## Metadata - Author: [[Tom Whyman]] - Full Title: Infinitely Full of Hope - Published: - Category: #books ## Highlights ### Introduction: What Can I Hope For? - In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant tells us that: “all the interests of my reason,” theoretical as well as practical, “combine” in just three questions: “What can I know?,” “What ought I do?,” and “What can I hope for?”. In these three questions, Kant delineates the whole scope of philosophical thought. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813459) ^rw314813459 - But amid this, what the partisans of truth quite failed to realise was that if reality as it presently exists appears to have nothing to offer you, then you may as well attempt to live in an alternative one: if you really have nothing to hope for, then by rejecting reality you’d have nothing to lose. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813460) ^rw314813460 - Socrates famously held that “philosophy begins in wonder,” but most contemporary philosophy begins in pedantry: in wanting to be able to prove that one is factually or ethically correct, “in the know,” or “in the right. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813461) ^rw314813461 - Hopelessness, it seems, is old — at least as old as hope itself. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813462) ^rw314813462 - I can count out my life in economic disasters. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813463) ^rw314813463 - As we’ve transitioned from our long youths into something at least resembling adulthood, millennials like me have found ourselves proletarianised en masse, where once our parents were allowed to feel themselves raised to the ranks of the comfortable and middle class, we have been priced out of the property market in many areas of the country and for the most part scraping by through poorly-paid, insecure work. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813464) ^rw314813464 #### Better Not to Be? - Around children, your language changes, and not just because you’re typically more careful not to swear: you start picking up their mannerisms; little muddled misspeakings — their odd invented turns of phrase. If a child shouts “loud!” whenever they see an ambulance, because they think that’s what they’re called, you start to feel compelled to do so yourself. If a child calls apples “happles,” adding an “h” so they can use the indefinite article “a,” well then of course an apple is a happle from now on. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813466) ^rw314813466 - for the most part our emotional life is spread, if this doesn’t sound too weird, across a single shared soul. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813467) ^rw314813467 - Note: Love - Thus, parenthood cannot solely be a matter of self-affirmation, because it is also something so radically self-estranging. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813468) ^rw314813468 #### Reasons to Be Hopeful - Happiness is complicated, always embedded in a world of injustice and selfishness and defeat. But the rush of joy associated with happiness, when experienced, is something basic: the thrill of simply existing, a sense of the miracle of being alive. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813470) ^rw314813470 - One does not need to downplay the severity of the world’s sufferings, to recognise that fun and beauty and wonder are also part of it. These things are not worse than nothing — in fact in a way they are everything that matters; everything, at least, that matters enough for it to seem deeply shitty to wish them away. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813471) ^rw314813471 - A child cannot be understood as a token of carbon consumption, like taking a flight, or eating a steak. A child is a new human being — and what else do human beings do, but act in the world, for themselves? [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813472) ^rw314813472 - From a materialist perspective, it makes absolutely no sense to attempt to improve the future by limiting the number of people with a direct interest in carrying it on. The fewer there are of us, the more ground we concede to them. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813473) ^rw314813473 - To this fractional extent, my child’s being born into the world will change it. This might not have the desired effect: who knows, I certainly don’t know who my child will be yet, they might well be a far worse person than I’m even capable of being. But if we dare to do something, anything, differently, in some way that might allow us to hit upon the right path… then things really could, conceivably, get better. There’s an element of Pascal’s Wager here: if the bad is inevitable then things will be bad anyway, so in a way no one has anything to lose. But if the good is possible at all, we ought to do everything in our power to bring it about. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813474) ^rw314813474 #### So… What Can I Hope For? - We are now in a position to offer a firm definition of hope. Hope is an attitude that agents might adopt towards the world — probably usually involuntarily, but perhaps also voluntarily — which is characterised by the following two things: 1. A recognition of the possibility of the better. 2. An active desire for the better to occur.. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813476) ^rw314813476 ### Chapter One: What Is Hope? - Adorno’s theory of happiness associates the feeling of being happy with that of longing, of anticipation. For Adorno, one is never happy — one was happy, one will be happy. Perhaps the present is in despair — but equally, only the present can be so. And so, happiness and hope are inextricably intertwined. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813478) ^rw314813478 - The rush of joy is an immediate, giddy thrill — but it’s far too pre-reflective to be anything other than itself. “Happiness” is — as Adorno says — only something that we realise we were experiencing later: a complex, reflective, feeling, vastly more than just a heady rush. And this is why it can not only be enjoyed but treasured — or anticipated. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813479) ^rw314813479 #### What Is It Like to Hope? - For one thing, Meirav argues that hope is characterised by what he calls “resignation” — “acceptance or acknowledgement of the fact that one does not have control or determinative power over something.” “If you ask me whether I will return the book which I borrowed from you a while ago, you would be annoyed if I said in reply that ‘I hope so’, [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813481) ^rw314813481 - Meirav argues for what he calls an “External Factor” conception of hope: for Meirav, the hopeful person is someone who has resigned their fate to a power they believe to be good, whereas the despairer believes that whatever it is that controls their fate is bad [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813482) ^rw314813482 - Bloch, whose writings on hope are always animated by the essentially Marxist commitment to the possibility of a better world, tells us that “The emotion of hope… will not tolerate a dog’s life which feels itself only passively thrown into What Is.” It “is not content just to accept the bad which it exists” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813483) ^rw314813483 - Moreover, the idea that hope is passive just seems completely wrong to me psychologically. I might not have total voluntary control over my desires or my beliefs about what is likely to happen in the world. But our mental lives are not wholly irrational, and I can cultivate certain dispositions if I choose to. I can reflect not only on but towards hope; I can strive to find reasons to be hopeful in the world. And if I am hopeful of/for something, then I know this — at least in part — precisely because I’m able to take some steps (if not always definitive ones!) towards obtaining the object of my desire. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813484) ^rw314813484 - Hope, for Bloch, is the most authentically human of all feelings, since only humans have hope as a “positive” expectant emotion to act against the “negative” expectant emotions of anxiety and fear. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813485) ^rw314813485 #### The Wisdom of the Chickadee - we are also talking about a period of time during which, as the person who lived this life insisted, “nothing happened.” So, what gives? Lear argues that the answer can be found precisely in the disappearance of the Crow way of life, the context in which everything Plenty Coups valued made sense — even his name, Lear points out, only really makes sense if you understand the Crow practice of “counting coup sticks,” items that played an important role in how the Crow fought battles. Once the buffalo had disappeared and the Crow had been utterly overrun by the white man’s rule, the traditional Crow way of doing things could no longer exist — and so Plenty Coups, along with the other Crow of his generation, was faced with a sort of total loss of meaning as such. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813487) ^rw314813487 #### There Was No Hope on Earth…” - If hope is to achieve its ends, it needs to keep reality in view — it cannot represent “reality” as something that it need not be concerned with; that it can somehow void. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813489) ^rw314813489 #### What Hope Isn’t ##### i. Cynicism - But it shows, Coe tells us, how easily comedy can work against critical scrutiny — as well as providing Johnson himself with a valuable lesson in how satire could be used to obscure, rather than denounce, his grasping, parasitical ruling-class politics and nasty, selfish, bullying personality. And so today we have reached the point where Johnson “has become his own satirist: safe, above all, in the knowledge that the best way to make sure the satire aimed at you is gentle [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813492) ^rw314813492 - and unchallenging is to create it yourself.” In a thoroughly cynical political culture, charlatans like Johnson are able to thrive. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813493) ^rw314813493 - It is also worth noting, as Fisher does, that the disclaiming laughter cynicism offers is basically quite boring — the big joke behind the world of a cynic is a smug, stupid one, that anyone in their right mind would do their best to ignore. This helps contribute to a general anti-politics which of course the Tories, who in the 2019 campaign promised almost literally nothing beyond “Get Brexit Done,” have proved adept at exploiting [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813494) ^rw314813494 - Chortling, unthinking, cynicism holds fast to its fear of failure. But in just this way, the cynic exposes their ultimate childishness: the cynic, who wants to be oh-so-grown-up, is in truth someone who has let their inner child win. It’s just that — rather than being open and enthusiastic, playful and naive — the cynic’s inner child is trapped on its first day at school, terrified and alone and crying, broken to be bullied into a lifetime of conformity. The cynic lacks the courage required to risk losing themselves. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813495) ^rw314813495 ##### ii. Resignation - This pseudo-reality is reinforced through what Adorno calls “pseudo-activity”: “action that overdoes and aggravates itself for the sake of its own publicity, without admitting to itself to what extent it serves as a substitute satisfaction, elevating itself into an end in itself. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813497) ^rw314813497 ##### iii. Despair - But security and shelter remain basic human needs: we cannot simply exist nowhere. “The best mode of conduct, in face of all this,” Adorno tells us, “seems an uncommitted, suspended one: to lead a private life, as far as the social order and one’s needs will tolerate nothing else, but not to attach weight to it as something still socially substantial and individually appropriate.” “The trick,” Adorno says: is to keep in view, and to express, the fact that private property no longer belongs to one, in the sense that consumer goods have become potentially so abundant that no individual has the right to cling to the principle of their limitation; but that one must nevertheless have possessions, if one is not to sink into that dependence and need which serves the blind perpetuation of property relations. And yet: the thesis of this paradox leads to destruction, a loveless disregard for things which necessarily turns against people too; and the antithesis, no sooner uttered, is an ideology for those wishing with a bad conscience to keep what they have. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813499) ^rw314813499 - Benjamin also quotes a fragment of conversation, as reported by Kafka’s friend and literary executor Max Brod: I remember a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. “We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts, that come into God’s head,” Kafka said. This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. “Oh no,” said Kafka, “our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.” “Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.” He smiled. “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope — but not for us.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813500) ^rw314813500 - And for Adorno too, “coldness” is associated with “hardness” — which for him names a particular educational ideal, the discipline that is instilled in our children in schools: Being hard, the vaunted quality education should inculcate, means absolute indifference toward pain as such. In this the distinction between one’s own pain and that of another is not so stringently maintained. Whoever is hard with himself earns the right to be hard with others as well and avenges himself for the pain whose manifestations he was not allowed to show and had to repress. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813501) ^rw314813501 ### Chapter Two: Are We Hopeless? #### It Was After That That I Began to Go to Pieces” - When I saw him looking up like that, I knew that I loved him, and that it was for always. It was as if my heart turned over, and I knew that it was for always. It’s a strange feeling — when you know quite certainly in yourself that something is for always. It’s like what death must be. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813504) ^rw314813504 #### No Right Living - We no longer really “live,” Adorno thinks, because capitalism has now developed to the point that human life is only able to justify itself in relation to the demands of the means of production. Under fascism, this is made explicit by the rhetoric of the state: “In principle everyone, however powerful, is an object.” Under consumer capitalism, individuality is certainly permitted in theory — indeed it is as individual, isolated social atoms that we are expected to consume. But in practice, as Adorno and his co-author Max Horkheimer tell us in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “individuals are tolerated only as far as their wholehearted identity with the universal is beyond question. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813506) ^rw314813506 - Adorno’s bleak conception of reality is thus too hopeless to sustain even itself. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813507) ^rw314813507 #### But Not for Us” - At every point in Kafka his protagonists witness the most wretched squalor: even the institutions of the law, in The Trial, are found in dilapidated tenements on the edge of the city; attic rooms that blaze unbearably with the heat locked in to their own stuffy air. In Kafka’s world, much as in the real one, there lurks a sense that somewhere in society exists a great opulence which — with just the merest of adjustments, the slightest and briefest outbreak of real sanity — could quite easily be made available to all. But this luxury is not all that Kafka’s protagonists, and those others they encounter, are denied: their world conspires to refuse them even basic functioning. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813509) ^rw314813509 - We — and K. — are the citizens of the wrong world: we will always remain too damaged for the right one. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813510) ^rw314813510 - The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma is a precariat paradise — an immense enterprise, “the biggest theatre in the world”; those who have been to Oklahoma and seen the theatre proper claim “there are almost no limits to it” — in which everyone will be afforded a place, just so long as they dare to seize the opportunity. Suddenly all the wrenching, sea-sick uncertainty of life under capitalism can be eliminated: you will receive the assured place in the world that you once thought you must always be denied. And yet, hardly anyone seems willing to take this chance [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813511) ^rw314813511 #### Who Is Hope For? - A feeling of one in distress who sees help coming but does not rejoice at his rescue — nor is he rescued — but rejoices, rather, at the arrival of fresh young people imbued with confidence and ready to take up the right; ignorant, indeed, of what awaits them, but an ignorance that inspires not hopelessness but admiration and joy in the onlooker and brings tears to his eyes. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813513) ^rw314813513 - Note: Kafka - On this theory hope is indeed not for “us” — but it is nevertheless related to us by means of our connection to other, future human beings [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813514) ^rw314813514 - Writing is a way of preserving your experiences for others; through writing, even experiences of the most numbing, pointless awfulness can be transformed into something valuable, like coal into diamonds: they are thus able to become the basis for a whole thought, a whole worldview. Unlike oral methods of communication, which rely on the ability to recall what one wants to say, writing can be a way of forgetting: the writer transfers the experience out of themselves, and in this way is able to lay both it — and themselves — aside. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813515) ^rw314813515 - Hegel talks of love as a way of finding yourself in another person, of marriage as a way of joining with this other [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813516) ^rw314813516 - The entire domestic sphere is permeated with guilt. The family, as an artefact of the (Adornian) wrong life, thus presents us with a distinctively Adornian dilemma. To escape the wrong life, we must find a way of transcending it; but we only have its inheritance available to us to supply the tools with which it might be transcended. “In the suspension of its rules,” Adorno tells us in “Notes on Kafka,” “patriarchal society reveals its true secret, that of direct, barbaric oppression.” By seeking to make ourselves independent of all the guilt and suffering which has come before, we risk repeating it on one another. The cycle cannot be broken. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813517) ^rw314813517 #### Beating the Cold - I hope I’m able to listen to my child (or children): I hope I’m able to be open enough to their views to allow them to transform my own. I hope I can take an interest in what they’re interested in and encourage them to pursue whatever goals they happen to have. I hope I can laugh with my children, not at them. More than anything else, I hope I can forget myself in them: transcend every small bitterness I have ever been subject to; place their sufferings above mine, to help them find their way in “this insecure world” — just as Franz envisaged helping his own children in the “Letter,” children who alas were doomed to remain forever hypothetical [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813519) ^rw314813519 - The “cold” are people who have become completely atomised from one another: they pursue their own interests “against the interests of everyone else.” “Every person today, without exception,” Adorno writes, “feels too little loved, because every person cannot love enough… For the people whom one should love are themselves such that they cannot love, and therefore in turn are not all that lovable.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813520) ^rw314813520 - In short then, education has trained us — and is training our children — to be “cold” because it aims at making us “hard” enough to repress our own sufferings in the face of the world. But empathy begins in the warmth of one’s own heart: hardness also makes it impossible for us to relate to others. Just as Fisher writes of the cynical: we are all psychologically mutilated children — even the ostensibly successful hide behind pathetic emotional defence mechanisms. For Adorno, the only remedy to this is compassion. We must teach our children to be sensitive in the first instance to their own sufferings, and then to those of others [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813521) ^rw314813521 - Crucially for Adorno, an awareness of suffering (both our own and that of others) can provide us with a way out of the conformity that makes fascism (and other horrors) possible. The hard are overly dependent on abstract rules — but softness can help you think for yourself: it can make you aware that something is wrong. “The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy… the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not co-operating.” For the ideal future children we must raise, empathy and intelligence go together. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813522) ^rw314813522 - During the first three or four years of life,” writes Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, “there is no difference between girls’ and boys’ attitudes; they all try to perpetuate the happy state preceding weaning; both boys and girls show the same behaviour of seduction and display. Boys are just as desirous as their sisters to please, to be smiled at, to be admired.” But then, for boys, “A second weaning, slower and less brutal than the first one, withdraws the mother’s body from the child’s embraces.” “Little by little,” de Beauvoir tells us, “boys are the ones who are denied kisses and caresses. The little girl continues to be doted upon, she is allowed to hide behind her mother’s skirts, her father takes her on his knees and pats her hair; she is dressed in dresses as lovely as kisses, her tears and whims are treated indulgently, her hair is done carefully, her expressions and affectations amuse: physical contact and complaisant looks protect her against the anxiety of solitude.” For the little boy, on the other hand, every concession to softness will in time be forbidden, whether directly or implicitly. “‘A man doesn’t ask for kisses… A[…] [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813523) ^rw314813523 - Hope, as an attitude, is thus identical with a certain sort of transformative force. Hope as a way of seeing: first moment of hope (the recognition of the possibility of the better). Hope as praxis: second moment of hope (active desire for the better). In Fisher’s last work, left unfinished when he fell victim to the depression which he suffered from throughout his adult life, he returned to Marcuse — and the still-unrealised promise of Sixties and Seventies counter-cultural radicalism. “The claim of this book,” as he writes in the opening lines of his Introduction to Acid Communism, the work which, I suspect, would have eventually been recognised as his magnum opus, “is that the last forty years have been about the exorcising of ‘the spectre of a world which could be free’” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813524) ^rw314813524 - Instead, neoliberalism is best understood as a project aimed at destroying — to the point of making them unthinkable — the experiments in democratic socialism and libertarian communism that were efflorescing at the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Seventies.” From Allende’s Chile, which later became a testing-lab for neoliberal economics under Pinochet; to the radical, inter-racial solidarity witnessed at the “industrial Woodstock” of the striking Chevy Vega plant in Lordstown, Ohio; to the “mass avant-garde,” seething with creative energy, that formed between artists, musicians, and intellectuals squatting in Bologna: In recent years, the Sixties have come to seem at once like a deep past so exotic and distant that we cannot imagine living in it, and a moment more vivid than now — a time when people really lived, when things really happened. Yet the decade haunts not because of some unrecoverable and unrepeatable confluence of factors, but because the potentials it materialised and began to democratise — the prospect of a life free from drudgery — has to be continually suppressed. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813525) ^rw314813525 - But knowing what we do now about Obama, about how his presidency in fact turned out, it is hard not to see it as expressing a confusion of means with ends. Hope, Obama seems to be telling us, is enough — just by itself. Belief is enough, just by virtue of its being belief. Imagination is enough, just because we can imagine that America is already perfect as it is. Slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs may as well already be, in fact, free. And with this, politics is able to become a matter solely of aesthetics — a timid sort of phantasy, that never dares cross over into reality. And indeed, it is plausible to suggest that “hope” was only chosen because its particular aesthetics won’t particularly offend anyone who matters. Fairey’s famous poster was originally captioned with the word “Progress,” but this was overruled by Obama’s campaign team on the basis that “Progress,” even as a mere sentiment, was too divisive. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813526) ^rw314813526 - We’d almost done it — almost managed to overturn every boring nugget of received wisdom going. And with the sort of margins we were winning by, in some constituencies, surely, we would be ready to sweep to power next time. Already, the party was talking about putting itself on a “permanent campaigning footing,” constantly canvassing in every target seat. We could unseat Boris Johnson, Amber Rudd, Iain Duncan Smith… The possibility of a new politics loomed: Labour as a real mass party, a real mass movement, focused on transforming society, not just holding power in Westminster. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813527) ^rw314813527 - And, with 2017 having been too close for comfort, the Labour right were now just one of a whole spectrum of political tendencies determined to invest as much time and energy as possible into ensuring that Corbyn would never be the Prime Minister — from the Tory press, terrified at what might happen if their owners started having to pay their taxes, to the idiotically uncompromising People’s Vote campaign, who never seemed quite sure which they hated more: Brexit, or Corbyn. By the time the 2019 general election was called,4 Corbyn had been firmly established as one of the most hated men in Britain: going out knocking on doors this time, you’d inevitably end up being lectured by irate men with barking dogs and puce-faced retirees about how the Labour leader was an IRA sympathiser; on the front page of every broadsheet newspaper, there was an endless spew of stories about this life-long anti-racist’s apparent anti-Semitism. Perhaps worse still, Labour had been backed into a hopeless corner over into Brexit. Needing to retain both Leave- and Remain-leaning voters in order to win an election being fought — let’s face it — both because of and over[…] [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813528) ^rw314813528 - And now, of course, we all know how things worked out. At times, yes, during the 2019 general election campaign, I felt hopeful. But on reflection, all I ever really felt hopeful for was that other people, also, would start hoping — that the transformative force of hope would suddenly sweep us all up in it once again, and socialism would win. So, in those moments of hope, what I was hopeful for, was simply — hope itself. And in a way, I think, this is what ended up doing for the left in 2019. In 2017, Labour activists found themselves hoping — hoping for something quite specific, namely an end to Tory rule. And this hope helped transform the political landscape — admittedly not quite enough. But in 2019, it was like we were all still hung up on the old miracle. So all we could bring ourselves to hope for was the magic of what might happen, again, if we could all just start hoping properly. And so, hope was made a fetish of — Corbyn ending just as Obama began [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813529) ^rw314813529 - Communism had an insane plan: to remake the ‘old breed of man’, ancient Adam. And it really worked. Seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man: Homo sovieticus.” These are the opening lines of Svetlana Alexievich’s vast, polyvocal elegy to the epic failure of the Soviet Union, Second-Hand Time. “You can’t judge us according to logic,” insists one of the many other voices narrating the book, Vasily Petrovich: eighty-seven years old, sometime prisoner in Stalin’s labour camps, and a member of the Communist Party since 1922. “You can only judge us according to religion. Faith! Our faith will make you jealous.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813530) ^rw314813530 - promise. “The constructivists, suprematists, abstractionists who under War Communism placed their graphic propaganda at the service of the Revolution have long since been dismissed. Today, only banal clarity is demanded.” In 1926 and 27, the phantasy of hope was already coalescing into a new reality principle, diminishing itself — diminishing the whole of the future of the human species, perhaps — in the process. Soon this new reality principle would become Stalin’s show trials; forced labour camps; the crushing of dissent in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; Chernobyl. In time, this diminishing would hollow the Soviet monolith into something that, disaligned from phantasy entirely, had become, in essence, pointless — and so by the early Nineties it would be ready to collapse; disintegrating into disaster capitalism and ethnic wars. The central trauma around which Second-Hand Time is built: On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, “And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.” Now, a hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it ought to be. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813531) ^rw314813531 ### Chapter Three: What Can Hope Do? - The whole world seems heavy with anticipation: everything else now seems at least somewhat underwhelming, compared with the promise of our child. Everything suffused with a sort of low-key anxiety [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813533) ^rw314813533 - De Beauvoir thus hypothesises that boys are formed in solitude; girls in the additional affection and attention they are given. But if in this, she writes, “the boy at first seems less favoured than his sisters,” this is only because “there are greater designs for him.” By being starved of affection, little boys are shown, somehow, that they are of a superior class to those who still receive it: “The requirements he is subjected to immediately imply a higher estimation.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813534) ^rw314813534 - if de Beauvoir is right, then what distinguishes little boys from little girls is that, in a world that is anyway very hard and very cold, little boys are raised to be especially hard; indeed, to prize this hardness as one of the most precious facets of their identity. And of course, as I noted at the end of the previous chapter, this hardness (and this coldness) is one of the major problems with our world as it presently exists. Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that masculinity itself is often discussed as something essentially pathological — the “toxicity” of “toxic masculinity.” “Masculinity” can thus be cited as an easy synecdoche for everything that is wrong with our world. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813535) ^rw314813535 - While masculinity might well be forged somehow in hardness and in coldness, it is worth pointing out that it is not necessarily something only very hard and very cold. Masculine people can still be warm and loving, and not just in a “feminised” way. For men, learning to live well in the world is not a matter of simply learning “not to be male” — just as one does not automatically live well in the world simply by happening to be female [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813536) ^rw314813536 - Every now and then, there is some widely-shared Reddit post or similar which helps reveal the full truth of just how isolated and lost men can be: some lost man’s girlfriend complaining that her boyfriend doesn’t wipe his arse properly because he thinks that touching his own arsehole (even with toilet paper) is “gay,” or horrified when it turns out that the man she loves has been spending a great deal of his private time eating plastic, because no one has told him to take the wrapping off oven pizzas before you bake them. These women, one realises when one reads these posts, are the first human individuals to pay these men enough loving attention to tell them how to practice basic hygiene, or safely feed themselves. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813537) ^rw314813537 #### Scattered Traces of Different Colours - Hope — if we are hopeful — illuminates our experience of the world. “Grayness could not fill us with despair,” Adorno tells us in Negative Dialectics, “if our minds did not harbour the concept of different colours, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole.” Hope, as an attitude, is a way of comporting oneself towards the world: hence, it is also a way of seeing. In this, hope helps show us how things “really” are. Adorno again: “Nothing could be experienced as truly alive if something that transcends life were not promised also.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813539) ^rw314813539 - Just look at how the advent of social media seems to have blown every boomer’s mind; how it has, in truth, rendered so many adult human beings newly illiterate; how this illiteracy has helped shaped politics in the West so profoundly, and so damagingly, over the course of the past decade. “The superego,” Marcuse concludes, “enforces not only the demands of reality but also those of a past reality.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813540) ^rw314813540 - Tags: [[c2]] - Over the course of a human life, however, the material conditions one is subject to can change. Indeed, the repeated lesson of modernity is that such change will almost certainly be massive. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813541) ^rw314813541 - Tags: [[c1]] - Adopting the perspective of such a world allows us to reverse the emphasis of much recent left-wing struggle. Instead of seeking to overcome capital, we should focus on what capital must always obstruct: the collective capacity to produce, care, and enjoy. We on the left have had it wrong for a while: it is not that we are anti-capitalist, it is that capitalism, with all its visored caps, its teargas, and all the theological niceties of its economics, is set up to block the emergence of this Red Plenty. The overcoming of capital has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that, far from being about “wealth creation”, capital necessarily and always blocks the production of common wealth. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813542) ^rw314813542 - Note: Mark Fisher in acid communism - This is what the idea of a “hopeful-yet-realistic” response to one’s situation must, ultimately, amount to. Reality, no matter how socially constructed, must be dealt with: one cannot simply, arbitrarily, escape it. But when one stands within reality, and approaches what one experiences with an attitude of genuine hope, then one is able to see through it — just wherever it is possible for the light of redemption to crack through at all. And one can thus fight to change it. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813543) ^rw314813543 #### God’s Greatest Gift - As president, yes, Obama can be credited with a handful of on paper very laudable achievements: passing a long-overdue programme of healthcare reform, for instance, or exiting office by commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning. But these achievements, at any rate typically betrayed by an unnecessary caution (why only commute Manning’s sentence and not pardon her?), were always bought at the price of compromise with a deeply broken Washington system fuelled by dirty money, gerrymandering, and vested interests. ... All of these decisions were taken with a strange, stoic detachment, as if capitulating to evil was just something that sensible adults are supposed to do. Far from his election showing America to be a country ready to leave its legacy of racism behind it, Obama’s presidency gave way to the return of the repressed, as he was succeeded by the proto-fascist Trump. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813601) ^rw314813601 #### A Big Bag of Cans, in the Park, with the Lads - When hope meets electoral politics, there is nothing necessarily obliging it to collapse immediately into cynicism. Consider for instance what happened in the summer of 2017. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813548) ^rw314813548 - At the time, May’s hegemony seemed — the Commons’ alleged intractability not withstanding — insurmountable: going into that election, the Tories had a 21-point lead in the polls. The Prime Minister’s strength lay in her ability to be all things, to every demographic whose vote mattered. To emboldened Eurosceptics, May was “the new Iron Lady” — standing proudly and jingoistically up to Europe atop the White Cliffs of Dover, the perfect Thatcher-substitute onto which they could project their delusions of imperial grandeur. To the politically Sensible, May seemed dutiful, schoolmarmly, a “safe pair of hands” to steady the ship after the braggish reign of all those Bullingdon boys; a Remain voter who must, therefore, not really want to Leave — the perfect handler, in short, to keep the ghouls populating the rest of her party in check. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813549) ^rw314813549 - From the perspective of the young and the poor, it seemed self-evident that the last seven years of Tory rule had been a disaster — and that Brexit, whatever else it was, was fundamentally a distraction from that. A different government was badly needed, or not even just a different government: a different way of being governed, one according to which the state was something people might participate in — not just a sort of alien monster, which intervened only to nudge us into suffering more. Around this time, I kept thinking of a line that Adorno has in his essay “Progress,” turning it over, almost nervously in my head, mental rosary beads: the thought that real progress would consist in “the hope that things will finally get better, that people will at last be able to breathe a sigh of relief.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813550) ^rw314813550 - That the left were “unelectable” was already a basic tenet of the reality principle, of capitalist realism ... They wanted a “broad debate” where the left’s candidate could face a member’s vote — I guess so that Corbyn and McDonnell could be made to realise for sure just how marginalised their views really were. That particular ruse, I think it’s fair to say, backfired: with a mass wave of new popular support — in part the product of rules the right had brought in to diminish the influence of the unions after Ed Miliband’s victory — helping Corbyn surge to beat his deeply underwhelming old New Labour opponents in a landslide. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813602) ^rw314813602 - In the wake of the Brexit vote, with the Tories squabbling and divided and weak, the party had squandered almost all the political capital it might once have held by pursuing a doomed attempt to replace Corbyn with a charmless non-entity called Owen Smith, now best-remembered for attempting a clownish bid at authenticity by pretending he’d never heard of cappuccino. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813553) ^rw314813553 - A new language: slugs, melts, “the absolute boy.” “Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is the Prime Minister,” went one left twitter bio, “and if you disagree you can fuck off.” As if the phantasy that Corbyn had indeed won could be made real just by insisting on it — the forces of the old reality none the wiser. A naive utopianism radiant over everything: Corbyn himself on-stage triumphant at Glastonbury, a whole crowd of revellers singing his name. Ohhhh Jeremy Corbyn, ohhhh Jeremy Corbyn. “Big Bag Of Cans With The Lads” one flag read, words encircling an image of Corbyn dangling a Tesco bag victoriously aloft, heavy with booze — a millennial Liberty, leading his people. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813554) ^rw314813554 #### Our Faith Will Make You Jealous - In the work of the intellectual man-of-the-moment Francis Fukuyama, the “end of history” was proclaimed — what Fisher himself would eventually come to recognise as the founding moment of capitalist realism. But Derrida was determined to rub this widely accepted view of the collapse of communism against the grain. For many on the intellectual left, as Derrida points out, the promise of “really existing” communism did not die in 1991 but in 1956, with the brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. Moreover, the demise of one particular state, he argues, can by no means cause the demands for justice associated with emancipatory, left-wing politics to simply go away: at one stage, Derrida lists all the various horrors of the world as it is, from mass unemployment to homelessness to inter-ethnic conflicts, all of which would be exacerbated — not relieved — in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813556) ^rw314813556 - Philosophers often talk of being “charitable” when analysing the arguments of others — reading the words of others, even one’s opponents, as if what they are saying makes the best possible sense, not trying to trip them up, at every opportunity, on a technicality. Donald Davidson even formulated a “principle of charity,” in his paper “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”: “We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimises agreement.” Doing justice to someone else’s utterances might well mean focusing only on the letter of what they are saying, nit-picking over surface-level meaning like a lawyer. But a charitable reader always asks: what is this person really trying to tell me? Understood as the mean between two extremes, the intellectual virtue of charity cuts, importantly, two ways. Too often, we lack charity when reading the words, or interpreting the actions, of others: we are too quick to snark, too slow to forgive; too dismissive of apologies or explanations. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813557) ^rw314813557 - But then equally, too many of the worst people in the world seem determined to demand from others a good faith that is simply unearned. Right-wing commentators often make a fetish of the “civility” they feel is denied to them, when people on social media call them out for their various idiot defences of the status quo; they moan about there being a “crisis of free speech” in universities when students object to bigots being given a platform to speak, as if what “free speech” really means is everyone being forced to listen to their hate. Cultivating the intellectual virtue of charity is necessary because we need to learn to judge the intentions of others fairly: need to understand, that behind the various utterances and arguments of politicians, business leaders, journalists, colleagues, family members, friends — lurk real interests, which may not always be formally present on the surface of what they are saying. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813558) ^rw314813558 - I’m not a humanitarian,” wrote the German migrant rescue ship captain Pia Klemp, in turning down a medal of honour from the city of Paris. “I am not there to ‘aid’. I stand… in solidarity.” Addressing the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, Klemp claimed that “You want to give me a medal for actions that you fight in your own ramparts… your police is stealing blankets from people that you force to live on the streets, while you raid protests and criminalize people that are standing up for rights of migrants and asylum seekers.” Klemp’s message is clear: “humanity” — conceived, in service to the powers-that-be, as an abstract ideal in which all can share, regardless of colour or creed or nationality or material wealth — stands directly in tension with the real, collective interest of the majority of human beings. The remedy to this is, precisely, the virtue of solidarity. If Klemp’s mission had been a “humanitarian” one, then it would have been subject to the problem associated with the moral virtue of charity I described above: it would have placed her in a position of superiority over the migrants, conceived only as various dregs of the “wretched[…] [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813559) ^rw314813559 - But when it comes to political action, a lack of solidarity is not our only problem. The crisis of agency is not only defined by a lack of charity or solidarity — but also by a lack of what I want to call modesty. As with “charity,” I use the word “modesty” here in what might initially sound like a bit of an idiosyncratic way. The problem here stems, I think, from the stark, almost apocalyptic, terms in which all political issues — genuinely apocalyptic or otherwise — are presented nowadays. Everything has to be the final battle for King’s Landing, or Hogwarts, or whatever — everything gets spun as “the most important election for a generation,” or “the last chance to do such and such,” as if turning the news into a permanent season finale is the only way to hold anyone’s attention at all. And so political action becomes all-or-nothing: we work towards landslide election wins; landmark moments of big, systematic change; the total victory of one policy over another… or just, nothing at all. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813560) ^rw314813560 - Tags: [[c1]] - Private enterprise doesn’t wait to move in when the state abdicates its responsibilities — what’s stopping rival political groups from doing so instead? Likewise, as individuals we can overcome some of the hurdles associated with our atomisation from each other by focusing on transformative action that is directly within our power. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813561) ^rw314813561 ### Chapter Four: How Can We Hope Better? #### Half Full, But of Poison - In his encyclopaedia of pessimism, Infinite Resignation, Eugene Thacker notes that “when pessimism enters philosophical discussion, it is almost never helpful. In fact, it makes things worse.” “However,” he continues, “in its unending miserere, sometimes something interesting happens”. Pessimism “raises the stakes of the discussion, scaling things up beyond the self-interested level of human beings living in a human world, beyond our wants and desires, beyond our individual or collective self-importance.” Shorn of all optimistic delusions, pessimism allows us to confront reality as it is. “A strange philosophy, then,” Thacker concludes. “The most adequate, the least helpful.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813564) ^rw314813564 - Drawing on empirical evidence from psychology, the philosopher of psychiatry Lisa Bortolotti has argued that optimistic delusions can indeed lead to success — but only when they distort reality in some “small” way: a way that, crucially, proves conducive to our taking action [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813565) ^rw314813565 #### It Is Our Sufferings That Should Be Shared - climate disaster can seem like too big a problem for us to really comprehend: philosophers such as Mary Midgley have speculated that there is something about how our minds have been formed that leaves us unable to process such a vast interconnected problem, unfolding over such a long period of time (Midgley, indeed, dubbed climate change a “conceptual emergency” — an emergency not just of our planet, but of our thought). But as its effects gradually worsen, our ability to do so may well diminish even further. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813567) ^rw314813567 - In “Theses on Need,” as we have seen, Adorno takes as his starting-point the thought that need is a social category. Even the distinction between “superficial” and “basic” needs, he declares — thus, the distinction between our need to listen to music, say, and our need to eat food — “is a socially produced illusion.” So-called superficial needs, after all, “reflect the labour process,” which compels people — even “outside of work” — to “limit themselves to reproducing the commodity of labour power,” artificially creating the concept of a “leisure time” which in truth is simply another, indirect aspect of the process by which we obtain the basic things we need in order to survive [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813568) ^rw314813568 - Physical suffering is not something that can be either equivocated about or denied: “to deal discursively with it would be an outrage.” When we witness the suffering of another — or experience suffering ourselves — we know simply, blankly, that no matter how this pain has arisen, things should in some sense be otherwise. In this way, the experience of suffering can help us see through the veil of ideology. “The smallest trace of senseless suffering in the empirical world belies all… that would talk us out of that suffering.” There can be no serious arguments about the rights or wrongs of concentration camps, for example — because these are simply places built to hold human individuals whose existence is considered a problem, in anticipation only of their removal (to some other territory) or death. Hence the veneer of sociopathy necessarily affixed to every right-wing commentator’s face: they are able to make a lucrative living doing what they do, justifying the unjustifiable, but only by being pathologically disingenuous. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813569) ^rw314813569 - physical suffering is something that cannot be denied: like Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” it constitutes something epistemically basic. At one point in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asks us to “Just try — in a real case — to doubt someone else’s fear or pain!” With the implication being: we cannot do it. Or at any rate: we cannot do it honestly. If you saw someone on fire, screaming in pain, you wouldn’t stop to ask if they were really in pain, before helping to put the fire out. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813570) ^rw314813570 #### New Ghosts - There is a danger of course that all this might just seem simply nostalgic — that all hauntology does is look back on and attempt to replicate a lost past in just the way that, say, the music of the Arctic Monkeys can be heard as an attempt to replicate post-punk. But what is being mourned in hauntological music, according to Fisher, is not “a particular period” — but rather the possibilities that certain bygone eras were felt, or are seen, to have contained. “What should haunt us is not the no longer of actually existing social democracy,” (for example), “but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialised. These spectres — the spectres of lost futures — reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world.” They thus herald a certain newness: the newness of a new ghost. They show us, despite everything, that we don’t have to live as we presently do: that there could indeed be another way to organise things [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813572) ^rw314813572 - Hauntology is not, therefore, primarily about nostalgia: it is about imagination. Any progressive politics worthy of the name is founded on our ability to imagine a world better than the one we exist in at present: if capitalist realism represents the attempt to take our political imagination away from us, then hauntology can do the work to get it back. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813573) ^rw314813573 - By imaginatively projecting ourselves into the past, we are also able to learn from the people who once populated it, taking them as our exemplars. Applied hauntology allows us to reawaken old forms of hope, even into a world that is, otherwise, quite hopeless; guiding us to fresh paths of action, in the now. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813574) ^rw314813574 #### What Ought We to Do? - In an age in which the need for real action is beginning to look particularly desperate, we are suffering from a crisis of political agency. ... MEL Magazine’s Miles Klee has written about how this paralysis is being encoded into our language: memed phrases like “you love to see it” and “you hate to see it,” uttered even in response to events we are ourselves directly swept up in, imbue our orientation towards the world with the passivity of spectators watching sport on TV. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813603) ^rw314813603 #### i. Charity #### ii. Solidarity - Neoliberal society is “individualistic” — we all know that. But this does not mean that individuals, as such, are strong: far from it. “In an individualistic society,” Adorno tells us in Minima Moralia, “the general not only realises itself through the interplay of the particulars, but society is essentially the substance of the individual.” Individualistic society is atomised — we are weaker, not stronger, for being divided from the collective. Hence why Thatcher was so keen to convince everyone that there was “no such thing as society, just individuals and their families.” No isolated person can possibly resist the tendencies embodied in the system as a whole ... This is why we need to practice the virtue of solidarity: to stand together — to work, against both the logic and incentives of the dominant order, towards those interests that we share (through our sufferings; through our joys). ... Modesty” is the mean between these two extremes — I use the word to name the virtue, of having a good practical sense of what our agency might achieve. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813604) ^rw314813604 #### iii. Modesty - I remember Maggie Nelson on labour in The Argonauts: “If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so will you. Nevertheless, you will have touched death along the way.” This is one of those times — when life and death draw close. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813584) ^rw314813584 - One knows, I suppose abstractly, going in to this sort of thing, that some loves simply do end in disaster — that in opening yourself to love at all, one risks being one of those people who have to live through perhaps the worst tragedy that can beset a person, even at all. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813585) ^rw314813585 - Well this is the world mate,” I tell you. “Thanks for joining us. I hope being here… works out for you and everything. I love you.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813586) ^rw314813586 - Descartes, famously, was able to remain completely, indefeasibly convinced of his own existence — cogito ergo sum — but only secondarily of the existence of the world outside him. For Midgley, this problem is symptomatic of the fact that the vast majority of the great names of Western philosophy have existed in a sort of perpetual adolescence, with neither wives nor children (the only exceptions Midgley is able to list are Socrates, Aristotle, and Hegel). “Nobody who was playing a normal active part among other human beings,” Midgley states, would be able to regard them as the philosophers have done. “For anybody living intimately with [other human beings] as a genuine member of a family,” the Cartesian cogito “would be cogitamus; their consciousness would be every bit as certain as his own.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813587) ^rw314813587 #### Conclusion: What Can We Hope For? - Meanwhile, the baby himself helps erode the boundaries we normally place between ourselves and other people: in pubs and cafes and on public transport, my apparently very naturally gregarious son cannot be stopped from gurgling at strangers, who themselves cannot help but coo back at him, his parents no longer people they are estranged from. On the rare occasions when they don’t, he looks up at us, strangely anxious — he has, I think with some astonishment, never really met anyone who doesn’t love him. The world my son was born into is one characterised by ongoing and ever-more complex disaster — but for him it is a rich, bright place, full of love and wonder. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813589) ^rw314813589 - In a way, the central point I’ve wanted to make in this book has been that if we want to be hopeful — really hopeful — we need to overcome the sort of atomised individualism which has become the norm across western society, perhaps from Descartes but certainly since the advent of neoliberalism. To answer Kant’s third question, “What can I hope for?” Well, nothing — not if “I” here is supposed to mean the isolated individual, as it were before God. But to answer a slightly different version: we can hope for almost anything at all. In a sense, all this constitutes is a reminder that there is indeed such a thing as society, that there is such a thing as the human species — that “individual” good is ultimately something empty, and pointless, and our aspirations ought only to be collective ones instead. When faced with great adversity, we can always respond in one of two ways: the hopeful, helpful acknowledgement of our collective dependence, and the possibility of collective good; or the paranoid Hobbesianism of indefinitely competing social atoms, who can only hope for an existence maybe a little bit less nasty for one, a little less brutal and short[…] [◊](https://readwise.io/open/314813590) ^rw314813590