Real Hope Is Radical

By Robert Jensen, AlterNet. Posted April 8, 2004.

Editor's Note: The following essay is excerpted from Robert Jensen's new book, Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights).

After an antiwar talk in which I sharply criticized U.S. foreign policy, a student asked me, "Don't you find it hard to live being so cynical?" When I responded that I thought my comments were critical but not cynical, he asked, "But how can being so critical not make you cynical?"

The student was equating any critique of injustice produced by institutions and systems of power with cynicism about people. His question made me realize how easy is cynicism and how difficult is sustained critique in this culture, which shouldn't surprise us. People with power are perfectly happy for the population to be cynical, because that tends to paralyze people and leads to passivity. Those same powerful people also do their best to derail critique -- the process of working to understand the nature of things around us and offering judgments about them -- because that tends to energize people and leads to resistance. Understanding the difference between critique and cynicism -- and the difference between hope and optimism -- is crucial to the future of any struggle against injustice.

At this moment in history, those struggles must not only be about trying to win changes in policies but also about the reinvigoration of public life -- a call for participation, for politics, for radical citizenship in reactionary times. Radical and reactionary in this sense are not used to describe specific political positions, left versus right, but instead describe an approach not just to politics, narrowly defined, but to the central questions of what it means to be a human being in connection with others. The world we live in is reactionary because it is trying to squeeze those important human dimensions out of us in the political sphere and constrict the range of discussion so much that politics does seem to many to be useless. To resist that one must be radical, be political and be radical in public politically.

To explain this I will describe my own journey from cynicism to hope, my own struggle both for greater understanding of myself and an understanding of something greater than me. This requires talking of love and justice, which means taking a small risk that I will be seen as naive or self-indulgent or just plain silly. But here we should recall one of Che Guevara's most memorable thoughts: "At the risk of sounding ridiculous let me say that a revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love."

From cynicism to hope

Let me start the story when I was younger, in my teens and 20s. I saw that the world was in pretty awful shape. The United States had just ended its terrorist campaign in Southeast Asia -- what we commonly call the Vietnam War -- and was intensifying another by proxy in Central America; rich people seemed unconcerned that their luxury was built on the backs of the suffering of literally billions of poor people around the world; people were still getting kicked around simply because they were women or non-white or gay or different in some fashion; and many people seemed not to care that the ecosystem that sustained our lives was in collapse.

I looked around at all that, and I got cynical. Human beings, it seemed to me, were pretty unpleasant creatures. Human nature, I assumed, had to be pretty rotten for all this suffering to go on and on, generation after generation. Even with the advances in social justice -- such as the end of slavery, greater recognition of the basic rights of women, etc. -- it was hard to be upbeat moving out of the 20th century, one of the most brutal and bloody in human history, into the 21st century, which promised to be just as, if not more, brutal. (With a taste of the expanded American empire in the 21st, it appears U.S. leaders will keep that promise.)

Being cynical appeared to have some advantages. I could step back from all the chaos and be hip. I could make jokes about how stupid people were. I could pretend not to care. I could turn away from the suffering of others because I, one of the hip and cynical, understood just how pathetic a species we were. I thought I was the one who saw it all so clearly.

I stayed cynical, and disengaged, for some time. The fact that I was working at newspapers didn't help; for journalists, cynicism is an occupational hazard that takes great intelligence and maturity to resist, and I didn't possess either quality in adequate amounts. So cynical I stayed, until I went to graduate school and was given the luxury of time to read, think, and study. Lots of people go to graduate school and become cynics, or their cynicism deepens; universities can do that to people. But I got lucky and met some exceptional people -- many of them outside the university -- who helped me see another way.

For me, that way began with feminism. I read a lot and listened to women. I started to learn about not only gender and sexism, but I also picked up a new way to understand the world, a new method of inquiry for examining the ideas and institutions that shape our world. I learned to look at how systems and structures of power operate. I learned to see past the surface to the core elements of those systems and structures. When I did that, I realized that things were far worse than I had thought -- the world was in more trouble than I had ever imagined. I learned about new levels of suffering and oppression.

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