The
Optimism Of Uncertainty
By Howard Zinn
10
September, 2004
The
Nation
In this awful world where the efforts
of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who
have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident
not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the
game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate;
life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the
world.
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment
will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden
crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts,
by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick
collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.
What leaps out from
the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability.
A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that most sluggish
of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial
powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train
to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War
II--the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop
and Molotov shaking hands), and the German Army rolling through Russia,
apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back
at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets
of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler
huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?
And then the postwar
world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese
Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution,
and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most
fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West,
cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone.
No one foresaw the
disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after
the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the
newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's
Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda. Spain became
an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling
me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without
another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy
came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone.
The end of World
War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence
and control, vying for military and political power. Yet they were unable
to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be
their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union
to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost
a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even
the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination
over a determined population. The United States has faced the same reality.
It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducting the most brutal bombardment
of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw.
In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of
the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil,
where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president
pledged to fight destructive corporate power.
Looking at this
catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice
should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power
of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in
their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again
and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than
bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization,
sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience--whether by blacks in Alabama
and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or
workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself.
No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are
persuaded that their cause is just.
I have tried hard
to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my
friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence
of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young
people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people.
And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands,
more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of
one another's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with
the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up
the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that
the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement
are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.
Revolutionary change
does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but
as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent
society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate
in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of
people, can transform the world. Even when we don't "win,"
there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved,
with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.
An optimist isn't
necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time.
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based
on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but
also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to
emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see
only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember
those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved
magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility
of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And
if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some
grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents,
and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of
all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
This article
was adapted from The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's
Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear (Basic Books, www.theimpossible.org).