Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark

I see a lot of writing habits in my college students that are carry-overs from high school. So a good deal of my teaching involves "un-teaching" some of the habits that served students well in, say, writing for their AP-level tests. This isn't a knock on college students; as writers, we all need to learn to adapt to new situations.

One of the habits that students have a hard time with is writing for a specific time and situation, taking a risk that plants their essays in time. I think this is partially because the examples from many high school English courses are about "big issues," seemingly endless topics for debate that seem baked into our discourse as an unending binary without change or resolution in sight. But non-fiction of any significance, I think, needs to acknowledge its place in history—and therefore risk the judgment of a future perspective, and the hindsight that comes with it.

This is a thought that plagued me after finishing Rebecca Solnit's 2004 Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Solnit is writing in response to a kind of depression among the left following George W. Bush's election and the unjust invasion of Iraq under false pretenses. She notes that many folks on the left seemed to fall into a deep cynicism that, in her view, serves to abrogate our responsibility to act against tyrannical and unfair institutions. It clings to the belief that action is pointless, and therefore unnecessary.

This kind of cynicism is also, in Solnit's argument, a-historical. Solnit recounts many times where activism created real meaningful change, and argues that these victories often go ignored or forgotten by would-be progressives—partially because they take a long time, partially because they are often partial, unsexy victories that require more work or upkeep. She writes: "The world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the trouble in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable."

It's a very good book, and I find Solnit's argument convincing. Just because you can't, say, compel the Senate to pass a fairer minimum wage right now isn't reason not to advocate for an increase in the minimum wage in your home state. But even with added afterwards (two of them, one from 2009 and another from 2014), Hope in the Dark does seem deeply dated, a product very much of its time.

I actually read Solnit's more recent collection, Call Them By Their Names: American Crises (and Essays), from 2018, more recently; and I know that the crimes of the Trump administration and the world's slide towards fascism has not dampened her belief in activism. In Call Them By Their Names, Solnit still argues against "naïve cynicism," and convincingly. Things are so bad right now, and the Trump administration getting away with so many crimes, that progress might seem unthinkable; yet before 2016, the current depth of depravity in the Oval Office seemed equally unthinkable to many of us. (A privileged view, to be sure, but still.)

So Solnit's message hasn't aged; it has, if anything, more important now than ever. What feels "old" is her anxiety about the Bush presidency, and the despair she attributes to the left as a whole in response to that crisis. Heck, the Trump presidency has led many to (wrongly, I think) valorize Bush after the fact. Sure (some seem to say) he committed war crimes, but at least he wasn't so crass about it. Reading Hope in the Dark, one wants to say, "You think that's bad? Just wait..."

Yet this historical grounded-ness is actually a strength of the writing, something that shows how strange our own present time is—if not for the way that current administration views and abuses marginalized peoples, then at least in the way it is horrifyingly explicit in its views.

And, for that reason, the parts of the Hope in the Dark that are dated actually bolster Solnit's overall argument. Because if the present moment was unthinkable even to Solnit back then, so was the presidency of Barack Obama, the election of our country's first black president. If we cannot predict the future, then it can still be impacted, as Solnit insists, by our activism and engagement. And we can look to history, as she does, to keep this mind--otherwise we run the risk of viewing the present as inevitable, as something that was not the result of the struggle and effort of thousands, millions. Once we see our present political realities, good and bad, as grounded in history, we can see them also as undoable. ICE isn't old; the calls to have it abolished are not particularly radical. Homelessness in America was not a result of natural forces, but a direct result of the Reagan administration's policies, particularly around mental health treatment; therefore, homelessness can be solved, if we will it. 

If Solnit's writing feels old, it also teaches an old lesson: good writing takes risks. It sees its present view as limited but important, and braves the judgment of the future.