Hopelessness, Art, and Society
I am not a hopeful person by nature.
I do not, as a rule, expect good things to happen to me. I do not expect American democracy to survive the Boomer/GenX turn towards fascism (even though I am a GenX-er). I mean, I wrote an entire post about how I had little chance to get an agent. I am a White Sox fan, for crying out loud. Hopefulness is not my default position. I tell myself that I have good reasons for pessimism, that life has provided plenty of evidence that the good guys don't usually win, that bad things happen despite your best efforts almost all the time. But that could be an excuse -- a reason to avoid too much self-examination about why, precisely, I see the world through dark glasses. As a result, one might expect that I would be temperamentally aligned with this Noah Berlatsky post about the problems with Hope.
But I cannot bring myself to fully agree.
You should go read the entire post. It is very well written and thoughtful, even if I ultimately disagree with it. All of his stuff is, frankly, and you should consider signing up for his newsletter (or my free one). I can wait -- hockey is on.
Back? Good. Noah makes two large points, neither of which I fully agree with.
First, Noah makes the very reasonable point that hope can be used as a vector for oppression. Riffing off the excellent work of Barbara Ehrenreich, he claims that hope is used to get people to accept bad situations or feel that they are to blame for bad things, like dying of cancer, happening to them. There may be some truth to that accusation, but I feel that is might be oversimplifying or missing the forest for the trees.
A movement to convince people that individual choice is the only cause of any misfortune and solidarity is a sign of weakness indisputably exists. And focusing on the hope in some situations, whether justified or not, is a tool in that movement's arsenal. But it is not hope causing the problems. It is the diversion of people from the systematic to the personal. And there are many other tools in that project -- fear, shame, sexism, racism, etc.
Similarly, the way oppressed people are pushed to offer forgiveness without recompense or even visible contrition is wrong and dangerous. But is of a piece with the desire to push all problems onto the individual. By focusing on what the victims of, say, a racist church shooting should do rather than on what has been done to make society so prone to such violent racism, the peolpe responsible for those failures attempt to hide their responsibility. And while painting those acts of forgiveness as hopeful in nature, the issue is not hopefulness but deceit.
I may be misreading Noah's argument, but placing so much weight on hope doesn't seem justified. The problem is the drive to keep people from looking at how society has been shaped to make their lives less than they should be. That is the issue and blaming a tool misses, I think, the problem.
Noah's second point is a reaction against the notion of creator's having a responsibility to provide hope in their work. Withholding hope, the argument goes, is doing at least a disservice to their readers/watchers/viewers/listeners. Noah strongly disagrees. Since the human condition often does not contain hope, art is not required to, either. He uses the film Dual to help make this point. Again, go read the post if you have not -- his walk through of the movie and how it corresponds to the feeling of living with depression is excellent. And I would be the last person to minimize having your feelings, your experience of life, validated in art. Again, hope is not a large part of my personal vocabulary.
But.
But I know the world is a terrible place. I know that we are awash in reactionary pushback, in gun violence unseen in this country's history, in a roll back of right after right. I know the world my children is going to grow up in likely to be less safe, less free, and overwhelmed by climate disaster. I know that we have the misfortune of living in interesting times, and that much of what we value is likely to be lost. I have buried too many people well before their time. I have watched kinder, better people than me ravaged by mental illness. I have seen smarter people than me fail for the want of a touch of good luck that I received. I know life is unrelentingly hard. I don't need a movie or a book to remind me of the basic unfairness of human existence.
I know that Noah is mostly reacting to the conceit that all art most contain some hope. I understand that such a demand, like all simplistic demands, is unrealistic and unhelpful in many cases. But I also know that hopeless art has been shown to potentially make its consumers less likely to act. It is easy to be pessimistic. It is easy to default to art that is cynical, dismissive of the potential for things to improve, wallow in arch irony, claim that never gets better, everyone is terrible, and nothing can improve. Given the cultural impact of shows like Succession and, in a different way, Yellowstone, I don't think we have a problem with too little hope in our art. Prestige is often handed out to art like Sorpranos and Barry -- shows that largely argue that human beings are irredeemable. You don't win awards and praise by being hopeful, not in the modern American art landscape.
To paraphrase a better writer than me, we don't tell children fairy stories so that they learn monsters exist. Children know monsters exist; their whole world is filled with scary things they don't fully understand and cannot control or defend themselves against. We tell children fairy stories so that they know monsters can be beaten. I am not arguing that everything must be draped in a gauzy layer of hope and happiness. As I said earlier, I understand the value of reflecting all aspects of life in art. But do we really think that American art is too hopeful, to optimistic? It certainly doesn't seem that way to me.
Civilization is in a constant struggle with capitalism, authoritarianism, and reaction. For almost my entire life, civilization has been losing that struggle. If we are going to worry about the direction of art and society, I would much rather be concerned that we focus too little on hope than that we focus on it too much