Examples: Having to think counternarratively in times too dire for optimism

To be clear: hope is not optimism. Hope makes no forecasts at all. Optimism is a refusal to face facts. Hope aims to change them. When the world is really in peril, optimism is obscene. Yet one thing can be predicted with absolute certainty: if we succumb to the seduction of pessimism, the world as we know it is lost. https://unherd.com/2023/03/the-true-left-is-not-woke/

To dedicate action to achieve the impossible should never be a matter of optimistic false consciousness. It is rather a recognition that there is no way for the rational mind, in light of present circumstances, to figure out a solution that accords with the postulates of a just peace. Yet at the same time there are present moral and political imperatives of carrying on the struggle to reach such a solution, because the future is unknowable and the present circumstance of occupation, oppression, dispossession, and dispersal intolerable. https://www.academia.edu/17856043/Edward_Said_s_Legacy_and_the_Palestinian_Struggle_by_Richard_Falk

While philosopher Susan Neiman and international law expert Richard Falk, respectively, are talking about very different issues, the two quotes agree that optimism just doesn’t cut it for some cases. Hope is called for because those issues resist rational decision-making; but at that very moment basic morality still requires our response to change things. Consequently, hope as a basic moral response comes to the fore.

I’m not sure I agree. I see the point about a blind-eye optimism. But I am not sure that the limits of rational understanding mean you have exhausted all other ways to redefine the issue for decision-making purposes. I mean, this is a planet of 8+ billion people. Indeed, I associate “hope” with these efforts to redefine “the facts on the ground,” if only because those facts are so heterogeneous. That there are no guarantees any such redefinitions work is also what I associate with hope.

But what does this mean, practically? My examples of hope are existing, already out there counternarratives to dominant issue definitions. To be clear, the four below are not optimistic. But neither are they obscene to consider in dire times when others insist we have not choice, morally, but to do x, y, and z.

1. The counternarrative few want to admit: The role of imagination is not to come up with a better future, but create contingencies for futures

A common diagnosis across critical theories of contemporary society is that it has lost the capacity to imagine a better future. As early as 1985, Habermas voiced the concern that utopian energies were exhausted (Habermas 1985), and variations of this sentiment are often echoed in reference to the neoliberal mantra that ‘there is no alternative’. . . .

Against this backdrop, I propose the following starting definition of the role of imagination in critical theory: It is presented as a capacity that, at once, cannot be cut off from the social order (i.e., it is potentially ideological or delusional) while being often referred to as an element within the human psychodynamic that leaves open the possibility for transcending the social order. . . .

To be clear: The resulting claim—that critical theory presents imagination as a part of the human psychodynamic that is not fully corruptible— is not intended as a reason for optimism. Given the current state of the world, with progressive politics largely confined to rearguard actions (or worse), such a picture would be strange to endorse. Quite the opposite: In the context I discuss here, imagination is presented more or less as an almost transcendental capacity (i.e., a condition of possibility) for transcending the social order—which, given the current state of affairs, may only serve to highlight that no real alternatives are in sight.

Which however means. . .

Following that, imagination is essentially framed as the element within the human psychodynamic that makes complete identification with a social whole impossible. In this sense, it serves as a category introducing contingencies into a social theory deeply centered on the concept of the “totality” of a social order. . . .

If there truly were a totality of the social order that inscribed itself perfectly into the psyche of every individual, not only would emancipatory change be impossible, but any form of change at all would be precluded— an evidently absurd notion. I rather think that attributing the possibility of change (i.e., contingencies in the social order) to an individual capacity implies that there are no social processes on the horizon for a critical theory to cling to (such as theorems like the diminishing rate of profit, etc.). In a sense, this way of thinking about imagination suggests that a better future is possible against all odds.

(Source: Gante, M. (2025). “Imagination in Critical Theory: Utopia, Ideology, Aesthetics” Constellations, pp. 1 – 10 (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.70009)

2. “So long as people meet the baseline,” or: Die so I can be sustainable

To end, I consider the objection that my view, insofar as it sees ecological sustainability as a constraint on a people’s self-determination, could license green colonialism on the basis that new settlers could ecologically sustain a territory better than Indigenous peoples. First, according to my view, the duty of ecological sustainability is sufficientarian and tied to maintaining the material prerequisites for human life, political society, and a people’s capacities to exercise its self-determination. Thus, an outside group cannot violate a people’s self-determination on the basis that it could better ecologically sustain that territory so long as the people meet this baseline. Second, many Indigenous peoples have historically in fact met this threshold by developing effective cultural and political systems to adapt and sustain their ways of life in the ecosystems they have inhabited (Whyte, 2018b). Where Indigenous peoples struggle to ecologically sustain their territories today is generally itself due to colonialism, which would explain why colonialism is wrong and not why green colonialism is justified. [my bold]

The reference to “Whyte, 2018b” is to Kyle Whyte’s “On resilient parasitisms, or why I’m skeptical of Indigenous/settler reconciliation” in the Journal of Global Ethics (https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2018.1516693).

Here, however, is another reference to Whyte with an altogether different implication for whose sustainability in the end matters:

Indigenous ways of knowing and living have never in the history of the planet supported more than fifty million human beings at once; to envision humanity “becoming indigenous” in any real way would mean returning to primary oral societies with low global population density, lacking complex industrial technology, and relying primarily on human, animal, and plant life for energy. . . .

It means “not just our energy use . . . our modes of governance, ongoing racial injustice, and our understandings of ourselves as human”—not only the roots of plantation logic in forced literacy, centralized agriculture, and private property—not only the possibility that it may be “too late for indigenous climate justice,” in the words of Kyle Whyte. . .Thus while pre-modern indigenous social formations are doubtlessly more ecologically sound than the ones offered by progressivist capitalism, the only path to reach them lies through the end of the world. And as much as we may be obliged to accept and even embrace such an inevitability, committing ourselves to bringing it about is another question entirely. https://thebaffler.com/latest/apocalypse-24-7-scranton

Once again, really-existing sustainability looks more like increasing those opportunities to response to unpredictable (read: Anthropocene) change without killing more than ourselves in the process.

3. Breaking up the United States

If the US Civil War over southern separatism is our guide to any forthcoming break-up, most state constitutions will remain in place as governing documents, while any interstate confederation would most probably be modeled on parts of the current US Constitution—though with the significant changes.

Constitution-making in the Confederacy witnessed not just further entrenchment of unconscionable chattel slavery, but also the first Department of Justice, a national citizenship requirement for voting, no functioning supreme court, a six-year term limit for president, civil service reform, strictures against protective tariffs, a district court structure, disavowal of the Monroe Doctrine, and provisions for a presidential item veto, executive budget, and no recess appointments.

Am I recommending all that? No.

What I am doing is asking this question: How else are we to get a parallel version of this range of substantive change without breaking up the country? (And those appalled by any reference to the Confederacy might want to remember that four states—Vermont, Texas, California and Hawaii—opted to give up their sovereignty to join the Union. So why is the reverse out of the question?)

The immediate decline in security and economic growth that comes with the break-up means priority would have to be to keeping the control rooms of our critical infrastructures in hospitals, energy, water, telecommunications, transportation, and public safety operating as reliably as possible. These systems frequently cross current state borders, and the challenge will be to continue inter-regional collaboration for their operation until alternatives—if needed and on the fly—are devised.

4. A counternarrative of “refusal” for rethinking social tolerance and the politics of care

Refusal as a political new beginning

Paramilitary officers stationed down Mount Alebban kept the [Moroccan] villagers in check, documenting every move up and down the mount by protestors and clandestine visitors. Signs and banners were drawn on walls and floors at the camp, and sculpted on rocks, producing the [camp] as a site of resistance and refusal: ‘We refuse the depletion of our resources’, ‘we refuse‘ to bow’, ‘this is our land’, ‘we have rights’, ‘we are not leaving’. . .

To refuse is to say no’, Carole McGranahan (2016: 319) argues. ‘Refusal marks the point of a limit having been reached: we refuse to continue on this way’ (ibid.: 320, italics in original). As a political stance, refusal does not signal the ending of the predicament but indicates a new beginning. Many studies converge in defining refusal as constitutive and generative of something new, including political spaces, communities and subjects (ibid.: 322). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12726

And yet, refusal can entail a nonpolitical beginning

[Maurice] Blanchot contributed a short text entitled “The Refusal.” “At a certain moment, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not discuss or voice its reasons. This is how it remains silent and solitary, even when it affirms itself, as it should, in broad daylight”. . . Blanchot refused. He said no. A “firm, unwavering, strict” no. Blanchot not only rejected de Gaulle, but politics in general. It was what he later described as “a total critique,” directed against the techno-political order of politics and the state. . . .

Blanchot rejected de Gaulle and the false choice between civil war or the general — the civil war was already underway in Algeria and continued after de Gaulle came to power — but he also refused to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution. The refusal was “silent.” In this way, there was a difference between Blanchot’s refusal and other contemporary interventions (Roland Barthes, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Situationists, etc.) that took the form of political analyses and mobilization. Blanchot did not mobilize. The rejection was, of course, a political intervention — or, at least, an intervention in politics. . . .

[But the] refusal did not give rise to a political community in any traditional sense. There was no identity, no nation, no republic, not even a working class, nor a program around which the community could unite. . .As Blanchot put it, “the refusal is accomplished neither by us or in our name, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first of all to those who cannot speak.” The refusal was, therefore, a mute statement. It pointed to a gap in representation and did not refer to any recognizable political subject. https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal#fn62 (endnotes deleted)

Huh? A more complicated example of not-speaking as refusal

This aid architecture supported the burgeoning civil society to train Ettadhamun residents in the skill of ‘interpersonal communication’ (tawasul bayna al-afrad) for the purpose of managing social conflict. Yet the members of the only non-religious association in the neighbourhood of Nogra reject the liberal recommendations of their trainers and carve out a tense neighbourhood co-presence without dialogue with their Salafist neighbours. . . .

The basic principle to adopt, Sihem [the meeting facilitator] suggests, is that ‘there is no absolute truth’ (ma famash heta haqiqa thabita). Some participants nod their heads in agreement but Fethi, a young man. . ., intercepts with an objection:

Fethi: Well, there are absolute truths for some people. We live in a Salafist neighbourhood and these guys believe they enact God’s law from the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him).
Sihem: Okay yes. But you can ask them to explain their point of view. What is their rationale (logique) for following this old law to the letter?
Fethi: No, you can’t ask them for their reasons. I know these guys, they are neighbourhood kids (oulad houma). I grew up with them and went to school with them long before they became Salafist. I even have a cousin who is a Salafist. They don’t engage in conversation if someone asks them to explain their position. They just turn around and leave.
Sihem: That’s the biggest problem in our country [Tunisia]. The dictatorship wanted people to be naive and uncritical. This is why we have so much extremism among our youth. But I encourage you to keep trying to speak with your Salafist neighbours. If they leave the discussion with one single doubt about their position, then you have won. This is the power of dialogue (hiwar).
Fethi retorts: Maybe this is case with other people. But not with the Salafists. They are convinced. They want to live in God’s country. If it’s not Tunisia, it’s Syria. We want to live in a people’s democracy. If it’s not Tunisia, it’s Italy.

. . . even though theories of liberal deliberative democracy either historicize or imagine people connecting with an abstracted concept of the public through the affordances of literacy, capitalism, and technological advancement, the democracy promotion aid that I interrogate here focused on the way people spoke to people they already knew or knew enough about. This was definitely the case in communities that training programmes designated as being in conflict. In practice then, the public sphere they aimed at forging through training did not posit interlocutors as biographical strangers. It is also important to highlight that both Shaja ̔a members and Salafists deliberated with their respective publics (like-minded peers) through their associational life, mosque attendance, in cafés, and on social media. What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.14317?af=R (my underline)

Another way of looking at this

It’s those different worldviews in “What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews” that call to mind the cultural theory of the late Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas.

For them and their students, different worldviews consist of four basic cultures: hierarchist, individualist, egalitarian and fatalist. Each is defined by where people locate themselves in terms of the degree of social constraints and prescriptions they face (‘‘grid’’, high and low; strong or weak) and the degree of group cohesion with which they act (‘‘group’’, high and low; strong or weak).

“Each way of life needs each of its rivals, either to make up for its deficiencies, or to exploit, or to define itself against” Were high group/low grid egalitarians to eliminate low-group/low grid individualists, for instance, “their lack of a target to be against would remove the justification for their strong [high] group boundary and thus undermine their way of life” (Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990, 4). Or to take the meeting participants in the Tunisian case: While in conventional-culture terms they are all Muslims, they could be redescribed as differing in basic worldviews, some being more individualist (the principal questioner) or hierarchical (the facilitators) than others.

What is of interest to us here, though, is that shared tangency among the four cultures where they meet together in the two-by-two typology. “For a few individuals there is a fifth possible way of life, one in which the individual withdraws from coercive or manipulative social involvement altogether. This is the way of life of the hermit, who escapes social control by refusing to control others or to be controlled by others…” (Ibid, 7). While the terms, “withdraws” and “refusing,” capture what we have been discussing, that term, “hermit,” misleads. Those at the meeting know enough about their neighbors different worldviews to know what to withdraw from and refuse to talk about. They’ve already reached the point of knowing when worldviews are incommensurable. (If you think that latter point is depressing, keep in mind that one major reason why Wildavsky, a senior US political scientist, took such an interest in cultural theory was because it kept alive the notion of pluralism.)

So what?

Sounds a bit like advocating social tolerance, doesn’t it? Neighbors put up with what they disapprove of in the name of something like comity. There is some truth in that, but the matter’s more usefully complex.

The opposite of tolerance as just defined isn’t intolerance: In being intolerant, you’re still disapproving. The actual opposite of putting up with what one disapproves of is, as others have pointed out, indifference–not caring one way or another about whatever. And therein, I think, lies the insight.

What is going on with the neighbors is, actually, a kind of caring. Yes, it is caring one way rather than other ways, but whatever way it too is part of the public sphere. Practices of caring are of course socially constructed, but the “politics of care” is a rather narrow way of summing up the point made in the Tunisia and other cases.

In its most policy-relevant sense, this kind of caring centers on maintenance and repair of the public sphere. It is knowing enough about others to know that saying to them, “Good God, man, get a grip; we’re adults here,” gets you nowhere, while knowing all the time that these ensuing areas of non-discussion leave the remaining public sphere in need of constant repair. Some might call this repair arising from refusal, tact (see Russell 2018, 1 – 11).

It’s all well and good to insist that efforts to decouple, disengage or otherwise detach from the political is itself political. But that is hardly the human starting point for refusal: It is, after all, the planet that refuses to prioritize us (Stevenson 2017, 106). We label this “nature’s indifference,” but only because we refuse any denial that our priorities matter, and matter well beyond caring one way or another.

(Other sources:

Russell, D. (2018). Tact. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Stevenson, A. 2017. About Poems and how poems are not about. Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series #16. Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books.

Thompson, M., R. Ellis, and A. Wildavsky 1990. Cultural Theory. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.)