Dark Mountain: On the Correct Management of Despair
Paul Kingsnorth speaks his truth from the darker side of the heart.
On the Correct Management of Despair
It’s no secret that a feeling of despair was one of the things that brought me to this project, and that led to its creation. It was the despair of an environmentalist who could see that environmentalism was failing and who had to work out how to deal with that. It was the despair of someone who felt he had no-one to talk to about his despair because, though many other people were feeling it too – oh, you could see it in their eyes however hard they tried to conceal it – it was never talked about. Activists do not talk about despair. No-one talks about despair. Despair, in a progressive society, is taboo. We do not want despair. We want hope. Hope, all the time. Hope, like a drug. Do not look down – look away.
Derrick Jensen asks a question of every audience he speaks to over in the US. ‘Hands up’, he says, ‘anyone here who believes that this society will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living.’ The kind of people who go to Derrick Jensen talks never put their hands up, perhaps because they have gone through the despair themselves and found honesty on the other side. But most of society raises its hand to this question everyday, including most environmentalists. They have to. They are not ready not to, because keeping your hand down when that question is asked means accepting openly what you have long known privately: that this Machine will not be stopped, not by us and not by anyone. It will stop only when it wears itself out, because its engine is constructed from greed and ambition and restlessness and these things do not go into voluntary retirement. Every religion, every spiritual tradition there has ever been has recognised this, with good reason.
So that is my despair. What should I do with it? I can talk, perhaps with you. I can share it. I can write it down. But I can’t and won’t pretend that I don’t feel it. And I won’t replace it with something called ‘hope’ just because I can, or think I should. I can live my life well, be happy, love, work, do the things that matter to me. I can save some of the good things, if I try, I hope. But I can’t hold back the despair all the time. Why should I? It’s a response – a rational response – to what we are doing; to the world we are levelling. It’s the only honest response.
The despair leads me to the mountain, and the mountain shows me the lights of the city as it spreads and the mountain is dark, at least for now, because the lights have not yet come. If they do not come it will not be because we chose not to send them this way; it will be because we fell back into our own fires before we got a chance to send them out here, and profit from them accordingly. Increasingly, now, I hope the lights never come. I hope the world goes dark again and that when the morning comes none of the lights work ever again. Only the sun, and at night the stars, reflected in the undammed rivers. Now that – that would give me hope again.
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