“You’re a true believer, right?”
The tone was somewhat accusatory, and not quite a question you want to field during a job interview.
It was early 2009, I was finishing my PhD on the use of digital tools by community radio stations, and breakfast with a senior professor at a prestigious university was not going as smoothly as I would like.
The True Believer was an early study on social movements by Eric Hoffer. He focused on cult-like behaviour, belief in the cause above all, and rejection of critical perspectives. It is rather a loaded accusation, then, to throw at a young scholar, and clearly arose from a belief that my study of community and activist media must come from a cult-like devotion; a belief that the sector is the immaculate instrument of pending revolution.
Theodore Adorno famously wrote - in his essay, Resignation - a defence of his own refusal to sign up to manifestos and movements. Like Hoffer, he argued that academics who advocate ‘praxis’ (the linking of theory to practical action ) are gaining a false sense of security and impact, in return for sacrificing their ability to engage in “autonomous thinking”.
My response to the interview question wasn’t to reference Hoffer or Adorno (whose work I have long found fascinating, if frequently frustrating ). It was far more prosaic and practical.
No, I’m not a true believer. I don’t believe that the arc of history necessarily ‘bends towards justice’, that there is ‘one simple trick’ to solve our problems, as self-help gurus and TED speakers would have us believe.
But I have hope. And I believe that hope is, in many respects, the one central value that anyone looking to bend that arc of history must have: the hope that change is possible; that our actions might – cumulatively - be of some consequence.
Margaret Thatcher famously claimed that “There Is No Alternative” or TINA. In some respects, she was mirroring Marxist thinkers like Italy’s Antonio Gramsci, and Frenchman Louis Althusser. Gramsci developed the concept of ‘cultural hegemony’ to explain how the existing social system, and the values embedded in it, come to be seen as inevitable and natural. Althusser argued that where authoritarian states use repressive structures (like violence ) to suppress dissent, democratic systems use ideological systems, like education and the media, which effectively train us to accept as natural the way the world is.
Think of a young child starting in school. What is the first thing they learn? Before the alphabet, before tadpoles and slime, they learn to speak only with permission. Have you ever met a child outside school, perhaps at a family function, and had them raise their hand to be granted permission to join the conversation?
I don’t blame teachers for using this rule to govern classroom interactions, and manage noise, but I do think it’s interesting how children internalise these rules, and systems, and understand them as applying universally. If you want to talk, you need the permission of the adult in charge: there is no alternative. Our options are shrunk down to a single pathway.
It is no coincidence, then, that the global social justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, emerging in the aftermath of Thatcher, Reagan and the seeming triumph of neo-liberal ideology, adopted the slogan “Another World Is Possible”.
That claim is, in its own small way, revolutionary. It draws heavily on Gramsci’s concept of counter-hegemony. It united a diverse coalition who would disagreed on what that other world should be, or how to get there. It prescribed no outcomes or strategies, but it did do one important thing, it offered hope.
In the Greek myth of Pandora, after all manner of evil and calamity is loosed upon the world, only one thing is left to counter: Hope. When I first heard versions of this story as a child, I don’t think I appreciated the importance and fragility of Hope as a virtue and gift.
World events, from our American cousins re-electing a narcissistic bigot, to climate change to ongoing genocides, become an onslaught of negativity; a tidal wave turbocharged by social media, overwhelming our psyches and rendering us frozen.
This is why the English scholar Raymond Williams talks of the radical role of Hope, of maintaining the possibility of change and choice, and “making hope practical, rather than despair convincing”. The American community organiser, Saul Alinsky, similarly sees “bringing hope” as the first task of the organiser, and not in some abstract or Polyanna-esque manner, but by introducing those tactics by which some gains may be made, and inspiring communities to work towards change.
So, at a time when despair and resignation are so tempting, where can we find hope? Alinsky reminds us to always focus on our own situation, and what we can achieve there.
Right now, we can work to ensure our next government is the best it can be. One that turns rhetoric on opposing genocide in Gaza into action. One that sees housing as an essential role of government, inextricably linked to building communities, rather than something to be delegated to the market. One that spreads a message of hope and inclusion, rather than echoing the dogwhistle politics of the far-right.
Dr Andrew Ó Baoill is a lecturer at the School of English, Media and Creative Arts at University of Galway.
