Rebecca Solnit: Why Cynicism Feels Smart—and Isn't
6/23/202640 min
Hope isn’t found in looking to the future; it’s in the past. This week, Willow sits down with legendary writer and activist Rebecca Solnit for a conversation about uncertainty, change, and the stories we choose to believe about what’s to come. Together, they explore why hope is not naïve optimism when rooted in evidence, and how history reminds us that change often arrives in unexpected ways. Drawing from Rebecca’s new book, The Beginning Comes After the End, this conversation examines the progress made in the last 70 years as cause for hope—and proof that the impossible happens all the time.
For more about Rebecca Solnit: https://www.rebeccasolnit.net/
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsRebecca Solnit· Guest0:00
[gentle music] Hope is a frilly pink dress people don't wanna expose their knees in. They feel vulnerable. Despair is a black leather jacket everybody feels really cool in.
Willow Defebaugh· Host0:13
I don't know when hope fell out of fashion, but I do think that Rebecca Solnit is right. Despair is this alluring, sleek leather jacket that often feels like the more popular choice today, and maybe it is because hope itself is vulnerable. It's actually scary for us to admit that we don't know how things are gonna turn out. Part of what I love so much about Rebecca's work, by the way, she has literally written the book on hope, is that she points to a vision of hope that's not tied to the future but rooted in the past. Her latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End, catalogs the many transformative victories in social progress, environmental progress, that have defined the last few decades. It's a way of arming yourself or equipping yourself with knowledge and confidence that the world itself has changed many times and is actually always changing.
Rebecca Solnit· Guest1:22
You can't see change unless you're slower than change in the sense that you stay still long enough to see that things are not