The Idea of Globalism Is Alive: Pairing Uncertainty and Hope

There is a growing number of analysts – are they the realists or the pessimists? –who consider the current state of politics not as a fall from a stable democratic baseline nor even a crisis that demands exceptional explanation.

In their view, periods of reform, the expansion of rights and constraints being put on institutions do not represent durable achievements, but rather historically contingent interludes within a longer history of domination and disorder.

I understand that this viewpoint certainly helps keep us on our toes and warns against mistaking temporary gains for permanent progress.

But as for myself, I think there is something eerie about it. Isn’t it better to remain disappointed rather than constantly aware that all good things are passing? You know what I mean?

Uncertainty is something we have to learn to live with

That is why I find myself drawn to another way of thinking.

The alternative does not require resurrecting faith in progress, nor denying the rising pessimism about democracies’ inability to perform. Rather, it requires rethinking what hope can mean under these conditions.

This is where the work of the historian and essayist Rebecca Solnit, most notably her latest essay collection No Straight Road Takes You There, offers a different orientation. She proposes to accept uncertainty, but without surrendering agency.

Solnit insists that historical outcomes remain fundamentally open, and that there is a persistent gap between what power intends and what it ultimately brings about. Who knows where events may yet land? That uncertainty is something we have to learn to live with, and perhaps even to hold onto.

The deliberate misinterpretation of Charles Darwin

One of her interventions that I find particularly helpful is the challenge she poses to the dominance of competition as the presumed natural order of political and social life.

That narrative is often misattributed to Darwin and repackaged as social Darwinism. As Solnit reminds us, Darwin’s own understanding of fitness referred less to ruthless domination than to adaptation within an environment. And that often depends on cooperation, symbiosis and collective belonging rather than ferocious competition.

We are not in this world merely to compete with one another. That is not our sole survival impulse. I find it important to pause on this, to see and name an alternative to that framing.

Authoritarian narratives: Built on isolationism

Since the 1960s, scientific and social theory has increasingly moved away from competition as the primary driver of change and toward an appreciation of how deeply cooperation structures both survival and transformation.

A second, closely related point concerns isolationism, on which many of today’s authoritarian narratives are built. It connects directly to the competitive logic above.

Compete ferociously for your own kind, disregard interdependence and imagine a world in which only your kind — whatever that may be — can survive while the rest is pushed aside. There is no such thing. There is no such world.

Solnit describes this as the ideology of isolation, a worldview that insists nothing is connected to anything else and that actions either have no consequences or generate no responsibility. As she writes:

Isolationists and interconnectionists might be more useful terms for the political divides of our time than left and right… You could describe the position as: “Nothing is mutual, there is therefore no justification for aid.”

Solution: Embrace uncertainty with solidarity

Hope, in this account, is inseparable from an acknowledgment of interdependence, from the recognition that consequences travel and that responsibility cannot be sealed off at borders, markets or identities.

This is why Solnit returns repeatedly to traditions of mutual aid and solidarity, invoking figures such as Eduardo Galeano, who insisted that charity reproduces hierarchy while solidarity affirms horizontal connection and reciprocal learning.

For example, what is mutual in mutual aid, she stresses, lies not primarily in the exchange of goods or services, but in the underlying belief that those who give and those who receive are bound together within the same moral and historical field.

Solnit is also explicit that hope has enemies, and that these enemies are not limited to despair alone:

“When you take on hope, you take on its opposites and opponents: despair, defeatism, cynicism and pessimism. And, I would argue, optimism. What all these enemies of hope have in common is confidence about what is going to happen, a false certainty that excuses inaction.”

Despair, when it hardens into prediction, becomes a luxury available only to those insulated from immediate harm. For those living under bombardment, occupation, precarity or repression, inaction is not an option, and the foreclosure of possibility becomes a form of violence in its own right.

Solnit’s insistence on measuring time in larger increments, on resisting the illusion that today simply repeats yesterday, speaks directly to this point.

Memory as a political resource

Memory, in her work, stands as a political resource. Continuity of memory reminds us that the present is neither original nor final, that we are both descendants of past struggles and ancestors of future ones. That the inability to imagine a different future should not be confused with the impossibility of having one.

It is also why Solnit warns against the casual proclamation of defeat. She sees that not as neutral commentary but as a form of participation that actively shapes outcomes by discouraging engagement and narrowing the field of action.

What motivates political action, Solnit argues, is not certainty but a sense of possibility within uncertainty, the recognition that outcomes are not yet fully determined and that collective action may still matter.

The importance of hope

Hope, in this perspective, is not comfort. It is risk. To hope is to take a chance on losing, but also to take a chance on winning, and without that risk, nothing changes.

If there is a resolution worth carrying into the coming year, it lies here rather than in the promise of imminent transformation.

But we must also be aware that repair, too, is a process. It is slower and less visible, lacking institutional sponsorship and resistant to quantification, but no less real for being difficult to observe.

My New Year’s resolution

I will continue to write from within this tension in the year ahead. I do so not because I am hopeful in any naive or consolatory sense, but because resignation remains the most reliable ally of degraded systems, and refusing it remains, however modestly, a political act.