In the middle of all these exhortations to optimism, I came across Derrick Jensen's essay "Beyond Hope". It starts out where we left off last night: playing Madrid... and starting to feel like the game is rigged. “Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth," says Jensen. With hope in our hearts, we toil away within the status quo, under the delusion that somehow, someday, something is going to change for the better if we just keep at it long enough. He contends that you have to let that hopeful fantasy die, or you'll never be willing or able -- or forced -- to take the kind of drastic action that's required to make that change actually happen.
Jensen says that what keeps him going, what fuels his own activism, is not that long view of the age-old struggle, with hope as a beacon at the end of the tunnel. It's his immediate, passionate engagement in the here and now -- his fierce love of the natural world, and his willingness to do “whatever it takes” to save it.
This definitely resonates with me on a certain level. I've always had trouble maintaining the long view, and have never been able to pull off the whole Buddhist detachment thing very convincingly, however hard I try. I've always suspected that in order to overcome the huge problems we're facing, we've got to throw ourselves into the struggle with every fiber of our beings. I find that when I pause to ponder the magnitude of the challenge, or to doubt my ability to make a difference, or even to consider another person's perspective, I am pretty well paralyzed before I begin.
This is kind of what Jensen is saying, I think. We can't allow even a small part of ourselves to hold back thinking, “Well, maybe in 100 years we'll get there.” We don't have 100 years. We have to just do what it takes to get us there. Now.
The trouble with this (aside from the question of what exactly “whatever it takes” might be in any given situation) is that so often every last fiber of your being isn't enough to save the whales or the wetland or your school or our democracy or whatever it is you've thrown yourself in front of a bulldozer to protect. Even with complete commitment, you're going to fail, a lot. And the more your commitment is fueled by passionate engagement -- being in love, as Jensen puts it -- the more devastating those defeats become.
So -- you have to have something deep and sustaining to balance out the impatient, electric, exhausting energy of immediate engagement. Maybe not hope, but something.
(Slowly getting a little closer to the point, I think. Next: a brief digression before Part III...)
1 comment:
i like you.
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