Neither Hope nor Nihilism but Fear

So, I whipped up a roundtable submission--six powerhouse scholars (well, five plus me) each talking about a collective affect such as joy, love, or outrage. I was concerned about whether I should choose hope (life-affirming, important, but kinda done before) or nihilism (fascinating, but very dangerous for me).

As it turns out, I didn't have to say in the proposal. I had decided, though, that if pressed I'd say I'm talking about fear.

If there's a roundtable about motivating affects, fear just has to be on the menu. I had hoped that another scholar (JS) would have written about it. But she's not going to this conference. I have a few others who might write about fear. But if they don't, I have to.

Fear, I think, attends both hope and nihilism in that both are reactions to fear. Hope reacts by putting a brighter possibility in front of or just beyond the zone of anxious, threatening uncertainty that is fear. Nihilism embraces it, refashioning the worst possibility into a certainty; the nihilist seeks some psychic support by recognizing that certainty as such.

Fear might be the way out of the rock and the hard place of hope/nihilism.

I do, after all, find myself talking a lot about fear. When I encounter conservative folk at Better Angels events, for instance, the primary emotion I get from them isn't (as many blues would have it) anger and hatred. It's fear. They're afraid of a world that seems to be barrelling headlong into a zone they don't recognize. They're afraid of being displaced, of having nowhere to go. ("Why are white people scared about becoming a minority in 2040?" tweets Levi Ackerman sardonically, "Are minorities treated badly in America or something?") They're afraid that liberals hate straight white Christian people and want to see them rounded up and shot. They're afraid of losing their jobs, of no longer knowing how to navigate the world for themselves and their families.

This fear leads them to place hopes in a big strongman like Trump, a bully--but for us!--who by virtue of his bullyhood has the power to quash those who threaten them. He'll drain the swamp. He'll build the wall. He'll put judges on the federal judiciary that'll protect unborn children and stand up for the rights of Christians.

Or it leads to nihilism. Trump is a force of chaos, less a bully than a kaiju imported into the porcelain world of DC so that he can smash everything. He won't drain the swamp; he'll burn it to ash. He is, in his chaos, the cleansing fire, the revolution out of which (somehow, magically) a new and better world will be born.

Obviously most reds are much more nuanced than this. And obviously blues like me have our own fears, which lead to our own mad hopes and grim nihilisms.

It's not easy, however, for many blues to hear about reds' fears, especially when those reds are white, straight, Christian males.  Compared to the real (as in, statistically substantiated) precarity of black and brown young men in the US, white people's worries (on average, statistically) can seem trivial. Add to that the factor that aggrieved white entitlement exacerbates the forces that endanger black lives and the room for empathy for white conservatives' fears shrinks to zero.

That would be itself a rather pessimistic/nihilist take on a different fear--the fear of terminal polarization. I wonder what a more hopeful take might be?