The
chapters on nuclear waste and plastic are dauntingly grim, but the
descriptions of New York City reverting to nature go two steps past
Mike Davis's Dead Cities in praise of entropy, weeds, and the power of
natural processes to take back much of the Earth as soon as we let go.
While
Gaviotas stands out as a rare, realized utopia, our choices among the
unrealized ones -- except as literature -- are legion. In 2007, I
finally got around to reading what has already become my favorite
utopian novel: William Morris' News from Nowhere. Best known during his
life as a poet, Morris is, unfortunately, now mostly remembered for his
wallpaper. He designed it as part of his lifelong endeavor to literally
craft an alternative to the brutality and ugliness of the industrial
revolution through the artisanal production of furniture, textiles, and
books -- all as models of what work and its fruits could be.
That
attempt had its political and literary faces, which is to say that
Morris was also a prolific writer and an ardent revolutionary. He was
more anarchist than socialist, as well as an antiquarian, a translator
of Icelandic sagas, and so much more. News from Nowhere, published in
1890, portrays his ideal London in the far-distant future of 2102, a
century and a half after "the revolution of 1952."
It's a
bioregional and anarchic paradise: The economy is localized, work is
voluntary, money is nonexistent and so is hunger, deprivation, and
prison. The industrial filth of London has vanished, and the river and
city are beautiful again. (They were far filthier in Morris' time, when
every home burned coal, while sewage and industrial effluents flowed
unfiltered into the Thames.)
Most utopias, of course, aren't
places you'd actually want to live. Admittedly, Morris' is a little
bland and mild, as life on earth without evil and struggle must be. But
his utopia is prophetic, not dated, close to many modern visions of
decentralized, localized power, culture, and everyday life. It is, in
short, an old map for a new world being born in experiments around the
globe.
Dreams on the Southern Horizon
Morris provided
the name for the present-day News from Nowhere Collective, a group that
has edited one of the more rambunctious handbooks for activists in
recent times, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global
Anticapitalism. A visually delicious, horizontally formatted little
chunk of a book, it features a lot of photographs, a running timeline
of radical victories in our era, and short, punchy essays from people
immersed in changing the world all over that world (from Quebec and
Nigeria to Bolivia and Poland). Playful, subversive, and far-reaching,
the book -- even four years after its publication -- demonstrates the
scope of constructive change and activism around the planet.
There
are other such handbooks, including my brother David's Globalize
Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, out from
City Lights Books a few years ago. It was in the course of editing some
of the essays in that book that I discovered the beautiful, hopeful
voice of Marina Sitrin, a sociologist, human rights lawyer, and
activist who has spent a great deal of time among the utopian social
movements of Argentina. Her encounters become ours in her new book
Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina.
That
country's sudden economic collapse and political turmoil in December of
2001 was largely overlooked here, but the crisis begat an extraordinary
grassroots response -- about as far from shock and paralysis as you can
imagine. Neighborhoods gathered in popular assemblies to protest the
political structure, and then stayed together to feed each other during
the fiscal crisis; factory workers took over shuttered factories and
ran them as cooperatives; the poor organized and mobilized; but more
than these concrete actions, Argentinean society itself changed.
People
began to talk across old divides and create new words for what mattered
now -- none more valuable than horizontalidad, which Sitrin translates
as "horizontalism," a direct and radically egalitarian participatory
democracy, and politica afectiva, the politics of affection, or love.
The 2001 crisis was soon transformed into an opportunity to overcome
the legacy of the terrifying years of the Argentinean military
dictatorship, to step out of the isolation and disengagement that fear
had produced, to reclaim power and reinvent social ties. With this,
Argentina moved a little further away from hell and a little closer to
utopia.
It's not a coincidence that Weisman's Gaviotas is in
South America (though it is a surprise that it's in Colombia). After
all, the most powerful voice coming from the Spanish-speaking majority
of the Americas is that of the Zapatistas, and Our Word Is Our Weapon:
Selected Writings of Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos, edited by Juana
Ponce de Leon, is still the best English-language introduction to that
indigenous movement's non-indigenous spokesman and raconteur
Subcommandante Marcos. Via his poetic, playful, subversive, and
ferociously hopeful manifestoes, tirades, allegories, and pranks, he
has reinvented the language of politics, pushing off the drab shore of
bureaucracy and cliché, sailing toward something rich and strange.
Ponce
De Leon's book, however, only covers the first several years of
Marcos's contributions. City Lights recently brought out his The Speed
of Dreams: Selected Writings 2001-2007. On page 102, he advises an
indigenous audience: "It is the hour of the word. So then, put the
machete away, and continue to hone hope." By page 349, he's quoting a
possibly fictional elderly couple in San Miguel Tzinacapan, who say,
"The world is the size of our effort to change it."
Not that
all resistance, all hope, comes from the south. It can be found
everywhere, or at least on many edges, margins, and in many overlooked
zones -- and one of the most exhilarating histories of it is The Many
Headed-Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Their
book traces a plethora of acts of resistance to capitalism,
exploitation, authoritarianism and the generally sorry lot meted out to
the poor in the eighteenth century. That resistance was exuberant,
inventive, and occasionally ferocious, and it found its own utopias.
The book begins with a 1609 shipwreck in Bermuda, in which the
shipwrecked sailors and passengers begin to form their own convivial
utopia that the Virginia Company forcibly disbanded. The Many Headed
Hydra covers some of the same ground -- and ocean routes -- as
Hochschild's book, and they make good joint reading.
I wish
Linebaugh's The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All
was out in time for this list, but look for it in February. (I read it
in manuscript for the University of California Press, loved it, and
learned a lot from it.) Beginning with Bush's breach not just of the
Constitution, but of Magna Carta's grant of habeas corpus, Linebaugh
returns to that moment at Runnymede when King John was forced to
concede rights to England's citizens. Linking that despot to the one in
the White House, he ventures back and forth between the two times to
explore the once evolving -- and now revolving or maybe even regressing
-- territory of rights and liberties.
The Climate of Change
One
thing becoming increasingly clear in this millennium: Human rights and
the environment are all tangled up with each other -- and not only in
environmental injustice hotspots like Louisiana's Cancer Alley or oily
places like Nigeria. Democracy and an empowered citizenry are the best
tools we have to make progress on climate change in this country. The
issue of climate change may be global, but in the U.S. a lot of the
measures that matter are being enacted on the local level by cities,
towns, regions, and states. Together, they have pushed far ahead of the
recalcitrant federal government in trying to take concrete measures
that could make a difference. Global measures matter, but so do local
ones: The change here is likely to come as much from the bottom up as
the top down.
One common response to climate change is to try
to limit your own impact -- by consuming less. An issue, for instance,
that's front and center in Britain but hardly on the table in the U.S.,
is taking fewer airplane trips. (The state of California, however, did
recently start looking into ways to regulate and reduce airplane carbon
emissions.) So there's personal virtue, which matters. Then there's
agitating and organizing like crazy, which might matter more.
Certainly, Bill McKibben makes a rousing case for it in his
introduction to Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and
Spark a Movement. The book, edited by Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage,
covers a lot of ground when it comes to how policy gets made and how to
make it yourself, as does McKibben's own Fight Global Warming Now: The
Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community.
Maybe the best
news of 2007 is that we're finally doing something about the worst news
ever: that we've royally screwed up the climate of this planet. After
all, the rest of that news is: We still have a chance to mitigate how
haywire everything goes, even though no one is yet talking about what a
world of low to zero carbon emissions would look like.
Maybe
one thing we really need (just to be a little more visionary and less
grim about the subject) is a modern version of News from Nowhere
portraying what a good life involving only a small carbon footprint
might mean -- most likely a more localized, less consuming life with
some cool technological innovations, including many we already have
(some of which are described in Weisman's Gaviotas). In ceasing the
scramble for things, there would be real gains; we'd gain back time for
sitting around talking at leisure about politics and the neighbors, for
wandering around on foot -- and for reading. But you don't have to wait
for everything to change: change it yourself by seizing these pleasures
now.
Writings 
Hope is an orientation, a way of scanning the wall for cracks -- or building ladders -- rather than staring at its obdurate expanse. 
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