How can you hope when you're coming out of a dystopia?

A leading thinker on moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples ruminates on hope

Hi Gen Dread head!

First off, small inventory newsflash: there’s now an excerpt video from my “Making Sense of Climate Anxiety” webinar in case you couldn’t make it and would like to see some of the presentation. And if this is your first time at Gen Dread, welcome!

What do you mean by hope?

Today I’m going to share part of one of my favourite interviews that I’ve done in the course of researching for my forthcoming book. That being my conversation with Dr. Kyle Whyte, Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, whose research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, amongst other things. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. I could cut our this conversation into many different themes but I’m going to focus on Whyte’s thoughts around hope, a hugely contested concept. 

In these late days of the climate crisis, hope has become unfashionable, all the more necessary, inaccessible, a security blanket, a dangerous distraction, the engine of action, the factory for wishful thinking, a sign of privilege or laziness and more, all at the same time. Meanwhile, the climate-curious often interpret it to be the most important feeling to extract from those working on these issues. 9 out of 10 generalists I chat with end their line of questions with this zinger: what gives you hope? (Read: please stop placing this question like the cherry on top of the interview. We have had so many cherries and have outgrown the taste. If it must be asked, please at least put it somewhere where we don’t see it coming!) 

I will continue to explore what hope means - and to whom - here at Gen Dread. Eminent Canadian complexity science scholar Dr. Thomas-Homer Dixon has a new book out - Commanding Hope - that I am very excited to read. Using a systems thinking perspective, he has convinced me in the past that there are many kinds of hope, and that the differences between them are crucial to recognize, rethink, and apply to our situation at this time. More on that in a future post.

The expression of hope must be trustworthy

I initially reached out to Whyte to learn what he thinks about non-Indigenous people who prop up Indigenous knowledge as the solutions toolkit for humanity in the climate crisis, which I felt was a growing trend, and discovered that he co-authored a paper about. This gets to the root of issues like partnership, allyship, and ultimately, hope. Here’s an edited and cut down version of our conversation.

BW: Indigenous wisdom is often held up as a source of climate solutions by non-Indigenous people. What are your thoughts on that? 

KW: One thing I feel more strongly about each year, this idea that Indigenous people have something to give to other people in terms of possible solutions and answers, I actually just think that's the wrong approach. It can't really be improved upon. I think there are people who over time have created really good ethical conduct, but at the end of the day I still see that they are driven by that question of trying to show or prove or benefit from that question of ‘what Indigenous people have to give to others’ and I think that ultimately prevents them from going as far as they can.

Now what I propose as the alternative is that Indigenous wisdom is not knowledge that one should initially approach through the idea that it is something valuable that has been overlooked by others. Actually it should be approached by an understanding that any community that has survived through everything that we have been through must have a number of different types of knowledge that they've relied on. It doesn't mean that we've made all the best decisions. It doesn't mean that we know everything. But the point being that we have this portfolio of knowledge, including older and ancient knowledge, intellectual traditions, and then also a lot of contemporary knowledge including the use of different forms of science. That is a story that is unfolding and ongoing. What I think is a better starting point for some body who is not from one of our communities is to say, well what can I do to impact or to benefit that story that is unfolding? What is it that my skill sets, knowledge, or things that I can learn, can do to intervene positively in that story?

BW: What do we have to be mindful of when trying to understand and benefit that unfolding story of Indigenous wisdom in this particular moment of increasing uncertainty, particularly when we come from traditions that have not understood partnership, but rather, domination? 

KW: One thing I notice, in popular media and Hollywood is this obsession that certain dominant groups and culture have with this idea that the human species is on the verge of being extinct. And the idea that there's something intrinsically valuable about the species or intrinsically devastating about the species going away. I think that really gets into some key differences of how people have interpreted their experiences. If you're thinking of groups who don't think about species with that sort of value system, their perspective would be marked by multiple types of extinctions and dystopias that would have occurred in the past.

Perhaps a more powerful motivator of allyship is when we no longer use the emotion or the concept of hope. I think that should be dispensed with. Hope, when coming from a position of privilege, is extremely problematic as a motivator and there are a lot of alternatives that provide just as much or more motivation that don't involve hope. One that I wrote about is if you imagine you are, or feel because it is true, coming out of a dystopia. If you are coming out of a dystopia, you cannot hope because you are in the dystopia and the dystopia is so all encompassing that it is not really a hope, but simply what you are trying to do. Even as you realize that you're not necessarily going to get out of it in your lifetime, what this involves is building in that kinship, where kinship refers to hard hitting and really direct norms. Like consent, reciprocity, accountability, and trust. That's what kinship is. Kinship is not ‘I respect you or I valourize your knowledge’. Kinship is ‘do we actually have a consensuality between us, recognizing that generations of power and oppression might mean that in our lifetimes we will never achieve genuine consensuality? Maybe our next generations will, but we might not.’ We can do stuff that will build the possibility that that could become true without the certainty that we will ever be in a position to celebrate it. 

That might sound ascetic or like a disciplining restraint kind of thing. But actually no, you can be highly motivated from a space of not wanting to be the hero. Of realizing that you're always going to make mistakes and that progress must be slow. And that some of the physical crises in the world are unfolding too quickly. That maybe the mistake is when we rush to solve them quickly, and that's what makes us repeat the mistakes of our ancestors. 

BW: Can you say more about why hope is extremely problematic when coming from a position of privilege? 

KW: I've always been puzzled by what hope means. When someone is in a situation where there are no available means to alleviate their suffering, they can hope for a miracle. That is, they are hoping for some transformation to occur that they have no way of predicting or knowing to be possible. In oppressive situations where there is more agency, people who suffer from oppression devise strategies to empower transformation based on their interpretations of where the leverage points are. They can vest hope in their strategies, all the while that they know many hard lessons are still in store as they learn from what happens when their actions contest oppressive forces.

In the first case, the use of hope is clear: it is hope for a miracle. In the second case, hope is tied to action, where the hopeful person knows they have done their best to undermine the systems that contribute to their powerlessness. But for persons of privilege looking onto climate change risks, what do they mean when they say they are hopeful that change will occur? Perhaps they are hoping for a world in which everybody achieves the same level of privilege - that is, a world of no privilege. They hope for this world in the absence of any global precedent or evidence that such a transition away from privilege is even underway. Perhaps they are hoping that people globally lower their carbon footprints to a significant degree. Yet these hopeful people do little to acknowledge or take action to prevent the retrenchment of injustice by the very clean energy businesses and government programs that are so often touted as obvious solutions to climate change. Perhaps they are hoping too for a miracle. But for a privileged person to hope for a miracle is disingenuous insofar as they have no way of knowing whether the very maintenance of their privilege renders the miracle even less likely to happen. The continuation of their privilege or its future preservation probably does make the miracle more improbable.  

Hopefulness can generate the ultimate bystander effect

Privileged people have to show that their hopefulness can be trusted by people who stand to suffer the most from climate change risks. Hopefulness can generate the ultimate bystander effect as privileged people allow for injustices to continue all the while remaining hopeful that a better world is possible. People who theorize about solutions without first hand experiences of oppression should take very seriously whether they even have the right to express hope. The expression of hope must be trustworthy. In the context of climate change risks, trustworthy actions are ones in which someone cannot be accused of prioritizing the maintenance of their own privilege at the continued expense of other people.   

BW: What might improve this situation and ability to form some kind of genuine partnership? 

KW: How does one move beyond asking people to always take a lot of time explaining about how they can be helped? The typical question, you know, how can I be a good ally, or the typical issue of how the burden gets placed on oppressed people to explain and teach...how does one get beyond that? Well one way to get beyond that is to realize that, well, if you're trying to address a particular type of power or oppression, the surviving community had to learn how to negotiate that by themselves and on their own with almost no help from anybody else. And they had to make mistakes. I think people forget how much shame and mistake making go into just anti-oppression work when you are working on behalf of your own community. 

So people can realize, well wait a minute, my pathway is going to involve those things too even if I am coming from a path of privilege, I need to start taking the time on my own to learn these things too, and realize that that independent learning that's going to happen is part of being able to succeed in that work. Not deliberate trial and error like a scientist. But when you're genuinely trying to partner and realize how your interventions in someone else's story can be more effective, there are going to be situations where what you thought you were doing was good but it was not good, and you realize there is so much more learning to be done.

BW: So we have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

KW: Yes, that’s a great way of putting it. 

This is a theme that keeps reappearing through my research here at Gen Dread: our ability to sit in the discomfort, and learn from it, is where the hope lies. 

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