Rebecca Solnit on Hope

Despair is a black leather jacket in which everyone looks good, while hope is a frilly pink dress few dare to wear. Rebecca Solnit thinks this virtue needs to be redefined.

Join Rebecca to explore why disaster makes us behave better and why it's braver to hope than to hide behind despair's confidence and cynicism's safety.

Solnit takes to the pulpit in the video below to deliver a sermon that looks at the remarkable social changes of the past half century, the stories the mainstream media neglects and the big surprises that keep on landing.

History is not an army. It's more like a crab scuttling sideways. And we need to be brave enough to hope change is possible in order to have a chance of making it happen.


Rebecca Solnit on Hope from The School of Life on Vimeo.

http://www.theschooloflife.com/Sermons/Rebecca-Solnit-on-Hope 

"To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

At the beginning of his massive 1930s treatise on hope, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, “The work of this emotion requires people to throw themselves actively into becoming, to which they themselves belong”. To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable. Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.”

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the dark: the untold history of people power, Canongate Books (Edinburgh) 2005, p. 5

Thanks to Ruth Potts for the quotes and the link.