Krista Tippett: Welcome to a new session of our hope course. Today, we are going to continue the theme of seeing the bigger picture, a more spacious picture that is in fact more aligned with the fullness, with the full complexity of reality. And our teacher is the journalist Rebecca Solnit. She’s a wonderful writer and chronicler of our time, not just of what happens, but the meaning it has and can have.

She’s such an interesting person and thinker. She grew up amidst a lot of hardship and poverty and loneliness, as she’s written about. And she became this thought leader with a perspective that is at one and the same time critical and soaring and has helped so many. She really does present wisdom for coming at the question which I feel runs all the way through this exploration we’re making here — how could it be reasonable to have hope in a moment like this?

She wrote a small book called Hope in the Dark a few years ago that was really present for many. I also appreciate her journalism in a book that she called A Paradise Built in Hell. Each chapter is an examination and a retelling of situations that were experienced in the news and to some extent have come down as history — as just full-on catastrophes, a best example being what happened in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.

And what she traces amidst great catastrophes and disasters is the narrative of repair and renewal and new creation that unfolds in generational time, after the spotlight has gone away. And her point is that this reliably happens and that it is under-examined. It’s under-investigated. It’s part of the story of our time that is under-told. So in these stories she tells, she is confirming, essentially, what Agustín Fuentes and evolutionary biologists are saying about us, insisting that in fact, more often than not, people are good and that we have a reliable superpower of cooperation — in fact, that we have a capacity to rise to our best selves, to discover our best selves, sometimes in and through the most terrible of circumstances. It’s a very strange thing about our species, that we are creatures who are made by what would break us.

Another point that Rebecca Solnit makes worth dwelling on, for us, is just that there’s so much surprise involved in history — you know, that falling apart that we talked about earlier. The falling apart always falls apart. Here are some of my favorite lines from the conversation I had with her. She said, “A lot of what my hopeful stuff is about is trying to look at the immeasurable, incalculable, indirect, roundabout way that things matter.” She also says — she’s written this: “History is like the weather, it’s not like checkers. Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart, sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends towards justice is so long, if you see its curve, sometimes hope lies not in looking forward, but backward to study the line of that arc.”

So in this part of my interview with her that you’re going to hear, I was asking her to delve into the surprising way that catastrophe affects human beings, as she’s charted this in crisis after crisis and disaster after disaster. And we called this show with her a play on that language of falling apart. We called it “Falling Together.”

Rebecca Solnit: And there’s a way a disaster throws people into the present and sort of gives them this supersaturated immediacy that also includes a deep sense of connection. It’s as though, in some violent gift, you’ve been given a kind of spiritual awakening where you’re close to mortality in a way that makes you feel more alive. You’re deeply in the present and can let go of past and future and your personal narrative in some ways. You have shared an experience with everyone around you, and you often find very direct but also metaphysical senses of connection to the people you suddenly have something in common with.

And then oftentimes, the people who do the really important work in disasters, which doesn’t get talked about much, are the neighbors. Who’s going to rescue you when your building collapses, when the ice storm comes and the power goes out? It’s probably going to be the neighbors. And so the question is really two things. One is, how can we get there without going through a disaster, and …

Tippett: [laughs] That’s right. That’s the question, isn’t it?

Solnit: And I think of that as kind of like this funny way the earthquake shakes you awake, and then that’s sort of the big spiritual question. How do you stay awake? How do you stay in that deeper consciousness of that present-mindedness, that sense of non-separation and compassion and engagement and courage, which is also a big part of it, and generosity. People are not selfish and greedy.

So and then the other question is, why has everything we’ve ever been told about human nature misled us about what happens in these moments? And what happens if we acknowledge, as I think people in the kind of work that neuropsychologists and the Dalai Lama’s research projects and economists are beginning to say — what if everything we’ve been told about human nature is wrong, and we’re actually very generous, communitarian, altruistic beings who are distorted by the system we are in but not made happy by it? What if we can actually be better people in a better world?

Tippett: You draw a connection often between, I would say, the reasonableness of hope and the reality of darkness. Would you say something about that?

Solnit: Well, I really wanted to rescue darkness from the pejoratives because it’s also associated with dark-skinned people, and those pejoratives often become racial in ways that I find problematic. So I wrote a book called Hope in the Dark about hope where that darkness was the future — that the present and past are daylight, and the future is night, but in that darkness is a kind of mysterious, erotic, enveloping sense of possibility and communion — you know, love is made in the dark, often as not — and then to recognize that unknowability as fertile, as rich as the womb, rather than the tomb, in some sense. And so much for me of hope is not, as I was saying, not optimism that everything will be fine, but that we don’t know what will happen.

And I feel so much of what we’re burdened by is bad stories — both people who have amnesia, who don’t remember that the present was constructed by certain forces to serve certain elements and can be deconstructed and that things could be very different; that they have been very different; that things are always changing and that we have agency in that change.

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Tippett: In another place in the conversation I had with Rebecca, she made that same case pointedly, in terms of how we don’t know what will happen or what the results will be of our own action. And this is such a wonderful and freeing thing to be able to take in every once in a while. You know, she said — she was quoting from Foucault, and she said this is not an exact quote. But here’s the thought: “We know what we do. We know why we do it. But we don’t know what [what] we do does.” We control our intentions, to some extent. We control our behavior. But we don’t control what that sets off in the world.

The other piece of what she’s saying that feels so resonant to me for us now is this notion that the earthquake shakes you awake, and then the question to live — how do you stay awake? Here we are, this now post-pandemic generation. Everything that we thought we knew for sure, so much of that was upended. We were called to so many questions and to learn edifying and deepening things about ourselves and others and the world. How do we stay faithful to those questions and to that learning?

I spent my 20s in divided Berlin, and the fall of Berlin’s wall in 1989 was utterly unimaginable, not just to me, not just to everyone I knew, but to everyone in that part of the world. The chancellor of West Germany was out of the country the day the Berlin Wall fell. And that experience that I had so directly, that there is always more to reality than we can see and more change possible than we can begin to imagine, this has formed me. I never expected in my lifetime to experience another turning like the one we’re in now, where the remaking of the world is truly upon us.

So in Part 2, we are going to meditate on cultivating hope in the dark. And in Part 3, you can hear more of my conversation with Rebecca Solnit and really experience that beautiful and complex generative narrative that she keeps helping bring into the light. And whenever you’re ready to move on, I will be here.