#97: New suns
The case for radical imagination
Do you really want change? Because the thing that puzzles me all the time is, over the last 10 years, liberal or left-wing groups have come up and said, “We’re going to change the system, we’re going to challenge it,” and then nothing happens.
— Adam Curtis
Do I have the right to feel angry about last week’s US Election?
This question has swirled around my head since last Wednesday. I’ve been in several conversations where the default answer has been: don’t get swept up in something outside your control. It’s a comforting response, but it hasn’t sat right.
The state of American democracy affects all of us, no matter what country we live in. Last week’s result will surely embolden populist movements across other continents. Sweden, where I live, shifted to a centre-right government in 2022, with the far-right Sweden Democrats becoming the second-largest party. At no point during this US presidential campaign did I see it in my interest to take any action. Looking at my track record, this is not surprising. Give or take a few uncomfortable conversations, the most I’ve done to advance a political position in my home country (the UK) is vote. How much license should that give me to complain when things don’t go my way?
The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has described the modern Liberal condition as ‘Oh Dearism.’ For Curtis, Oh Dearists are the left-leaning folks living in a time of relatively extraordinary privilege, eager to profess their discontent at the state of the world before carrying on with their day. In other words, they say they want change but don’t do anything to bring it about. As uncomfortable as it is to admit, I recognise myself in this definition. I’d like to move beyond it.
“Radical simply means grasping things at the root.”
— Angela Davis
It’s amazing how many signals the universe can send once the mind decides to pay attention to something.
Last month, I visited two politically engaged friends in New York. Both had been volunteering for a nonpartisan telephone campaign that aims to encourage non-voting environmentalists to go out and vote. (An estimated 8 million environmentalists didn’t vote in the 2020 election.) I felt proud of these friends for giving their time and inspired by the specificity with which they’d chosen to act. As environmentalists themselves, they were able to leverage common ground in conversations that might lead to change.
After returning from New York I had an inexplicable urge to listen to the On Being podcast for the first time in years. The latest interview was with the writer and activist adrienne maree brown, author of multiple books including Emergent Strategy and the newly published Loving Corrections.
brown’s work revolves around the principle of radical imagination, of daring to imagine other worlds beyond the constructs we have accepted:
“…we’re living inside of imaginations that other people told us were true and told us, this is how the world is. […] I think about it often; that we live in this abundant world, and we’ve been told it’s scarce. And then we’re given all these stories of scarcity. And because of that scarcity, we have to fight each other constantly. We live in a world where there’s actually no superiority based on what we’re born into, whether it be skin, sexuality, gender, any of that, but someone has imagined superiority, and someone has imagined it into a structure that we now all [accept].” — in conversation with Krista Tippett
brown chooses her words carefully. When she talks about radical imagination, she’s not implying violent change. She’s talking about radical in the way the activist Angela Davis used it, as originally defined from the Latin:
"vital to life," from Latin radicalis "of or having roots," from Latin radix (genitive radicis) "root"
From this perspective, radical change is both natural and thorough, aiming to surpass superficial solutions by getting to the root cause.
Grasping things at the root requires patience—an acceptance of nuance and complexity. Rarely do we find ourselves in that state of mind after an election. It’s much easier to be pissed off, pass judgement, and see things as black and white, which is exactly how we ended up with this election result in the first place.
The only way I found to resist that homogenized view of the world was to make myself part of something larger than myself.
— Dorothy Allison
Last Friday, the writer
posted a tribute to the late Dorothy Allison. Dorothy was an American lesbian author and activist. She passed away on election day aged 75. I’d never heard of Dorothy or read any of her work, but I followed Kaitlyn’s nudge to read Dorothy’s 1994 essay ‘A Question of Class’ and was flawed by its ending:“The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor. It is a myth that allows some to imagine that they build their lives on the ruin of others, a secret core of shame for the middle class, a goad and a spur to the marginal working class, and cause enough for the homeless and poor to feel no constraints on hatred or violence. The power of the myth is made even more apparent when we examine how, within the lesbian and feminist communities where we have addressed considerable attention to the politics of marginalization, there is still so much exclusion and fear, so many of us who do not feel safe.
I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us—extraordinary.”
The horror which Alisson describes is frighteningly close to the imagined world we live in today, now affirmed by the 75 million humans who cast their vote for Trump.
Whether you identify as a Curtis Oh Dearist or not, you might have found yourself thinking: there’s no getting past this.
That’s understandable.
What if, instead of shutting off with that thought, we remembered that this world is all the result of someone else’s imagination?
What if, instead of trying to repair a broken world, we allowed ourselves to imagine new ones instead?
Where would we end up?
There’s nothing new
under the sun,
but there are new suns.
— Octavia E. Butler
Octavia E. Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the few Black women authors to venture into the genre in the 1970s. In the 1990s, she published her acclaimed Parable novel series centred on the protagonist Lauren Olamina, a young visionary in a dystopian America ravaged by social and environmental collapse. Convinced by humanity’s potential for growth, Lauren creates a new faith called Earthseed with the guiding philosophy that God is Change.
The third and final Parable, which Butler struggled to write and ultimately left unfinished, includes the epigram “There’s nothing new/under the sun,/but there are new suns.” It captures our collective tension between optimism and pessimism but also the possibility of breaking through an impasse into something new.
I’ve never been much of a science fiction reader, and Butler’s work was largely unfamiliar until brown quoted this beautiful epigram in her On Being interview. But this is the power of noticing, of slowing down and following your nose. You can end up somewhere new.
Instead of turning inward, I want to venture outward.
I want to find new suns.
Thanks so much for reading,
Lauren
P.S. Is it a coincidence that nearly all the trails I’ve followed these past few weeks have been laid by women? I think not.