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?



 

Monsters, Trust, Nihilism, Hope

Newt: My mommy always said there were no monsters--no real ones--but there are, aren't there?
Ripley: Yes, there are.
Newt: Why do they tell little kids that?
Ripley: Most of the time it's true.
Aliens  (1986, James Cameron, dir.)

Most of the time, it's true.

I concluded yesterday that trust may be a precondition for hope. When we tell young kids that everything's going to be all right, we're not offering a literal prediction of the future. We know, being humans who have lived for a significant amount of time, that things are often not all right. There are monsters. But "everything's going to be all right" isn't a factual description. It's a performative gesture. It brings into being the reality of love and trust. I love you and will do my best to be with you and protect you.

That trust, in turn, enables hope. I knew you would come, Newt says as Ripley rescues her. There are real monsters. But I hope. I hope.

As I waver between hope and nihilism, I wonder whether the passively or actively nihilist forces animating so much activism on the right and the left stems from a loss or lack of trust. I can well see how strains of Afro-Pessimism have at their root the charred remains of trust in whiteness. Trusting whiteness, from this point of view, has repeatedly proven lethal to black people. Whiteness is the zombie-bit person who swears they won't turn, only to savage you at the earliest opportunity. We have (collectively, generally) squandered any right to request or expect the trust of black and brown people.

Lack of trust subtends an absence of hope. There's no hope of a racial utopia, the realized dream of the beloved community. Whiteness is, from the Afro-Pessimist view, definitionally about maintaining and deepening the oppression of black people. It will never get better so long as whiteness exists. And whiteness--like captialism, misogyny, greed, bias--seems immortal.

That certainty itself resembles a kind of trust, however. The nihilist trap lies in its own smug-depressed-more-cynical-than-thou surety. I trust that there is no hope. I thus hope for nothing. Such a view founds the thanatopian urge reflected in the nihilist political bumper sticker: Giant Meteor 2020. As in The Neverending Story, the Nothing acquires substance, agency. It becomes a kind of dark deus ex machina for intractable situations, an anti-miracle, salvific entropy. When in doubt, trust nothing. Put your trust into the Nothing. Hope in the Nothing.

That's a bit more Cthulhu-esque than the average Afro-Pessimist, I'll wager.

What creates trust? Philosopher Keven Vallier distinguishes political trust--our trust in the institutions of government, our faith in peaceful transfer of power after elections, etc.--from social trust--our trust in strangers to abide by the codes that keep society more or less orderly. I wonder if that insight leads to distinctions in hope and nihilism. Is there a meaningful difference between political hope and social hope? Between political nihilism and social nihilism?

Maybe, in other words, I can find a way to talk about hope and nihilism, have my cake and eat it too.

There are monsters, after all. But, at the end of the film, Newt asks if she can dream. Ripley, knowing that monsters exist, affirms that "we both can."

The Preconditions for Hope

Roundtable-planning for my proposal about the affective drives for performance continues apace. I've sent out invitations; I'm waiting on yeses or noes. Love and outrage are onboard. We'll see about joy, patriotism (or nostalgia), devotion, and whatever LF wants to do (if she says yes)/

And I'm delaying committing to hope or nihilism.

I should do hope. What gets me out of my doom spirals, I told my therapist yesterday, is teaching. When I'm teaching students, I cannot project pessimism and nihilism to them. I may loathe myself for my white male Americanness, but I cannot stand self-loathing in my students. It's Fred Rogers all the way: There's no one else in the whole world like you, and you are capable of loving and being loved just as you are.

There are few things I hold for certain. When I say that Rogers message to students, though, I deliver it with as much certainty and conviction as I can muster. There's no room for hedging. There's no room for doubt or exceptions.

I once asked my sister (wisest person I know, mental health counselor) about the ethics of assuring small children that everything's going to be all right. It's literally not true. She allowed that, of course, bad things happen to everyone, children included. Of course, telling children that nothing unpleasant will ever touch them their whole life long would be a recipe for dysfunction. But when a parent tells a frightened child that they'll be OK--most of the time--it's not a literal prediction of the future. It's a promise: I love you. I am with you. I will do my best to stay with you and protect you.

She reminded me of a snippet from Won't You Be My Neighbor (the excellent documentary on Mr. Rogers). Mr. Rogers (very young in this clip) tells of one of his first encounters with a group of small children. One of the kids shows him a stuffed animal, telling him that its arm came off in the wash. This was a test, Mr. Rogers reflected. They waited to see how Mr. Rogers would respond. Would he swoop in and save them from their fear? (But your mommy fixed it, didn't she? It's all better now!) Instead, he asked a question: Our arms don't fall off when we wash them, do they? The kids, delighted that someone pinpointed their real fears here, responded enthusiastically.

The point, my sister said, isn't the factual status of Mr. Rogers's statement. Sometimes, indeed, children do lose limbs. But what the kids are asking isn't Do bad things ever happen? but Can I trust you to love me? Children need a foundation of trust and consistent care in order to thrive.

So do my students need something other than the yawning nihilism of my own pathologies. They have troubles aplenty. They're stressed, busy, going into debt, and terrified of the future. They're struggling to discover who they are apart from the family patterns they've learned throughout their childhood.

They aren't children. They know bad things happen. But they can all use a bit of Mr. Rogers certainty, the thing that is true by virtue of its affirmation: You are precious. You are loved. You can love just as you are.

There's a hope in that, or at least the preconditions for hope.

Caught between Hope and Nihilism

Every year around this time I wake up and realize that the deadline for proposals to the Big Summer Conference is November 1. And every year around this time I brainstorm madly for some kind of session that matches the Conference's yearly theme ("Drive" this time, since it's in Detroit).

After today's wake-up and brainstorm, it looks like I'm going to be pulling together a roundtable about the deep, enduring emotions (affects) that drive social movements in performance. My idea is to have each roundtable participant write/present something about a particular emotion. I have a friend who's researching fear. Another writes about outrage (a favored topic of mine in the past). Someone else is doing love.

Eventually I need to decide what to do myself. I'm caught between hope and nihilism.

Just put that on my tombstone: "I'm caught between hope and nihilism."

Actually, I don't want a tombstone. Or a funeral, really. I'd prefer to leave no trace and disappear from human memory as quickly as possible. Nihilism FTW! Except--I feel guilty thinking that. Can nihilism ever be anything other than a mental pathology? (There's my paper, probably.)

There's already a go-to performance scholar for hope: Jill Dolan. Hm. I should ask her. She's a super-star, of course, and likely already engaged. But it's worth a shot. I hope she says yes! LOL.

Nihilism and pessimism aren't safe topics for me, really. They're fascinating in the way that unhealthy-for-me things often are, like chocolate fudge ice cream sundaes from Baskin-Robbins. Or chocolate pudding. Or chocolate anything. I can get into really, really bad spots thinking too much about pessimism.

I have a pessimistic bent and a tendency to depression. This is both a neutral fact of my brain/personality and a complication for me as a Christian. The second fruit of the Spirit, we're told, is joy. It's right after love. Christians should be joyful, hopeful, cheerful. I'm not by nature a cheerful person.

I strive for pragmatism tempered by humble gratitude. The more I can recognize my kneejerk pessimistic thoughts as reactivity, the better. But even after that, it is often hard for me to discern reason for hope (as my recent posts have illustrated). When obliged to be a leader or a teacher, I can shift into an optimistic gear. It's a fake-it-til-you-make-it kind of gesture. Sometimes it works to get me out of a spiral.

But we'll see.