Monday
While many of us are rending our garments and tearing our hair at the current state of the world, feminist author Rebecca Solnit’s new book has a positive message. In a Guardian article about The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, columnist Zoe Williams quotes Solnit as saying that we’re so focused on the grim present that we fail to realize we are witnessing the death throes of an old order. In making her case, Solnit quotes the theorist who influenced me the most when I was a history major at Carleton College.
That theorist was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and I’ve devoted a chapter to him in my book. Solnit quotes his observation, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
I didn’t know this Gramsci quotation but I dwell on it here because a version shows up in a Matthew Arnold poem while there’s a related image in a Virginia Woolf novel. First, however, let’s look at Solnit’s optimism.
There certainly doesn’t seem to be much cause for it given that, at the moment, we are struggling with the monster in the White House and his billionaire and grifter friends. But Gramsci was himself struggling with Mussolini and, in fact, would die in one of his prisons. The monsters, in other words, are often lethal. Nevertheless, Solnit is channeling Gramsci’s faith that the new world will in fact be born, even if we don’t always live to see it. If we lack his faith, it’s because we are myopic:
People do not remember the past … [they] often seem to live in a perpetual present. And some find that reassuring, that nothing is ever going to change. Some find it despair-inducing, because nothing is ever going to change. I wanted, in this horrible moment, to remind people that what the far right is doing globally, I think, is largely backlash. A new world is being born, and they’re basically trying to abort it. Which is a little ironic, given their views on abortion.”
Solnit points to the remarkable advances made by various liberation movements, noting that they can’t be entirely overcome. If authoritarians are panicking in the face of them, it’s because they recognize their power:
“Something big I propose in the book,” she says, “is that the whole idea of the ascent of man, his separation from nature, his inevitable progress towards the supremacy of industrialised capitalism, towards this supreme version of himself, is a weird detour from how most people, throughout most of time, have thought about nature and our place in it.” The mistakenness of that detour might show itself in environmental destruction, or it might show itself in an epidemic of loneliness, or in the scourge of corporate rapacity, but, once the imagination has woken up to it, says Solnit, “the change is deep and profound.”
Solnit believes that class consciousness and environmental awareness can’t just be extinguished once they’ve been enlivened:
“Fossil fuel lobbyists cannot undo it. Putin and Trump and that idiot in Argentina [Javier Milei] cannot undo it. They’re trying to push rewind on the VCR, which feels like the right technological moment in history for them. They’re essentially saying, if you listen closely: ‘You all are very powerful. You’ve changed the world profoundly, with the environmental and climate work, feminism, queer rights, the general anti-authoritarian push for accountability and equality. All those things are connected.’ Your enemies appraise you accurately, even when you don’t believe it yourself.”
The Matthew Arnold poem doesn’t share Gramsci’s Marxist optimism about the future but it may capture a version of our present moment. Visiting an old monastery in the Swiss Alps (“La Grande Chartreuse”), the Victorian poet finds himself longing for a world that is past. Unlike Trumpism, however, he knows he can’t return to it, which leaves him trapped in melancholy:
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side.
It is a sentiment that he also expresses in “Dover Beach,” his best-known poem:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Perhaps we can see white Christian supremacists as panicking at the ebbing of this Sea of Faith, which includes young people leaving the church, some of them repulsed by the narrowness of their elders. This would help explain the fearful and angry embrace of Trumpism. Like Solnit, however, Arnold believes that no return is possible, although he does express a smidgen of hope in the future. Perhaps the tide will flow again, bringing in a new age. As he writes later in “La Grande Chartreuse,”
There may, perhaps, yet dawn an age
More fortunate, alas than we.
This admission aside, however, he appears for the most part to be one of Solnit’s mayflies.
Woolf resorts to a more brutal account of someone tormented by the in-between-state. In her novel Between the Acts, stockbroker Giles is so appalled at the violence involved in the new world being born that he is one of those who aborts the process:
There, couched in the grass, curled in an olive green ring, was a snake. Dead? No, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die. A spasm made the ribs contract; blood oozed. It was a birth the wrong way round—a monstrous inversion. So, raising his foot, he stamped on them. The mass crushed and slithered. The white canvas on his tennis shoes was bloodstained and sticky. But it was action. Action relieved him. He strode to the Barn, with blood on his shoes.
Given time, the snake would have digested the toad and the cycle of life would have continued, which appears to be Solnit’s point. Giles’s revulsion at the messy process of change—and the old world dying and the new world struggling to be born—causes him to lash out in violence.
But with over over eight million people having participated in No Kings marches on Saturday—Julia and I joined up with 150 others in bright red Winchester, Tennessee—it’s easier to begin believing in a brighter future. If Trumpism is a backlash against freedom, then its days may indeed be numbered.
In the meantime, however, it’s doing a lot of smashing.
