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The Posture of Hope
Five takeaways from Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Hope in the Dark’
Let me share a little bit about Rebecca Solnit’s popular book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, and then I’ll tell you my five takeaways.
What She Says in her Foreword
“I wrote this book in 2003 and early 2004 to make the case for hope,” Solnit says in her Foreword to the Third Edition. Now, as she wrote in 2015, “the world of 2003 has been swept away.”
“Hideous economic inequality” fueled by “the rise of Silicon Valley as a global power center [that] has eliminated and automated countless jobs” and led to “a global information monopoly” and “sophisticated profiles of most computer users” along with “surveillance capacities that the Kremlin and FBI at the height of the Cold War could not have dreamed of.” Meanwhile, while post-9/11 anti-terrorism rationalizations are no longer in vogue, civil liberties remain under attack. “Worse than these is the arrival of climate change, faster, harder, and more devastating than scientists anticipated.”
But just as power so often “comes from the shadow and the margins,” so too “our hope is in the dark around the edges.”
Hope is “not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.” Things could get better, or…
