Entering Year Three

20% off, and a dose of hope

Photo by name_ gravity on Unsplash

It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years of this newsletter. Actually, that day passed a week ago, but in the chaos of the post-election world it came and went and I was focused on other things, like trying to conceptualize how we organize and fight moving forward and with compiling some resources for folks to do that. Today I want to talk briefly about the future of this newsletter and how we conceptualize hope, but first I would be remiss if I didn’t pass along an amazing opportunity for anyone new to organizing to attend five free workshops over December and January (link here). I highly recommend those sessions, which couldn’t come at a better time.

Now, as for the future over here at New Means, most of my goals are the same as they’ve ever been. I hope that together we conceptualize a society that’s organized differently, around protecting life and fostering real human flourishing rather than profit and domination. And I hope to help provide tools and examples and strategies for how we get there. Many of those tools are to help us get to work out in the world, to help us get together and build the world we need. But some of them are also internal, and I want to talk about one or two of those today. Internal shifts are, I think, necessary at the same time as we construct organizations, structures, and systems out in the world. The internal and external are ultimately co-constitutive – we need each to reinforce the other.

At this juncture, I have to ask for your help in making that vision a reality. For the two-year anniversary all subscriptions are 20% off, monthly and annual, and I’m asking for your support so that I can double the time I spend writing and researching for you. These next four years, and beyond, I hope to spend as much of my time as possible organizing and writing and bringing the lessons from the former into this newsletter. I know this project won’t replace my job any time soon, but the more time I’m able to devote to this the more I believe I’ll be able to turn this project into a helpful resource in a crucial moment. And I can only do that with your help. 

Thank you so much to everyone who is able to support my work here — I can’t wait to spend more time relaying histories of organizing and strategies and tactics, writing about what people are doing right now to build power and resist, and so much more. As I said above, I also want to regularly speak about some of the internal work we can do right now and moving forward to be effective, to have some measure of inner peace and clarity as we fight, and to enable us to stay in this for the long-haul.

Photo by Raphael Renter | @raphi_rawr on Unsplash

I’ve spoken about spirituality from time to time in this newsletter, and I’ve certainly spoken about hope. Hope has a remarkable range of definitions, and at this particular moment honing in on exactly how we conceptualize it is crucial. I want a hope that feeds me, that feeds us. I want a hope that is sustaining, that helps us take the next step when the light at the end of the tunnel looks dim. I want an eternal flame of hope that doesn’t tell us victory is inevitable, but instead helps us fight.

The natural place to begin, for me, is with Terry Eagleton’s Hope Without Optimism. As Eagleton writes, “An optimist is not just someone with high hopes. Even a pessimist can feel positive on a particular issue, whatever his or her habitual gloom. One can have hope without feeling that things in general are likely to turn out well. An optimist is rather someone who is bullish about life simply because he is an optimist.” In other words, optimism rests on no foundation. It is a flimsy attitude, and while it could make life more pleasant it doesn’t have the robustness to carry us through the trials and tribulations ahead. We need a stronger hope.

In writing about Eagleton’s work, Megan Adam says that he would say that, compared to optimism, hope “is scrappier and requires that we do something about it.” And it won’t surprise you to hear how I love that. There is little that makes something robust like taking it from an abstract concept into concrete action. Adam also quotes Ray Bradbury as saying “Action is hope. There is no hope without action.”

We are now pointed us toward the hope we need today. We can’t afford abstraction right now, we can’t afford too much loftiness, too much of a hope that is just optimism. An approach that exists out in the ether whether we take action or not can too easily become a hope we cling to and use to feel better while we remain inactive. At the same time, a tangible and action-focused hope is so valuable because it tells us that as long as we are here, capable of taking action to resist fascism and build toward a better world, there is hope. As long as we can act, we can hope.

In his own work Eagleton quotes Herbert McCabe, the Dominican priest, theologian, and philosopher as saying: “We are not optimists; we do not present a lovely vision of the world which everyone is expected to fall in love with. We simply have, wherever we are, some small local task to do, on the side of justice, for the poor.” Wherever we are, there is work for us to do, and in that there is hope. There are and always will be actions that we can take, and in that there is hope. On the one hand, this is a simple truth. If we can act there is hope that tomorrow will be better than today. And, on the other hand, I think we should be clear that we are still making a choice here.

Photo by Brian Yurasits on Unsplash

The approach to hope laid out in the preceding paragraphs is, in some ways, just simple logic. If we can act, we can make tomorrow better than today, we can collectively build the ability to make the future better than the present. But I don’t want to pretend that there isn’t still a little leap of faith there, particularly when the present grows dark and the future looks to be more difficult than the now. There’s a leap, a choice, a decision we have the opportunity to make. The foundation of this variety of hope might be strong in several ways, but we all still reach a point where we have to choose if we believe in it, or not, whether we believe that our actions can amount to something.

This is why I use the terms faith, or spirituality, from time to time. I know these words have a bitter taste for some of us, myself included for many years, but today I think of faith just as choosing to believe something I can’t prove. I think of it as making the choice to believe, and I think we have a lot of those choices to make right now. I choose, again and again, to believe that we can build liberation. I choose to have faith that we can restore solidarity as the approach we take with one another, with people we don’t know and will never know. In fact, I think some of these societal shifts are only possible through choosing and choosing again to believe in one another. There are tectonic shifts that we need to foment in this world, I don’t think they can take place if we don’t believe them possible, and I think that when we do take that little leap of faith, of hope, we open up an incredible world of possibilities for us all.

So more to come, as always, but I hope after reading this you believe a little bit more both in our ability to change, and in your specific capacity to act. I’ll continue to ground my hope in the steps I take, both big and small, to build a better world. And I hope you’ll all play whatever part you can: helping plan organizing meetings, reaching out to neighbors, sharing resources, and building day by day. Solidarity, always, and another massive thank you for your support over these two years. It has meant and continues to mean the world - JP