[Dialogue] 'The Optimism of Uncertainty' from The Nation

[Harry Wainwright]

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Colleagues, I thought you might like to see this article.  Peace, Harry

   The Optimism of Uncertainty 
   by Howard Zinn


   In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in
   comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage
   to stay involved and seemingly happy?

   I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that
   we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played.
   The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to
   foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at
   least a possibility of changing the world.

   There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment
   will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the
   sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in
   people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against
   tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed
   invincible.

   What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its
   utter unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia,
   in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the
   most advanced imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and
   sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the
   bizarre shifts of World War II--the Nazi-Soviet pact (those
   embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and
   the German Army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible,
   causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of
   Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of
   Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler
   huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?

   And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in
   advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent
   Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China
   renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making
   overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise,
   perplexing everyone.

   No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires
   happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies
   that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the
   benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi
   Amin's adjacent Uganda. Spain became an astonishment. I recall a
   veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not
   imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war.
   But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being,
   open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone.

   The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective
   spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political
   power. Yet they were unable to control events, even in those parts of
   the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The
   failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its
   decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was
   the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear
   weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population.
   The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale
   war in lndochina, conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny
   peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the
   headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the
   presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil,
   where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new
   president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.

   Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the
   struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the
   apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money
   and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That
   apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human
   qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor,
   determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity,
   courage, patience--whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa,
   peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and
   intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold
   calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are
   persuaded that their cause is just.

   I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the
   world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who,
   in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere,
   give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests.
   Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of
   activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to
   unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another's
   existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate
   patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain.
   I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very
   people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are
   themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

   Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware
   of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving
   zigzag toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in
   grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small
   acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.
   Even when we don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact
   that we have been involved, with other good people, in something
   worthwhile. We need hope.

   An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in
   the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just
   foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a
   history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice,
   courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex
   history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it
   destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and
   places--and there are so many--where people have behaved
   magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the
   possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different
   direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to
   wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite
   succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings
   should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a
   marvelous victory.


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