False Cheer Won't Help Us, But "Active Hope" Will

False optimism and the power of courage, the seriousness of Stephen Colbert, Monday morning stress relief and more in our Sunday links roundup

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My feature post this week looked at a totally normal reaction to the times we are living in: avoiding the news completely. It makes sense that we’d want to put down our phones or cancel our subscriptions, and generally turn away from the torrent of terrible news out there. It’s a reasonable mental health strategy for many of us.

Research into news avoidance found that a lot of us think that journalists could do a better job explaining how news affects us directly — and what we can do about it.

And it was that desire for some sense of agency that led me to finally tune into a podcast that I had, frankly, been avoiding for a while: a conversation between the ecologist, Buddhist and activist Joanna Macy and the climate organizer Jess Serrante called We are the great turning.

Macy is an elder stateswoman of environmental activism and spirituality. Serrante is an organizer and activist in her mid-30s who has been Macy’s student for years.

Their conversation, held over several sessions at Macy’s kitchen table, explores how to take the fear, rage and grief we’re experiencing over the state of the world and turn it into something we can actually make productive use of.

Fortunately, it’s not a conversation about blind optimism. “If you try to cheer me up, that means you don’t get it,” the almost 95-year-old Macy said at the time. (Macy has recently entered hospice).

Hope is so basic to the American values system that it forces us to bypass a range of complex emotions about the realities of our situation. The expectation in our culture is that if we just try hard enough to stay positive, things will change.

“Americans want to be comfortable instead of truthful,” Macy says.

Instead, Macy proposes an idea called “active hope”: which calls us to participate in the world we want to build, without leaving our rage, sadness and confusion behind.

To have hope in this way, Macy says, is to realize that we don’t know enough to be confident that it’s a lost cause.