I’m now on the side of being a senior fellow for
Humanity United, a philanthropic foundation of the
Omidyar family. And from the world of philanthropy
and from the world of policy and politics, I’ve often
heard the phrase, “Hope is not a strategy.”And of course within that, people are placing a great deal of confidence that if we are
capable of developing a strategy, change will happen. What I found rather consistently is
that while hope may not be a strategy, I’ve never seen change happen without it. This has
to do with desperation and powerlessness. There’s a famous phrase from way back, “Power
corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” What I’ve found is that powerlessness is
often the seedbed of violence. I think it was Bruno Bettelheim who said that violence is the
strategy of the person who can imagine no other alternative. Whether that’s self-violence
or violence inflicted on another either by way of protection, prevention or control. The
landscape of violence is a landscape of hopelessness. And while I wouldn’t want to place
myself in direct contradictory argument with Thomas Merton, what I found in settings of
deep conflict is that people are navigating between memory and imagination. Ultimately,
holding that space in a healthy way requires the seed of hope if we are to imagine beyond
what currently exists. Seed planting, however, in a way that is extraordinarily grounded,
and not otherworldly.Exactly. Most of the people where I worked in Latin America in particular are
people who are land-based. Campesinos, agriculturalists. When you plant a
seed, is that a strategy or is it hope?So when a campesino, say in Alta Montaña in Colombia, plants a tomato seed or yucca, their
imagination is that within a few months it’s going to provide sustenance for their survival
this year. But what of the campesino who plants the avocado tree or the oak? Why would
they do such a thing? [Laughs]. This is the part that has been, for me, so riveting. That
people in the midst of that deep desperation still have this capacity to plant these seeds.
They are in essence saying, “I opt for imagination. I have hope for the legacy of what is yet
to come while at the same time I know I have little control over what will emerge.”I cannot refer to that as hope-free. Wendell Berry, the farmer poet from the US, he has this
wonderful phrase: “I have seen the seed lie in the dung and rise as corn.” You know? The
dung is really the excrement but it is at the same time the fertiliser. So to me that notion
of it is one that is deeply rooted and deeply sustaining of hope. That is the capacity to
transcend the powerlessness of desperation that would shift us into some form of violence.
Asking the question, “How are we together going to transcend the things that we have
created that are destroying us?” To me, that’s hope embodied. Jorge Luis Borges, the
famous poet from South America, was asked once about hope. And he said—I’ll have to say
it in Spanish and then I’ll translate it—he said, “Ah! La esperanza! Ese hermoso recuerdo del
futuro.” Now in English: “Ah! Hope. That beautiful memory of the future.” [Laughs].You speak and write a lot about hope. There
are a few thinkers in the social change space
that believe in a hope-free approach to change.
Meg Wheatley comes to mind, Thomas Merton,
Stephen Jenkinson. And I’m wondering where you
currently sit on the hope/hope-free spectrum.[Laughs].
It is hope grounded in reality
It’s both.
There is a certain humility and mystery that
accompanies the embodied hope that I find in
seed planters.
57REHUMANISESCONVERSATIONS