THE OPTIMISM OF UNCERTAINTY

Howard Zinn

 

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
 

Some quick lessons: Don’t let “those who have power” intimidate you. No matter how much power they have, they cannot prevent you from living your life, thinking independently, speaking your mind.
 

Find people to be with who share your values and commitments, and who also have a sense of humor.
 

Understand that the major media will not tell you of all the acts of resistance taking place every day in the society—the strikes, protests, individual acts of courage in the face of authority. Look around (and you will certainly find it) for the evidence of these unreported acts. And for the little you find, extrapolate from that and assume there must be a thousand times as much as you’ve found.
 

Note that throughout history people have felt powerless before authority, but that at certain times these powerless people, by organizing, acting, risking, persisting, have created enough power to change the world around them, even if a little. That is the history of the labor movement, the women’s movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the disabled persons’ movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the movement of Black people in the South.
 

Remember, that those who have power and seem invulnerable are in fact quite vulnerable. Their power depends on the obedience of others, and when those others begin withholding that obedience, begin defying authority, that power at the top turns out to be very fragile. Generals become powerless when their soldiers refuse to fight, industrialists become powerless when their workers leave their jobs or occupy the factories.
 

When we forget the fragility of that power at the top we become astounded when it crumbles in the face of rebellion. We have had many such surprises in our time, both in the United States and in other countries.
 

Don’t look for a moment of total triumph. See engagement as an ongoing struggle, with victories and defeats, but in the long run slow progress. So you need patience and persistence. Understand that even when you don’t “win,” there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that you have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. You need hope.
 

Is an optimist necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that only confidence can prevent people from giving up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
 

What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
 

Who foresaw that, on that day in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to move from the front of the bus, could have predicted that this would lead to a mass protest of black working people, and a chain of events that would shake the nation, startle the world, and transform the South?
 

Let’s go back to the turn of the century. A revolution to overthrow the Tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin’s deformation of it, or Khrushchev’s astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev’s succession of surprises?
 

Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II—the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?
 

And then the post-war world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, which Stalin himself had given little chance. And then the break with the Soviet Union, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone.
 

No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere’s Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin’s adjacent Uganda.
 

Spain became an astonishment. A million died in the civil war, which ended in victory for the Fascist Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone.
 

In other places too, deeply entrenched dictatorships seemed suddenly to disintegrate—in Portugal, Argentina, the Philippines, Iran.
 

The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. The United States and the Soviet Union soon each had enough thermonuclear bombs to devastate the earth several times over. The international scene was dominated by their rivalry, and it was supposed that all affairs, in every nation, were affected by their looming presence.
 

Yet the most striking fact about these superpowers was that, despite their size, their wealth, their overwhelming accumulation of nuclear weapons, they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence.
 

The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population.
 

The United States has faced the same reality. It could send an army into Korea but could not win, and was forced to sign a compromise peace. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducted the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. And in Latin America, after a long history of U.S. military intervention having its way again and again, this superpower, with all its wealth and weapons, found itself frustrated. It was unable to prevent a revolution in Cuba, and the Latin American dictatorships that the United States supported from Chile to Argentina to El Salvador have fallen. In the headlines every day, we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president pledge to fight destructive corporate power.
 

Looking at this catalog of huge surprises, it’s clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience—whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.
 

I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. I think of my students. Not just the women of Spelman College, who leapt over a hundred years of national disgrace to become part of the civil rights movement. Not just the fellow in Alice Walker’s poem “Once,” who acted out the spirit of a new generation:

It is true— ­

I've always loved

the daring

ones

Like the black young

man

Who tried
to crash

All barriers

at once,

wanted to

swim

At a white

beach (in Alabama)
Nude.

 

I think also of my students at Boston University and people all over the country who, anguished about the war in Vietnam, resisted in some way, facing police clubs and arrests. And brave high school students like Mary Beth Tinker and her classmates in Des Moines, Iowa, who insisted on wearing black armbands to protest the war and when suspended from school, took their case to the Supreme Court and won.
 

Of course, some would say, that was the sixties. But throughout the period since, despite widespread headshaking over the “apathy” of successive student generations, an impressive number of students continued to act.
 

I think of the determined little group at Boston University who, emulating groups at a hundred other schools, set up a “shantytown” on campus to represent apartheid in South Africa. The police tore it down, but the students refused to move and were arrested.
 

In South Africa, shortly before, I had visited Crossroads, a real shantytown outside of Capetown, where thousands of Blacks occupied places that looked like chicken coops, or were jammed together in huge tents, sleeping in shifts, six hundred of them sharing one faucet of running water. I was impressed that young Americans who had not seen that with their own eyes, had only read or seen photos, would be so moved to step out of their comfortable lives and act. We have recently seen students all over the country campaigning for a living wage for campus employees, and against global sweatshops.

 

Beyond those activists, there is a much larger population of students who have no contact with any movement, yet have deep feelings about injustice. Since I’ve stopped teaching, I’ve spent much of my time responding to invitations to speak. What I’ve discovered is heartening. In whatever town, large or small, in whatever state of the Union, there is always a cluster of men and women who care about the sick, the hungry, the victims of racism, the casualties of war, and who are doing something, however small, in the hope that the world  will change.

 

Wherever I go—whether San Diego, Philadelphia, or Dallas; Ada, Oklahoma or Shreveport, Louisiana; Presque Isle, Maine or Manhattan, Kansas—I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands more who are open to unorthodox ideas.

 

But they tend not to know of each other’s existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement. I suppose I’m trying to persuade myself as well as them.

 

Arriving at Morehead State University in rural Eastern Kentucky, in the midst of the 2003 Iraq War, I found the lecture room crowded with fifteen hundred students (out of a total enrollment of 6,000). I spoke against the war and received an overwhelming reception. Earlier, when I’d been picked up at the airport by a group of faculty peace activists, one of them brought their fourteen-year-old daughter, who’d defied her high school principal by wearing an anti-war T-shirt to school. I have found such people in all parts of the country, more and more, as evidence that the truth makes its way slowly but surely.
 

It is this change in consciousness that encourages me. Granted, racial hatred and sex discrimination are still with us, war and violence still poison our culture, we have a large underclass of poor, desperate people, and there is a hard core of the population content with the way things are, afraid of change.

 

But if we see only that, we have lost historical perspective, and then it is as if we were born yesterday and we know only the depressing stories in this morning’s newspapers, this evening’s television reports.

 

Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people’s consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that gays are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military intervention despite brief surges of military madness.

 

 It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

 

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often in this century we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

 

The bad things that happen are repetitions of bad things that have always happened—war, racism, maltreatment of women, religious and nationalist fanaticism, starvation. The good things that happen are unexpected. Unexpected, and yet explainable by certain truths that spring at us from time to time, but which we tend to forget:

 

Political power, however formidable, is more fragile than we think. (Note how nervous are those who hold it.)

 

Ordinary people can be intimidated for a time, can be fooled for a time, but they have a down-deep common sense, and sooner or later they find a way to challenge the power that oppresses them.

 

People are not naturally violent or cruel or greedy, although they can be made so. Human beings everywhere want the same things: they are moved by the sight of abandoned children, homeless families, the casualties of war; they long for peace, for friendship and affection across lines of race and nationality.

 

One semester, when I was teaching, I learned that there were several classical musicians signed up in my course. For the last class of the semester I stood aside while they sat in chairs up front and played a Mozart quartet. Not a customary finale to a class in political theory, but I wanted the class to understand that politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives. Political discussion can sour you. We needed some music.

 

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society.

 

We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

 

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

 

 

Howard Zinn’s books include A People’s History of the United States (HarperCollins, 1980), The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace (Beacon Press, 2002),  You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon, 2002), and Howard Zinn on History (Seven Stories Press, 2000). This essay is adapted in part from essays in the latter two books and from an essay of Zinn’s on www.zmag.org.