Finding Hope in Dark Times

Practicing hope is difficult, but in a society whose dominant attitudes are hopelessness or denial, it is a crucial skill to develop

With every friend and student who I hear fearful of being deported, every colleague who shares that their government-sponsored programs are being shut down, each drawn out and despondent face I see, I realize more and more how the effects of political change are already upon us. As Trump takes office and the far-right political apparatus begins implementing their well-documented plans, the weight of the times feels incredibly heavy. Our future prospects can seem bleak as we feel like we have to buckle in for the next four years, playing defense and simply getting by.

This is all coming as I personally finished drafting a research paper on hopeful attitudes in a class I taught on sociotechnical critique of surveillance technology, and ethics. The gist of the research is that because we taught a course on critique, helping students see the social and political flaws in surveillance systems, we were afraid that they would become bogged down by the weight of seeing such a flawed society. When my co-author and I originally planned the course, we saw this as a potential pitfall and included material about people who resist oppression and actively fight to change unjust systems. Our question was: Did this material lead to students adopting hopeful attitudes in the face of a critical view of the world?

In the process of writing the paper, I learned a lot about what other disciplines and scholars have written about hope and the motivation to take social or political action. It inspired me to share a bit of what I learned, as it might be useful for many of us who are looking at the current shifts in the political landscape and feeling despondent and hopeless.

Hope can take many forms

One major lesson that I learned about hopeful attitudes is that there are many different ways that people write about hope. Going into the research, I had a few notable scholars and activists in my mind who inspired me to think about hope. Cornel West wrote about what he called “tragicomic hope” in his book, Democracy Matters, as the ability to preserve a belief in better futures while “staring into the face of hate and hypocrisy,” as a counter to nihilism. Joana Macy, who developed the Work that Reconnects, wrote in her book Active Hope about how hope is the belief in a better outcome, desiring a better future, and a practice that we build every day. Mariame Kaba also writes and speaks about hope as a practice, but she calls it a discipline, something that we need to cultivate to counter a world whose dominant culture is hopelessness.

What I noticed from these scholars and activists is that they focused on both the difficulty of achieving hopeful attitudes, and their necessity for political work. Each of these writers were articulating visions about how to fight for a just and democratic society, which ultimately forced them to find ways to preserve hope amidst darkness. I have also found that in my political (climate justice, anti-militarist, and labor organizing) and academic (studying misinformation, unjust technologies) work, I have also had to cultivate skills to find hope even in what feel to me like very bleak situations.

Writing the paper, I found a very useful framework for thinking about hope, written by Darren Webb, professor at the University of Sheffield. Webb describes five types of hope, distinct from each other from his review of writing about hope from theology, philosophy, and psychology: patient hope, critical hope, sound hope, resolute hope, and transformative hope. For each type of hope, he lays out its objective, cognitive/affective dimensions, and associated pedagogical activities for developing this type of attitude:

• Patient hope: Directed towards trust in ourselves, others, and the goodness of the world or that its arc is positive; cognitively defined by a secure trust in the behaviors of others, patient and persevering attitudes.
• Critical hope: Directed towards a world without degradation, suffering anxiety; cognitively defined by the feeling that something is missing, that there is a tension between promise and reality that creates a future-oriented longing.
• Sound hope: Directed towards a concrete, specific future world and the steps to get there; cognitively defined by envisioning a plausible future world and objective, and hoping for a better future because of the reality rather than in spite of reality.
• Resolute hope: Directed towards a better future by setting aside overwhelm and hoping against the available evidence; cognitively defined by adopting anti-deterministic attitudes and assuming that individuals with agency can mold a fluid world.
• Transformative hope: Directed towards a better future marked by an inspirational goal that expands the horizons of possible worlds; cognitively defined by utopian visioning, inspiring collective action, and a sense of possibility grounded in confidence in the powers of human collective agency.

I really liked this framework of hopeful attitudes because it captures several aspects of hope while also embracing different kinds of hoping that are present in different kinds of political life. They span aspects of reslience, envisioning futures, calculating possibilities, planning action, and rejecting nihilism. They also lend themselves to cultivating personal hope via emotional resilience (patient hope) or individual agency (sound hope, resolute hope) and collective hope by believing in the power of groups to change the world (transformative hope). They capture the importance of having strong values, visions, and feeling efficacious to take action.

In the face of the political changes unfolding, I believe that we need a bit of each of these types of hope. When we feel demoralized, patient hope is necessary to embody resilience and a belief that we and others do want things to be good. Then critical and sound hope can help us strategically find flaws in the state of affairs and make plans to enact change. And resolute and transformative hope can spur us to reject nihilistic thinking, believe in the plasticity of the world and power of human agency, and collectively fight for change.

Hope is necessary to take action

The other takeaway from my research that is resonating with me in this moment is the role that those who study communication and social movements ascribe to hope in terms of motivating action. A helpful review of motivation from the standpoint of social movement theory, by Bert Klandermans, professor emeritus at Vrije University in Amsterdam, articulated that emotions play a strong role in our decision to take political action. What he cites as “avoidance emotions” — fear, hopelessness, or inefficacy — stymie involvement, whereas “approach emotions” — anger, feeling efficacious, hope — lead to involvement.

A different meta-analysis of fear messaging from the public health lens, written by Kim Witte at Michigan State University and Mike Allen at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, concluded similarly. They argue that when people consider public health messaging, the most recent model of behavior says that taking a threat seriously, plus feeling efficacious to respond, motivates people to act. Fear without efficacy makes people freeze or otherwise engage in denial through avoidance or reactance to a threat.

From the standpoint of these scholars and their disciplinary theories, feeling efficacious and having a vision (crucial aspects of hopeful attitudes) seem key for motivating action and bypassing freezing in the face of fear.

I believe that these ideas can be important lessons for our political moment. There is a lot of fear in the atmosphere — with good reason. But a great deal of people may be frozen because they feel they can’t do anything, or have no vision of a better world or how to get there. For those who are steeped in the dominant view of political life — changes happen from top-down action by powerful people, and our democratic power comes through voting — it may seem that since the vote failed, we just have to wait for the next opportunity to vote. This view is highly disempowering. To feel efficacious, people need some idea of what steps any normal person can take to effect political change outside of the electoral system.

The models and theories of political change for the average person are severely lacking. These are not things that we are taught in school, nor hear from media or any form of information in the post-school world. There is no mention of community organizing, methods of protest, bottom-up theories of change, power analysis, strategic action. To overcome the paralyzing fear, these methods of taking action, and feelings of empowerment and hope that come from using them successfully, must become widespread.

Illuminating the darkness

There is a good chance that as the weeks, months, and years progress, the new political powers will continue to inspire fear for many of us. In the face of oppression, we can find several types of hope — resilience, plans for action, belief in the collective, visions of a better world — by practicing hopeful attitudes every day. None of this is to say that we have to deny sadness, grief, and fear, but rather that we must work with them and incorporate them into positive action.

I’ll follow up eventually with some writing describing some of the practices that I think can also help us find hope. Different things will, of course, work better for different people, but I can offer some practices that continue to help me.

As we practice being hopeful, it will inevitably be a difficult ongoing struggle. I, myself, am no perfect Zen master. I have days where I feel incredibly despondent and must rest and process my grief. But I try to practice recapturing feelings of empowerment and continue envisioning brighter futures even in the darkest times. I hope that some of these ideas that have inspired me can help you and others find the light in the darkness as well.

As a shameless plug, one action that I’m taking in the face of these dark times is to hold workshops on how to process this current political moment, learn theories of power and change, and apply strategic tactics of change in your own life. I’m calling them From Crisis to Action, so we can collectively figure out how to move forward amidst such political upheaval. Recordings taken from the workshops are also being published on YouTube and can be found on the linked page.