In the midst of the disaster that spreads around us, I turn once again to a remarkable reflection of John Berger:
"Naming the intolerable is, in itself, hope. When something is considered to be intolerable, action is subject to all the vicissitudes of life. But first of all, true hope resides in a mysterious way in the capacity to name the intolerable as such. This capacity comes from a great distance, in the past and in the future. This is the reason that politics and courage are unavoidable."Clearly, Berger refers to politics as the conscious and organized action that addresses the common good, not the game of the political and governmental intriguer who is part of the intolerable. It refers to the courage, effort, impetuous spirit, valor, to the dignified rage that the Zapatistas direct, not the irrational outbursts of violence that are creating equally intolerable situations.
How is hope generated? How to assure that verification of the intolerable does not give way to paralysis or despair? What is the mysterious path to which Berger alludes?
It is increasingly recognized that "radical hope is the essence of popular movements", as argued by Douglas Lummis. Each social movement is made up from the hope that joint action will be able to get what is sought. But we must clearly distinguish hope from expectation. Expectation expresses the arrogance of pretending that one can plan and control the future, such that it often becomes a mechanism for manipulation and control.
During the 1940's, talk of a "revolution of rising expectations" fed the collective desires with promises of improving itself with the consumerism that defined the capitalist expansion. It is a "revolution" that self-destructed. A current expression of the intolerable is the frustration produced by the failure of long-cherished and exhausted expectations, the frustration of the recent graduate who cannot find work in what he studied, and in that of the worker who pawned his entire life in the expectation of a peaceful old age that today he is skimping on ...
Hope is something else. It means recognizing our own limits, which are precisely those characteristic of the human condition, and opening ourselves to surprise, to the charm of the unexpected. It implies, for example, knowing that "society as a whole" is the result of a huge number of factors and conditions that are entirely unpredictable. It would be bad if we were to put ourselves in motion by demanding first a comprehensive design for the society that we might contribute to creating with our action. But that radical hope, aware of its limitations but also its potential, is the very hope on which survival of the human race today depends. As Ivan Illich suggested over forty years ago, we need to rediscover hope as a social force at a time when restlessness boils at the base of society, and when a growing number of people contemplate the radical moment that leads to saying:
"I do not obey anymore. I do not submit. I am not passively willing to accept this terrible fate that has been imposed on us."We are beset by a multitude of scattered powers of a mafia nature, powers that rob us of all calm and do not let us live in peace. We live under the constant threat that everything we love and have might fade away in the air, that some of these powers might take away our jobs, homes, lands, rights and guarantees enshrined in the law: security, health, life itself ...
Against all this we raise hope, but it is not, as Vaclav Havel said, the conviction that something will happen in a certain way, but instead the conviction that something is correct, regardless of what happens.
Radical hope is sustained by the belief, well founded in historical experience, that no power can make impossible what we hope when the thread of history is broken, and a people say with conviction: Enough! We are not going to tolerate it any more. Spanish original
*Gustavo Esteva's work with grass roots movements is recognized internationally. In 1996 he advised the Zapatista movement in Oaxaca. A founder of the University of the Earth (Oaxaca), he has also been a key figure in the foundation of several NGOs and Mexican and Latin American networks, which Esteva prefers to describe as "hammocks", rather than as networks or coalitions, because they try to adapt to initiatives undertaken by their members.