There Will Be a Future, but Its Origins Will Have Little to Do With Hope or Despair

When President Trump signed into law last week the bipartisan Great American Outdoors Act, he gave his fellow citizens something he’d refused to give them before, an uplifting and inspiring sense of what’s possible in America. And when he is voted out of office in November, the relief of his absence will be punctuated by his uncharacteristic and momentary alliance with those devoted to promoting the common good. It’s the first environmentally sensible and sensitive thing he’s done in office, that I can tell.

The Outdoors Act will generate billions of dollars over five years from oil and gas revenues for the Land and Water Conservation Fund and will be earmarked to repair years of neglect in our national parks. Whether the Trump people will feel obliged to actually do something useful with that money is another matter. But still he joined Democrats and Republicans to make a nurturing gesture toward the future.

And that has prompted me to realize once again that, indeed, there will be a future.

What we think will happen in the days and years ahead is not a question of our compromised optimism or the presumptions of our pessimistic despair. It really doesn’t matter how we feel as long as our disappointment and anger hasn’t solidified into a neurotic and stalemating knee-jerk cynicism, a cynicism that can only give birth to dead ends and doomsday vistas.

What all of us do and think right now will have a determining, if mostly invisible, influence on the world we and our offspring inhabit in the future. That’s just the way human history works. What matters is our motives; our sense of purpose; our self-respect as humane, compassionate and rational people.

I sense that for many of us, COVID isolation has stimulated a soul-searching reconsideration of what we think is important in life. It might have caused in enough of us a willingness to commit to, if not a course of action quite yet, then at least a reassessment of goals for ourselves and for the people of our region, nation and world. That’s what responsible people do — they conceive of a future worth their best efforts to achieve — not egotistically, not with the arrogance of personally “being effective,” or even of “making a contribution,” but as a standard to guide their assessment of current leadership and to judge their own level of seriousness and commitment to what they think is right.

It’s not about hope for the future. It’s about working for a future you consider honorable and humane, with having no control over the “results” of yours or anyone else’s efforts.

In the New York Times, Eric Utne, of the Utne Reader, quoted Vaclav Havel’s view of hope. “It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” We can’t know the future, but that doesn’t mean we have to abandon it.

Utne thinks we “need to segue now from the techno-industrial market economy to its sequel — much smaller-scale, less energy intense, more localized communities that prize food growing, knowledge sharing, inclusiveness and convivial neighborliness. We need to learn from culture’s around the world that are still living as stewards of the larger, biotic community.”

That’s a view that still resonates with the sensibilities and idealism of millions of Americans, young and old. And it certainly does for me, despite the multitudes of disappointments and flubbed opportunities of the past.

COVID isolation has also allowed me to re-inhabit my library. And when I rediscovered philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s description of the motives and purposes of the liberation movements of the 1960s — summed up in the phrase “the great refusal” — I saw again that the commitments of the past live on into the evolving present. And our commitments will as well. “The great refusal” is still alive today in cities across the country, in the thoughts and actions of people who refuse to accept racism and sexism, in all their violent, covert and obnoxious forms. They also refuse, at great personal cost, to allow ugly and brutal bigots to deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and peaceful assembly.

It’s even possible to see Marcuse’s analysis of President Johnson’s vision of the Great Society as still living on in the minds of thoughtful Americans today who understand that war does not create anything but destruction. Millions of us understand that an egalitarian, peaceful society, with full employment and living wages, a society that’s devoted to the personal betterment of everyone, is unlikely to spring forth from an inherently violent and aggressive economic system grounded in a military-industrial complex.

As Marcuse wrote in 1965, “It is perhaps conceivable that something like full employment can be attained by an expanding war or defense economy, plus an expanding production of waste, status symbols, planned obsolescence, and parasitarian services. But … such a system would produce and reproduce human beings who could by no stretch of the imagination be expected to build a free, humane society.”

Many of us know the kind of world we want. We can describe it in part by the following goals: A democratic world without racism, misogyny, or ruling classes; a world without industrial and military pollution and the sickness it brings; a world dedicated to equal justice under law; one that values education for its role in furthering mature and responsible human behavior; a world without poverty and the social child abuse and the starvation it can bring; a world that isn’t literally saturated with murderous devices, from hand guns to nuclear weapons; a world in which the natural environment, and the creatures that depend on it, us included, is treated with definitive respect; a world in which climate change and the pandemics it stimulates, is no longer an immediate threat to life on earth.

In COVID seclusion, I hear myself thinking like this: Do I believe that such a world is impossible to achieve. Absolutely not. Am I hopeful that such a world one day will exist, not really. But if I wouldn’t place a bet on its impossibility, it must mean that I think somewhere deep down that it is, indeed, a viable potential reality and, if that’s the case, then I have no alternative but to make its evolving reality a motive that guides my political, social and creative behavior. It’s not a matter of hope or despair. It’s a matter of what I’m willing to work for and what I’m willing to abandon. There is no middle ground. And, like so many Americans, I find myself radically unwilling to abandon any of those humane and idealistic goals for the future of our world.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it