The Defeat of Hope
When dreams don’t come true
Every so often, a generation comes along with visions of transformation. From some combination of political and economic conditions, intellectual readiness, youthful restlessness and the unusual charisma of a few individual leaders, a countercultural wave washes against the shore of ordinary history, and thousands or millions of people are seized with the hope that old patterns of injustice or obstacles to progress can, this time, be swept away.
But history offers a fierce, resistant inertia, and upsurges of hope nearly always end in disappointment. Some aspects of a society may bend a little, some progress made, but visionaries rarely see their dreams entirely fulfilled. Often, a society responds to threatened change by doubling down on its repressions or resorting to violence, or more subtly by absorbing watered-down versions of the dreams into its existing, preferred institutions, a process known as co-opting.
What happens to idealism when dreams die? What happens to a society that resists prophetic visions?
Disillusionment sets in, along with cynicism, resignation, and stagnation. Injustice and callousness fester, much like what we see in the Western world today.
I was stirred to this reflection by reading a classic (1972) study of the social turmoil during the time of the English civil wars in the 1640s and 50s — The World Turned Upside Down, by Christopher Hill. The renowned British historian gives a thorough account of the various economic, political and religious reform movements that rather suddenly arose when the authority of church and crown disintegrated.
A motley group of young radicals came up with utopian visions of a more egalitarian and liberated society, some of them anarchic and fanciful, some that were simply well ahead of their time. For example, the Levellers called for redistribution of wealth and political power, while Gerrard Winstanley of the “Digger” movement proposed a form of spiritual communism.
But England’s elite classes — its landowners and church leaders and nascent capitalists — determined that the revolution was going too far, and they managed to restore the monarchy in 1660. Hill observes that the imagined Utopias were crushed, and conventional thinking largely reasserted:
Property triumphed. Bishops returned to a state church, the universities and tithes survived. Women were put back into their place. . . . Milton’s nation of prophets became a nation of shopkeepers.
Hill maintains that some of the breakthrough ideas of the period continued underground and went on to influence later idealists and reformers. The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) arose during this time and has been at the forefront of many social movements in the centuries since. Even so, the collapse of visionary idealism after 1660 ushered in a period of resignation. Religious radicals had rejected the Puritan teachings of sin and damnation, but with the Restoration,
sin came back, first as the means by which radicals explained to themselves their failure to achieve victory for God’s cause on earth [and second because] sin also protected property and an unequal society… [S]in, like the poor, was always with us, and there was nothing that we — still less the poor — could do about it.
We don’t read or talk much about these aborted radical social movements of nearly four hundred years ago, but a much more recent period of cultural upheaval still lives in our imagination — the 1960s. The title of David Farber’s 1994 history captures the utopian sense of possibility that arose again in those years: The Age of Great Dreams. And the late Todd Gitlin, a radical leader during the time, called the sixties, in the title of his historical account, Years of Hope, Days of Rage.
What happened to those great dreams? Why did hope turn into rage?
Like the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, the new world imagined in the mid-twentieth century ended in disappointment. While some aspects of the culture are significantly more open or liberal than before the 1960s, countercultural movements provoked a ferocious backlash, what some historians call a “conservative restoration.” Starting with Richard Nixon’s politics of the “silent majority” and entrenched by the policies of the Reagan administration, the forces of capitalism, privilege and “traditional values” have been reasserted and reinstated.
The 1970s and 1980s saw a Restoration as consequential, if not quite as explicit, as that of the English monarchy in 1660. Corporate and elite interests reasserted control of economic policy, starting with soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s 1971 memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce defending the “free enterprise system” from radical critique and the establishment of the Heritage Foundation in 1973. Earl Warren retired from the Supreme Court in 1969, followed by other liberal jurists, to be replaced by the conservatives who have increasingly dominated it. Religious fundamentalism and Christian nationalism, thought to be moribund since the embarrassment of the 1920s Scopes trial, rebounded dramatically; the Moral Majority was founded in 1979.
Although the environmental movement took shape in the 1960s and seemed to strike a universal chord — even the Nixon administration supported breakthrough environmental legislation — the pro-business and pro-“freedom” backlash has largely stifled efforts to preserve an intact and healthy natural world or prevent global warming. And the impressive gains in racial equality achieved in the 1960s have been methodically stalled and chipped away by courts, legislatures and assorted goons (some of whom wear badges).
In the 1960s, the perceptive journalist George Leonard grew enthusiastic about the utopian optimism he tagged the “human potential movement.” In his memoir twenty years later, he reflected that the prevailing attitude was “What was not possible?” The years since then have not been kind to such optimism. We have been forced to admit that there are a lot of things, a lot of hoped-for strides toward a more just, compassionate, and ecologically sensible society, that are not possible, or at least are highly unlikely to occur anytime this century.
So, just as many of the seventeenth century radicals threw in the towel and admitted that there might be something after all to the notion of humanity’s inherent sinfulness, many activists in our time have turned from visionary optimism to resignation and despair. Boomers have become Doomers. A sense of possibility has turned into a fatalistic — or maybe just a more realistic — acceptance of the fragile transience of liberalism, democracy, civilization, and perhaps also of our species.
One of the most poignant admissions of defeat is Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays, published in 2017. He laments:
The world is smaller, more tired, more fragile, more horribly complex and full of troubles. Or, rather: the world is the same as it ever was, but I am more aware of it and the reality of my place within it. I have grown up, and there is nothing to be done about it. . . .
The green movement, which seemed to be carrying all before it in the early 1990s, has plunged into a full-on midlife crisis. Unable to significantly change either the system or the behaviour of the public, assailed by a rising movement of ‘sceptics’ and by public boredom with being hectored about carbon and consumption, colonised by a new breed of corporate spivs for whom ‘sustainability’ is just another opportunity for selling things, the greens are seeing a nasty realisation dawn: despite all their work, their passion, their commitment and the fact that most of what they have been saying has been broadly right — they are losing. There is no likelihood of the world going their way.
In a recent Medium article, Peter Sean Bradley reviewed a book that portrayed Kingsnorth’s pessimistic turn as belonging to an emerging “Anthropocene antihumanism.” Bradley correctly sees this as a quasi-religious attitude, which he says holds that “Human sin begins with humanity’s insatiable appetite for comfort, security, food, and housing. To give nature some space to exist, humans must voluntarily relinquish control over the world.” So, the deflation of visionary hope leads again, four centuries later, to re-embracing the concept of sinfulness. (In fact, Kingsnorth has embraced Orthodox Christianity and written about his conversion.)
Bradley does not approve of the antihumanist attitude, of the implication that humanity is irredeemably evil. I don’t think I approve of it either. But I am more sympathetic to the sense of crushing defeat that Kingsnorth reports.
When a visionary has caught a glimpse of transformation, a picture of a better world that seems to be within reach, and then has this vision trashed and pulverized by a self-satisfied hostile society, the disillusionment is painful. When a reformer believes that “most of what they have been saying has been broadly right” and yet finds oneself repudiated and irrelevant, there is some solace to be found in leaping to the opposite pole, the Doomer position that all is lost anyway. Of course my bright ennobling vision couldn’t be realized — humanity is too stupid/sinful/evil and is therefore beyond hope.
Let us acknowledge that visionaries are not always “broadly right,” even when they think they are. If all (or even some) utopian thinkers were to “see their dreams entirely fulfilled,” as I put it earlier, our society would probably find itself in other kinds of trouble than the ones they are addressing.
I have enough respect for Burkean conservatism to admit that radical, visionary schemes for social change can be dangerously disruptive and do as much harm as good. Humanity’s flaws (“sin,” if you like) are real and persistent, and positive change is gradual. There are often two steps backward for every three that manage to move ahead. Visionaries, by definition, are those who lack the patience to accept this.
But let us also recognize the cost of disheartening our prophets. “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” it says in the Book of Proverbs. If we do not encourage leaps of imagination beyond the currently entrenched reality, a culture stagnates.
In the case of global warming, as Kingsnorth and his peers have prophesied, if we cannot allow ourselves to envision a society beyond fossil fuels and the global economy that keeps us hooked on them, then people will literally perish. Many of them. They already are.
It is apparently impossible to create paradise on earth, to fully achieve a truly egalitarian and compassionate society in which “human potential” will universally flourish in harmony with the natural world. But the struggle to aim toward that elusive ideal gives meaning and purpose to our lives, and makes our existence more bearable by degrees.
If the forces of resistance and restoration are too powerful and too self-righteous to relax their defense of tradition and privilege, then the visionaries will surrender, and end up endorsing the hopeless, crimped attitude that humanity is simply damned. And then we truly will be.
