The Anarchist and the Animist #5b: The Hope Thieves
Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
The following is an addendum to my recent Letter to my friend Sam. The series goes by the name The Anarchist and the Animist. I refer in this piece to Sam’s last letter, #4: The Ship.
With care, Adam
Dear Sam,
I chickened out in my last letter. There was something I was going to say about hope that has been nipping at my earlobes for weeks now. Around the time we started this dialogue you told me a story that I can’t shake. Forgive me if I’ve told it already, but it is the kind of story that generously comes around to offer seconds. You said, “Sometimes my practice of radical hospitality includes buying someone who is in pain a beer if they ask me for it. Sometimes it includes drinking a beer with them so that they don’t feel alone. What if the numbing effect of that beer is the only thing keeping them alive?”
As we began writing our letters back and forth, I half-jokingly suggested a subtitle for the Anarchist and the Animist series: The Hope Thieves. I described it to you this way: The people who read this newsletter mostly have homes, some savings, and at least one device upon which to open and read the email that comes into their inbox. Let’s say for a moment, that you and I were raised on a steady diet of progressive hopefulness. The excruciating pain radiating from the wound of the way things are would be unbearable without an abiding faith that we’re headed in the right direction. As the story goes, things are bad now precisely because modernity is a work of art in progress.
Unlike the beer you share with your friend on the street, this newsletter doesn’t cost anything. Even if it did, most readers would likely be more than happy to send in a few dollars. I might have to put that assertion to the test in the upcoming months as the money in the account here dwindles. What’ s more, hope is readily available for purchase in reusable containers from a wide array of media outlets. Un-hopefulness doesn’t have a whole lot of sales appeal. So these letters you and I are writing are enacting a kind of pick-pocket move. We are describing not only how the ship is built from violence, but also that it is sinking of its own accord despite our frenzied efforts to apply ever-more-waterproof and expensive band aids. So what happens when someone reading turns around and catches one of us with our fingers in their back pocket? This is what I meant when I made that joke about us being the hope thieves.
Here’s a story for you. This past summer I hired a guy named Mike to put in a concrete foundation for the bakery here at my new place in New York. Mike works full time for a large construction company, so it took him over a week working evenings to build the forms and lay the rebar. For the day of the big pour, he called in a crew from work. Four or five young guys show up at the appointed time. It’s clear from the way that they talk to Mike that they respect him. If I had to guess, Mike’s about sixty-five. The concrete truck is running a bit behind, so there’s time for some standing around. And a cigarette. One of the young guys asks me if he could bring his girlfriend by some time to see the cows. She loves cows. I tell him yes, of course. Some of their crew has been working to put in a new foundation for a huge factory farm about an hour away—a chicken operation. They complain about how much it stinks working there, and they mean literally the fowl odor in the air. Mike says, “Adam’s going to start a school for old-fashioned farming.” I must have told him something to that effect in one of our conversations. I say to the group, “It will be a good thing if a few people know how to raise food when the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves.”
There’s a bit of a silence. One of the young guys pulls his cigarette from his mouth and says, “I know what will happen when the grocery stores stop having food. Everyone’s going to get out their guns.” I knew from the subtle cues that he wasn’t talking about hunting. All of the young men nod or audibly register their agreement. I look over at Mike. He is silent, and he’s not nodding. The concrete truck pulls into the drive, and the conversation is over.
It would be easy to vilify these young, working-class men. They could be jaded, or under-educated, or just plain angry and violent. Or, their story could be told another way. What if they are just honestly reporting on the behavior they have seen in the people older than them over the course of their twenty-some years?
Not all subsets of the population lean on hope as a primary numbing agent. What we call jadedness is another potent coping mechanism.
What I find so remarkable about your work, Sam, is that you are actively trying to earn the trust of people in your neighborhood for whom the grocery stores already stopped having food on the shelves. Meaning, the food there is not for them because they don’t have the money to pay for it. Theft is an option, or begging, or self-medication. If you are successful in earning their trust, they might just tell you what they can see from where they stand.
So I am struck by the possibility that it is nearly impossible for us to imagine the specific causes of suffering experienced by people in different places on the sinking ship. To some it looks like the grocery stores will stay open forever. For others, they have entertained the possibility of the end of this way of living and it doesn’t look like everyone holding hands singing Kumbaya.
Your houseless friends have to figure out how to live alongside constant direct evidence that we have grown very, very bad at sharing on board the ship. All day long, they watch as hopeful people avert their gaze, and walk on by. In your letters, you are describing the experience of the unhoused people you have gotten to know. I am trying to describe modernity through the eyes of nonhumans. Hence the story in my previous LETTER about the conversations along the hiking trail.
Yesterday I was visiting with a friend over breakfast. I tried to explain this to her, saying, “We describe the suffering of the person living on the street as a problem of inadequate access to material comforts. Why is it so difficult for us to imagine that their suffering might also come from not being welcome into anyone’s home?”
She said to me, “It must be painful to have your humanity taken away from you.” Then she paused, and I could see on her face that she was working on something else. Her voice lowered as she said, “I know that I have deep fears that keep me from unlocking the front door of my apartment and offering someone my couch on a cold night. It is very painful to have my humanity unavailable to me.”
My friend was describing the place beyond hope. It is a moment of recognition that the ship stays afloat not only by denying hospitality to many humans and nonhumans. The ship stays afloat by normalizing the unendurable pain of being forced to withhold what we have to offer. If we all stopped hoarding, the ship would go down in a matter of minutes. It is a unique type of pain that is acutely difficult to survive. I say this from personal experience. I feel it every day. Hope is one of the most effective numbing agents.
Yesterday, I sat next to my friend at the breakfast table. She could have stopped after an easy recitation of the suffering of the oppressed. Instead, I watched her turn toward me. And I listened as she asked me to bear witness to her broken heart. In doing so, she said, “If I set down my hope for a few moments, will you set down yours? And will you weep with me as I tell you I have no idea how to begin the work that is being asked of us?”
I have no idea how to begin the work that is being asked of us. Perhaps only this: If we practice turning toward one another, it will surely be easier to remember that we’re not alone when the tears are finally ready to start flowing.
Modernity keeps itself from getting fired by telling us that it has always been this way. “Humans have always been greedy types, but until recently lacked the tools and technologies to bring ourselves to the brink of collapse.” Modernity tells us that hope lies in the human knack for invention, that our natural disinclination toward sharing can be overcome by a project of manufacturing more of everything. “Once we have abolished limits, sharing will become an obsolete obstacle to human survival.” At least that’s the hope.
Modernity warns us that we cannot allow the ship to sink because its sinking would bring immeasurable material suffering and death to countless humans. In part, this is one of modernity’s assertions that I will not refute. It’s not going to be pretty. But I will refute the assertion that we can’t allow it to sink. The ship has never been under our control. We are the ship’s servants—not the other way around. We don’t get to decide when and how it sinks. But we do get to practice our humanity by remembering that the experience of going down will be very different for different people on board. Many of the ship’s passengers have never had the luxury of being hopeful. That’s just not what they see out the little round window in their rooms on the lower level where the water is already up to their knees. In fact, some of them may even have a living memory of a life before being taken on board.
I know this might not be any easy one to read. But I got the sense that I owed it to the nonhumans. They are always asking me to say it plain.
Blessings to you, my friend.
Adam
Thank you