Hope In The Dark: The Untold History of People Power

Solnit’s book opens with the paradox that hope is made in the dark—and thus from a place of uncertainty about the future and the specific outcome of a campaign. Activists can’t be certain of the extent to which their demands will be met—or of the timescale necessary to achieve their aims. Some movements, like the campaign for women’s suffrage, require the efforts of multiple generations. Moreover, social change often arrives in a piecemeal, irregular fashion. For example, the 1982 New York City Central Park protest’s demand for a bilateral nuclear weapons freeze didn’t result in immediate change; however, as Solnit writes, “in less than a decade, major nuclear arms reductions were negotiated, helped along by European antinuclear movements and the impetus they gave the Soviet Union’s last president, Mikhail Gorbachev” (2). To Solnit’s mind, further campaigning, despite frustration at the slowness of progress, may eventually have brought about the desired change—or at least ensured that the issue of nuclear disarmament remained a topic that governments couldn’t ignore.

Solnit points out that when victory isn’t a simple matter, many “transform the future’s unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward” (1). This then leads to a static state of despair and a retreat into the indulgences of private life. Christine Carter, Senior Fellow at the Greater Good Science Center, described how resisting the unknown, or ambiguity, is natural and encoded in our brains to keep the body safe. This plays out in the activists Solnit describes, who are so threatened by the unwieldy and unpredictable scope of their campaigns that they prefer the certainty of despair involved in conceding defeat to a battle in the dark. As these activists, many of whom are privileged with middle class comforts, retreat to the private and domestic spheres, they turn their back on the possibilities of that uncertain future. In other words, they prefer to remain safe in the present rather than fight for what could be.

While embracing the possibilities inherent in darkness is essential to continuing to fight instead of going home, Solnit argues that the camaraderie in activist communities—and the collaboration of diverse groups of people—can provide a sense of purpose that replaces the drive for certainty. Moreover, celebrating any victory toward the greater good isn’t only energizing but consonant with the fact that “history is full of small acts that changed the world in surprising ways” (66). If we accept that our efforts are drops in the ocean, we can be part of a flow far greater than ourselves. By being a collective that doesn’t retreat into private life, we resist the mandates of totalitarian governments that want individual concerns to distract us and thus not question the decisions they make on our behalf. Solnit’s book is a manifesto on counterintuitively resisting the desire for certainties and a safe world where we can give up public life and go home. Instead, we must accept that the future is more uncertain and bizarre than we could ever imagine and work with its eccentricity to resist the bleak visions for the future that corrupt authorities and elites conceive.