When you Can't Find Hope

A Meditation on facing the rise of American Fascism

The whole point about Odin was that he had the right but not the might. The whole point about Norse religion was that it alone of all mythologies told men to serve gods who were admittedly fighting with their backs to the wall and would certainly be defeated in the end.

C.S. Lewis First and Second Things

Things look bad right now. And, fair warning, in this essay I am not going to try to convince you that, despite all appearances, we have good reason to hope. Maybe we do; I want there to be good reasons for hope, but sometimes we can’t see them. And, yes, there is still resistance to fascism. And, yes, there are plenty of people we can point to and efforts that are being made to ensure that as many of us as possible survive this. And…

And…

And…

It is still hard to find hope. We did this back in 2017 and back then we had a lot more reason to hope. Major institutions and politicians were all fired up and angry and determined to #resist. There was a broad collective energy of defiance. Now—8 years later—we are tired and they just seem to be more hateful, crueler, and more energized. Many of the voices making fiery speeches denouncing the incoming Trump regime in 2017 seem to have gone silent now. Many of the platforms we use to connect and communicate are being shuttered or are themselves, bending the kneed to fascism. Many of the political leaders who are supposed to be the opposition to all of this are normalizing the onset of fascism by acting as though it were nothing more than an unfortunately conservative administration; they want to “find common ground” and “work with the incoming administration wherever possible”.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

• Yeats The Second Coming

Those of us in targeted marginalized groups (and our loved ones), are particularly unsettled as we watch the Powers That Be negotiate over which of our basic rights are worth actually fighting for. And likely, those of you who are reading this already know and understand why, for many of us, hope feels hard to come by right now.

And I do not want to stand against hope. I am not for a second saying that there is no objective reason to have hope. Those reasons do exist. More than that, I do want to stand foursquare against despair and I recognize that, like me, many many people are having a great deal of difficulty feeling or finding those reasons today. And for precisely that reason, if you cannot find hope today, or tomorrow, or in the days to come I want to talk about hope’s sister virtue: faith. Already I need to explain myself both to my Christian and to my post-Christian, atheist, or otherwise non-Christian readers. When I talk about “faith” I do not mean to be speaking of it as a sentimental religious value (though I do think there are some great insights to glean from those theologians and philosophers who spent their lives exploring and interrogating this virtue). I don’t think there is any particular religious commitment necessary¹ in order to exercise and benefit from the virtue of faith as I want to talk about it here. I am talking about a faith that is closer to something like “cussedness” or defiance.

But let me back up again. On the subject of hope and faith I have said before that I don’t think there is a better known or more compelling guide than J.R.R. Tolkien². In The Lord of the Rings my favorite moment of hope comes at that moment when Samwise and Frodo are near giving up (Sam is such a wonderful incarnation of the virtue of hope) Sam is granted hope:

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

- Return of the King

and the perspective, the hope, that moment grants him is enough for him to keep going. I hope, I pray, that it might have stirred something in you. Hope is what can drive us to sense a reason to believe that “the Shadow [is] only a small and passing thing” and that “light and high beauty” must eventually win out. Hope is beautiful and precious, and sometimes fragile, but profoundly powerful: it can feel like breathing and it is a critical, vital virtue for combating despair.

Sam and Frodo

But it is not the only virtue. I like to say that we have two legs with which to walk through opposition: hope and faith. And faith kicks in when hope is far away and all of the voices and the totality of our evidence tell us only that hope is foolish. When, unlike Sam, we are not granted any vision of a star; hope’s sister faith must take over.

Faith is something like trust, and it is something like determination, and it is something like “f*ck you”, and it is something like love, and it is somehow a-rational, and it is somehow the most reasonable thing in the world. Faith is the commitment to end well when hope is gone. Faith looks at a world falling apart and refuses to accept that world, not out of delusion (in some way faith is more clear eyed and sober than anything) but out of a rejection of the world that despair builds. Faith is why we love Lewis’s Puddleglum (hardly a person of hope but, for that, someone of towering faith) whose crescendo as a Character is summed up in the declaration

I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.

• The Silver Chair

and in The Lord of the Rings my favorite incarnation of faith is Éomer (I have never been able to read this section without tears) at the battle of Pelennor Fields. Already exhausted after fighting for hours trying to secure something like a victory, he looks up and

“Now [Éomer] looked to the River, and hope died in his heart, and the wind that he had blessed he now called accursed. But the hosts of Mordor were enheartened, and filled with a new lust and fury they came yelling to the onset.

Stern now was Éomer’s mood, and his mind clear again. He let blow the horns to rally all men to his banner that could come thither; for he thought to make a great shield-wall at the last, and stand, and fight there on foot till all fell, and do deeds of song on the fields of Pelennor, though no man should be left in the West to remember the last King of the Mark. So he rode to a green hillock and there set his banner, and the White Horse ran rippling in the wind.

Out of doubt, out of dark to the day’s rising
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
To hope’s end I rode and to heart’s breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!

These staves he spoke, yet he laughed as he said them. For once more lust of battle was on him; and he was still unscathed, and he was young, and he was king: the lord of a fell people. And lo! even as he laughed at despair he looked out again on the black ships, and he lifted up his sword to defy them.”

It is heavy in my mind today that Lewis and Tolkien both knew when they wrote those passages, what it was to defy a rising tide of fascism and the waning of all reasonable hope. In fact precisely because it kicks in when hope is lost, faith is the critical element in the whole possibility of eucatastrophe: the unlooked for good ending that breaks in just when all seems lost. Without faith, we have no possibility of an unlooked-for turn of circumstance and the return of hope. Almost paradoxically, while faith is necessary for the possibility of eucatastrophe, it does not guarantee eucotastrophe. As Tolkien puts it in On Fairy Stories

It [the eucatastrophic story] does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

So today, as the stretched remnants of aspiring democracy come under the sway of a fascist government I would not dare to tell you to “take heart”, “see the bright side”, or “have hope” though I certainly want all of those things for you and for myself. Instead I will ask you to be faithful to the cause of liberation; to be faithful to a vision of a world of “light and high beauty” that “that licks [this one] hollow”. Let us go down on the side of “the land that never has been yet—and yet must be—the land where every man is free.”³

Also please go read Margaret Killjoy’s recent essay “Duty to Escape”.

The Duty to Escape

1. In fact I suspect that, while some religious commitments might help here, others might actually hurt. If, for instance, you understanding of faith is of something passive that is given to you (or not) there might be some necessary un-learning for you to do here.

2. I for one plan to re-read The Lord of the Rings and probably The Silmarillion over the course of this year for precisely this reason

3. Langston Hughes Let America Be America Again