What's The Role of Hope in Activism?
Moving from hope-led to love-led activism.
It’s difficult to be hopeful right now. I don’t think I need to name all the reasons why. We’re inundated with bad news every day. And if you’re an activist who is motivated by hope, the state of the world can so easily leave you paralyzed. Despairing.
At least, that’s what I’ve been hearing in my conversations with fellow activists who feel lost, unsure how to make a lasting impact or whether what they’re doing is enough. I think we need to critically examine the role of hope in activism: how we use it and how we’re impacted by it, consciously or unconsciously.
During another time in my life full of significant despair for myself and my loved ones, I started studying hope, reading books about it and thinking more critically about what healthy hope looks like and how to be a hope-bearer to others. I also started paying more attention whenever the topic of hope came up and was surprised by what I heard and read.
What follows are reflections on three specific questions:
Is hope necessary in activism?
How do we maintain hope when we seem to be moving backward?
Does hope need to be realistic?
I consider these reflections the start of a conversation.
Is hope necessary in activist work?
For many activists, hope is not their motivation.
One thing I noticed when I started paying attention to the topic of hope is how many social justice and environmental activists did not believe in hope. They explained that they did not believe in an end to their work or a period of global peace, but that didn’t let them off the hook to do their part.
One such interview was with environmental activist and writer Janisse Ray during the 2016 Festival of Faith and Writing who said, “Not being hopeful doesn’t give you the right not to act or write.”
If our motivation is a goal we never achieve, it’s much easier to give up. So what if we change our motivation?
Ray further explained, “It’s not hope that keeps me going, it’s love … the question of how you stay hopeful should be how you stay love-filled?” I love this distinction between being motivated by hope and motivated by love. When we love someone, we don’t expect to solve all of their problems for them. We’re there to support, comfort, witness, and walk beside.
What if we treat our activism like a relationship? Instead of a goal of eradicating a problem, we maintain goals like lessening suffering or increasing awareness. These are achievable, even if they seem less substantial.
It’s not hope that keeps me going, it’s love … the question of how you stay hopeful should be how you stay love-filled?
Janisse Ray
In a conversation for Sun Magazine with writer Judith Hertog, Dr. Cornel West speaks elegantly about what motivates him to keep going:
West: I’m a prisoner of hope. I don’t believe in optimism or pessimism. I believe in wrestling with despair and trying to generate enough energy to remain Socratic and prophetic in my own life, deeds, and thoughts. But the world is always a mess.
Hertog: And always has been?
West: Yes, in every moment of our existence there has been too much suffering, too much misery, too much hatred, too much contempt, too much envy, too much resentment. The question is: How do we break the cycle in our individual lives? You can break it with a grin, with a hug, with a piece of art, with a movement, with democratic practices and the hope that they are not crushed by authoritarian tendencies. But that is the best we can do. It’s a sad story in the end. We know this. But we must maintain a cheerful disposition.
Hertog: Because it would be even worse if we didn’t stay hopeful?
West: That’s right. My dear brother Jeffrey Stout, a great philosopher of our day, says, “Hope is not a mood; it’s a virtue.” We have a right to be in as dark a mood as we want, because things are indeed bleak. But hope is a virtue — which is to say, it’s an excellence that we aspire to. No matter how dark your mood is, you still have a responsibility to aspire to the virtuous. Hope is the refusal to succumb to despair and nihilism.
Love, too, is a virtue. No matter how much hatred you see in the world, and no matter how much you want to feel hatred in your heart, you should know that the standard is still love. You might feel yourself succumbing to hatred, but as long as you know what the standard is, you’ll know you’re wrong. Once you give up on the standard, we’re all in deep trouble.
Hertog: So it’s good to have hope, but will we ever achieve the ideals we pursue?
West: There will never be a true paradise in this world. There will never be any kingdom of heaven in history. There will never be any utopian society.
The question is: Do we have the courage and tenacity and compassion to try to move beyond our tribalism and our narcissism? That’s the best we can do. Biologist E.O. Wilson says our basic problem as a species is that we are just too selfish, narcissistic, and tribal. Anything that gets us away from those proclivities is a major contribution to progress.
There are different ways of overcoming our narcissism and tribalism: secular, scientific, artistic, religious. All of them are concerned with unsettling our ego so that love and compassion can flow. (Emphasis mine)
I like the distinction between hope as a mood and hope as a virtue, and the idea that we have a responsibility to try to be virtuous. Hope as a mood is volatile and shifty. So easily lost.
Love is equally hard to define, but mature love withstands moods. It’s action- and commitment-based. It, too, is a virtue.
Depending on how you look at it, it’s either poignant or ironic to include this quote from Dr. West, who is running for president this year. We have to ask if running as a third party is the most virtuous, the most loving thing he can do for the country. I’m not here to answer these questions, but I think we need to be talking about what the future of democracy in the US looks like.
How do we maintain hope when we seem to be moving backward?
Here’s a related question: do you allow yourself to love someone only when you believe the relationship will last forever? Hopefully not, since nothing lasts forever. But that doesn’t take away a relationship’s meaning or beauty or capacity to create joy.
What if we start acting as if whatever progress we make is meaningful because they are acts of love — love for ourselves, for one another, and for the planet — regardless of whether that progress lasts forever?
When running for president, Barack Obama ran on a platform of hope. And throughout his presidency, he maintained a rhetoric of hope to keep the country united.
Obama used Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s phrase “the arc of the moral universe” and being on “the right side of history,” to inspire voters with a promise that things were continuing to get better.
But by the end of his presidency, many Americans were exhausted by the lack of change. War was still raging in the Middle East, police brutality and the killing of Black Americans was no less of a problem, refugee seekers south of the border were still being inhumanely detained, and the white working class was still trapped in poverty.
Three years after he left office, political writer Peter Beinart writes about Obama’s message following the death of George Floyd: “Obama told the same story about America that he’s been telling since he entered national politics 15 years ago. It’s a hopeful story about a country that is more united than divided. And it’s never felt more dissonant than it does now.”
We didn’t see the progress that Obama seemed to promise and, following his presidency, we entered an even worse period of regression and upset. So when Obama continued to preach the same message of linear progress, it just didn’t land the same way.
I’m not trying to say that Obama failed in any way, but there was a flaw in his platform of hope: he tied it to a linear perspective of progress.
Political historians and philosophers call this dilemma the myth of progress.
Here’s political philosopher John Gray on a definition from a 2013 interview with VICE:
I define progress … as any kind of advance that's cumulative, so that what's achieved at one period is the basis for later achievement that then, over time, becomes more and more irreversible. In science and technology, progress isn't a myth. However, the myth is that the progress achieved in science and technology can occur in ethics, politics, or, more simply, civilization. The myth is that the advances made in civilization can be the basis for a continuing, cumulative improvement.
Progress is made and then unmade, as we’ve seen lately by the undoing of Roe vs Wade and so many other decades-old wins. But that doesn’t mean progress doesn’t happen.
The problem is when we believe that progress has to be linear instead of what’s more likely, a very very big spiral or a windy path that turns in on itself. But too often we’re promised a short-sighted vision of progress, because that’s what sells in politics.
And what happens is that we fall for big noble ideas with no viable plan to see them through. Or, worse, an idealistic agenda that leaves societies or communities even further divided.
At first, accepting that permanent progress is a myth may be discouraging. As in: Well then, what’s the point of trying to make progress at all? But what if we allow this alternative view on progress to guide us to be more practical in what we strive for or hope for? What if it helps us be more practical in how we vote, how we protest, or how we build movements?
Accepting that permanent progress is a myth may be discouraging … but what if we allow this alternative view on progress to guide us to be more practical in what we strive for or hope for? What if it helps us be more practical in how we vote, how we protest, or how we build movements?
This whole section looked at progress in the political sphere, but obviously that’s not inclusive of all activism. I consider this Substack part of my activist work, as well as the fetish work I do. And it’s just as easy to get discouraged when I don’t actively see that I’m making a difference in my small sphere of influence.
I often talk to my fellow fetish workers about the misogyny, racism, body shaming that’s rampant in the industry. Sometimes it seems as if these issues are getting worse instead of better.
But if I apply a love-led approach, it’s so much easier to keep going. Each time I help a client feel good about what he desires. Each time I help another plus-size fetish provider feel less alone — I see my influence on a much smaller scale. I have to continue to believe that these small actions matter.
Does hope need to be realistic?
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of commentary on what a long-term solution would look like in the Middle East. (Worth a read: Daniel Levin’s Guardian op-ed and New Yorker interview with Nathan Thrall).
A problem I think a lot of social justice warriors make (myself included) is not being solutions-oriented. I thought about this a lot in 2020 during the protests around police brutality. At the time, there were a lot of demands to defund the police without presenting practical plans of how to protect communities and resolve conflicts without them.
Protest is a necessary step. Cries of outrage are important. But coming up with viable solutions is equally necessary.
It’s not everyone’s place to be creating these plans and visions. But I think we all need to be asking questions about what change might look like and offering the microphone or uplifting the platforms of those with practical ideas — especially those voices within the communities most impacted.
But should hope always be grounded in realism?
I don’t think so. Otherwise we run the risk of stopping believing that radical change is possible.
Nap Ministry founder Tricia Hersey writes about the necessity of a DreamSpace, which is a realm of daydreams and hopes and connections to ancestors that are accessed through rest. In DreamSpace, we de-program ourselves from the impact of capitalism and colonization. “To rest in a DreamSpace is a red brick through the glass window of capitalism,” Hersey writes in Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto.
To rest in a DreamSpace is a red brick through the glass window of capitalism.
— Tricia Hersey
I talked to author and community healer Kai Cheng Thom about DreamSpace and MLK”s beloved community and believing in change that seems so implausible:
In many ways I'm a pessimist about this. And in many ways, I'm an optimist. And the pessimist in me always says to the optimist, ‘Don't be ridiculous or don't be so naive.’ But I have to be naive to talk about sci-fi. I love this quote from the late great Ursula K. Le Guin who said, ‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.’
Not to be all like progress moves us forward, because clearly it doesn't always. But there is just the fact that revolutionary resistance has made miracles before: enslaved peoples have freed themselves before, oppressed groups have overthrown dictatorships … And I think the DreamSpace, for me, is our ancestors did it and they didn't make paradise happen, but they made something happen.
We need to paradoxically believe that radical change is possible and not be discouraged when it’s slow-going or when society regresses.
We need to keep acting on what is most loving in the moment while dreaming up a better, impossible-seeming future. Because the dreaming leads us to creative solutions we wouldn’t have imagined otherwise.
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