An anti-despair reading list

The world, it seems reasonable to assume, is fucked. Between climate change, the revocation of nuclear arms deals left and right, and the fact that an increasing number of the world’s most powerful governments are being run by greedy cryptofascist dullards, it seems like we’re moving in a dark direction as a species. It would be easy to fall into despair, to grow helpless.

This, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is unnecessary. But perky web articles and cute, “Hang in there buddy!” memes aren’t really going to keep you going. To stay clear-eyed and full-hearted over the next few decades of your life, you’re going to need to build a coherent worldview, and you can’t cobble that sort of thing together with short-form pick-me-ups. To do that, you need books, and you need art.

I do not claim to be an expert, but I have managed to pull myself out of a depression over the past couple of years, and I have started viewing the world a bit differently as a result of it. This, in large part, has been because of key books I’ve read. So here is one man’s reading list for fighting despair in dark times.

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Nonfiction

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The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong

The amount of reality we see is only a tiny sliver of what’s possible. There are humans, for example, who can see more wavelengths on the spectrum than we can. They literally have extra colors in their eyes. There are animals that can see in slow motion, or with a telephoto zoom, or taste things with other limbs. With so much in this universe to see — and with our ability to see so little of it — one might start to wonder: could we possibly begin to construct our reality a bit differently?

In The Reality Bubble, journalist Ziya Tong documents all of our blind spots in the world, from these strange sensory blind spots, to our inability to comprehend the scale of the universe, to our blind spots about where our food comes from and where our waste goes. The book hits the perfect tone for our dark times, one of both curiosity and urgency, and will make you think that change isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable.

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A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

For people feeling gloomy about the state of the world, there is no one better to read than Rebecca Solnit. Solnit doesn’t ever pull a Stephen Pinker-style “you’re wrong, everything’s actually fine,” but she manages to find ways to be optimistic without ever compromising her clear-eyed view of the world.

A Paradise Built in Hell debunks a myth about disasters and apocalypses: that humans turn on each other in a violent orgy of every man for himself. History (and for many of us, personal experience) shows the opposite: when shit hits the fan, humans help each other. They pull together, they self-organize, they make sure people get fed and medically treated, they rescue those at risk, and they save the day.

In this book, Solnit debunks the myth of rampant looting after a disaster (a myth spread by the powerful to reinforce the idea that we need them), and confronts the violence in post-Katrina New Orleans, which came not from looters and gangs of rapists, but from white supremacists who realized they could get away with murdering black men.

If ever you needed reassurance that the world on the other side of disaster is not a violent Mad Max nightmare, but a world of cooperative struggle, then this is it.

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Stranger Than We Can Imagine by John Higgs

British writer John Higgs’ 2015 masterpiece is billed as “an alternative history of the 20th century.” Britain, at the beginning of the 20th century, could reasonably have been considered the center of the world. To a Brit in 1901, the world made sense.

Then relativity and quantum mechanics changed everything we thought we knew about science. Modernism, surrealism, and dada pulled the rug out from under art. Totalitarianism rose, wars became potentially world-ending, we started launching men into space, our economy grew so fast it threatened to consume the earth, and we became so interconnected that we could see what was happening on other continents in real time. In the midst of all of this, Britain stopped being the center of the world. Its Empire was gone a mere half century after its peak.

This unmooring of everything in the 20th century that had been real and certain before 1901 was (and is) baffling and traumatic for many people. But Higgs offers a new way of thinking about it, a way that may help us start to understand where we now are. America, the most powerful nation in the world in 2001, and now a mere 18 years later indisputably in decline, could learn a thing or two from Higgs and the Brits.

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Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

This is a beautifully written book detailing 25 lessons we can learn from the history of nonviolence. It explains how “turn the other cheek” was actually a statement of civil disobedience in biblical times, it explains how Gandhi believed that, if you must choose between violence and doing nothing to change things, you must choose violence, it goes into Martin Luther King’s perceived radicalism in the United States in the 60’s (and why people claiming MLK would have “done things differently” from activists now is complete and utter garbage), and it goes into how the Cold War was ended not by Ronald Reagan shaking his fist at the Berlin Wall, but by thousands of dissidents working tirelessly over the course of decades.

Politics can seem impenetrable to common people a lot of the time, but Kurlansky’s book shows that creative nonviolent efforts undertaken by ordinary people have changed things for the better again and again over the course of history. Violence may be inescapable in this world, but we can choose to reject it.

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Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan

This is the best possible follow-up reading to Kurlansky’s Nonviolence. In it, Chenoweth and Stephan detail why it is nonviolence is so effective. They went through every major resistance campaign of the 20th century, and found that nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as violent campaigns.

There are a few reasons for this: First, if you run a nonviolent campaign, you are likely to get more people to join than a violent campaign. Second, it is easier for a regime to oppose a violent campaign than it is a nonviolent one: armed rebels can be fought and executed, peacefully protesting civilians are much harder to shoot on (not impossible to shoot on, as history sadly shows us, but the blowback from murdering innocent people is pretty steep). And finally, when nonviolent campaigns win, they tend to transition to more peaceful and less authoritarian forms of government.

This book is packed with practical lessons for dissidents, and with justifications for changing things peacefully. As it turns out, you don’t need guns to change things. You just need to make it so things staying the same is more expensive for the rich and powerful than it is for them to change.

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Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit’s 2004 book was written in response to the invasion of Iraq and the reelection of George W. Bush, a pretty bleak time in American politics. Now, 15 years later, it is essential reading. Solnit, like Kurlansky, is excellent at providing an alternative view of history and offers a glimpse of the path forward. In it, she quotes Czech poet and dissident Vaclav Havel, who, when he wrote this in 1985, was in prison.

“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not a prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

Four years after writing this, Havel was no longer in jail. He was, in fact, the President of Czechoslovakia. Things change.

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The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

Science books are essential for staying curious in dark times, because they remind us how fucking weird the universe is. Rovelli’s 2017 book The Order of Time explains what quantum physicists now know to be the case about time: basically, everything we think about it is wrong. It is not the linear, machine-like thing we imagine it to be as we watch the hands of the clock tick through the day. In fact, only a single equation in physics references its existence. The way we see it moving has more to do with our perception than it has to do with the nature of time itself.

Rovelli is a brilliant science writer, on the same level as Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson, and this book is essential for fighting despair because it’s hard to feel hopeless at the state of the world when you realize you don’t understand a fucking thing about it. Nothing beats fear like curiosity, and nothing pulls you out of despair quicker than wonder.

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Fiction

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Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is the all-time master of compassionate humanism. Slaughterhouse-Five is an extremely dark book (it’s about World War II and the firebombing of Dresden, which Vonnegut was present for as a Prisoner of War), but it manages to also be an incredibly humane story that will, if nothing else, make you feel a little bit gentler towards other humans.

Like The Order of Time and Jerusalem (also on this list), it will have you thinking about how time works, and if we maybe don’t really understand any of this at all.

If that’s the case, then we’re all mucking about down here. None of us really know what we’re doing, the universe is a mystery, and death comes to us all. So it goes.

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Jerusalem by Alan Moore

This remains the most rewarding thing I’ve ever read, but I don’t recommend it to many people, because it is nearly 1200 pages long. Alan Moore is best known for his comics V for Vendetta, Watchmen, and From Hell, but this 2016 book is his magnum opus.

It takes place in Northampton, England, Moore’s hometown, and it jumps around in history, from the 19th century to the end of the universe. Chapters are written from the perspective of Moore’s family members, the daughter of James Joyce, Charlie Chaplin, and the Archangel Michael, among others. Some chapters are written as poems, others as plays, others as pulp fiction. About 400 pages of the book take place over the 10 minutes it takes for a 2-year-old boy to choke on a cough drop (and they are a staggeringly good 400 pages).

The book makes this list in particular because of its sprawling, original vision of life and the afterlife. If you, like me, have abandoned the idea of a heaven and hell, if you do not see any paradise beyond your death or human extinction, then Moore offers a wild, surreal alternative that will make you rethink the world and your place in it. It is a spectacular piece of writing, and incredibly fun to read, if you don’t mind taking a couple of months to get through it.

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Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

Daytripper is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read, and you can finish it in an afternoon. It is a comic book written by twin brothers Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, and it covers the life of Bras de Oliva Domingos, a Brazilian obituary writer. Each day covered in the book is an important day in his life, and at the end of each of these days, he dies. 

It is a beautiful meditation on life and death. It is one of those books where you finish it and just sit quietly with it for a few minutes.

We tend to organize our lives around these big moments, but it is the small ones that end up defining us. The more we forget that, the more anxiety, depression, and despair can take hold.

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A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller

The Cold War inevitably gave rise to a lot of excellent post-apocalyptic literature, but A Canticle for Liebowitz stands out as one of the most striking and one of the most hopeful for a society on the brink of a different type of cataclysm. The plot is simple: After a nuclear war between Russia and the US, the survivors go around burning all books and murdering intellectuals and academics, claiming (perhaps not unreasonably) that it was knowledge that brought us to this point. 

A Jewish Engineer named Liebowitz working at an army base begins smuggling books containing the entirety of man’s scientific knowledge out to a nearby Catholic abbey in the desert. They are entrusted with keeping this information quietly, to return it back into mankind’s hands when we’ve finally learned our lessons. The book follows the abbey over the course of the next 1700 years.

The book is a thrilling one for us to read now because it imagines life beyond a disaster, and it depicts morality as something that must always be grappled with, regardless of the technology at our disposal.

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East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck’s magnum opus isn’t The Grapes of Wrath — it’s East of Eden. It is in one sense a retelling of the book of Genesis, but set in Steinbeck’s home, the Salinas Valley. The question at the core of the book is an eternal one: are we fated to be good or evil? Or do we have a choice?

It’s a staggeringly good book, with one of the greatest villains in literature, and with central characters who were actual family members of Steinbeck’s.

The conversation at the core of the book came from Steinbeck’s mistranslation of a Hebrew Bible, but it won’t matter, you’ll want to tattoo “Timshel” onto your wrist at the end anyway.

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Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

Set aside the 12 years that have passed since the seventh book came out. Set aside J.K. Rowling’s need to constantly modify her books to make them more “woke” after the fact, set aside that she can be kinda shitty on Twitter, set aside that every new movie feels increasingly like a cynical cash grab, and just take the first seven books on their face.

They are amazing guidebooks for people (especially young people) going through tough times. I re-read all seven after Trump’s election, and they worked incredibly well as a pick-me-up.

Separating the art from the artist is probably a fool’s errand, but a flawed person can certainly write some brilliant stories.

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Poetry

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Pessimism is for lightweights by Salena godden

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This is a living document — if you have suggestions, let me know!

Your helplessness is a delusion

I was recently invited to a local community college to discuss what we, in the modest little corner of New Jersey that we live in, can do about issues as huge and seemingly untouchable as global human rights. It is a terrible topic for a speech. Human rights, for most of us, is just something to be depressed about, and that is because activists and advocates like myself are notoriously bad at making people feel hope about the state of the world. 

The problem, of course, is that we advocates have pet issues we want to fix, and in order to fix them, we first have to tell you about them. 

If I want you to donate money to my cause to save the Rohingya in Burma, I first have to tell you about the Rohingya in Burma, and that is going to make you feel sad. Then, my compatriot over at the charity next door will come in and tell you about the plight of the Syrian refugee, and this, too, will make you feel sad. This, too, will make you open your wallet, or maybe pick up the phone to call your congressperson.

We have no shortages of causes we’re fighting for, so this cycle will continue with a parade of us detailing the modern world’s atrocities and catastrophes, and eventually, you will not only get tired of donating money, you’ll start to feel numb to the virtually endless suffering of other people around the world.

Activists have a name for this. We call it “compassion fatigue.” You yourself have experienced compassion fatigue if you, like me, mute the TV every time that Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercial comes on. 

Closing our eyes to the pain of another living being may make us feel cold and callous, but really, the problem is simply that our individual capacity for compassion is finite, and the world’s suffering is infinite.

The choice, it appears to us, is to either numb yourself or to die of empathy.

Helplessness blues

So when we read the news about the Syrian civil war and the refugee crisis growing out of it, many of us feel helpless, like there’s not much that can be done. And to an extent, this is true. Assad has all but won the war, so the dictator who gasses his own people will likely remain in power, now firmly backed with the military might of Russia and Iran. Even if we intervened now, that core fact would not likely change, nor would the fact that the “other side” fighting Assad has a lot of radical Islamist elements in it that most of us would prefer not to be allied with.

When it comes to refugees, we’re also past the point of being able to do very much: If they were here, we could welcome them to our neighborhoods and help them rebuild their lives, but the current administration is not going to let them in, and that position is not likely to change, no matter how much we protest. 

We can give money to organizations that support refugees, we can vote for candidates who are pro-refugee, we can get involved with activist groups, and we can educate ourselves on the conflict, it’s context, and it’s history, but short of actually leaving our homes and going to Europe or the Middle East, our ability to directly help is limited.

The reality of the situation right now is that most of what needs to be done for Syria and Syrians needs to be done at very high levels of government, and most of what really needed to be done to stem the violence should’ve been done years ago. 

The details differ, but the same is basically true of the case of the Rohingya in Burma, or the gang violence in Central America, or the ongoing collapse of Venezuela, or the war in Yemen — the decisions that caused these events were made high up, and they were made in the past. By the time they hit our newspapers, we’ve already failed in the ways that really matter. 

That, I admit, is a pretty depressing thought. It’s thoughts like this that make us feel helpless about the state of the world.

I’d like to argue that any sense of helplessness you feel when confronted with these humanitarian catastrophes, though, is misplaced, and that it stems from thinking about it in the wrong way. So before we can figure out what we can do to fight for human rights, we first need to change our thinking about it. And to do that, we need to address the elephant in the room.

Nazis ruin everything

There’s a rule on the internet known as “Godwin’s Law.” Godwin’s Law states:

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

There’s a corollary to this, which is that whoever is the first to bring up Hitler loses the argument. 

There’s a good reason for this: Nazis poison everything. It’s impossible to talk about the world and politics in a world where the Nazis existed, and, sadly, continue to exist. More importantly, it’s impossible to even think about humanitarian catastrophes without discussing the Nazis. They are the black hole of humanitarian work and political activism. You can’t escape them, and your thoughts and actions bend around them. 

Most modern human rights work was built in direct response to the atrocities the Nazis and their allies committed during World War II, and much of what drives modern human rights workers is the specter of the Holocaust. So instead of trying to avoid the Nazis, we should take a moment to confront them: There’s a major problem with how the Nazis influence the way we talk and think about the world. They make us lazy thinkers, and worse still, this lazy thinking disempowers us.

I’ll explain.

Inevitably, whenever people discuss how to stop human rights abuses before they occur, they bring up the failure of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy when he went to Munich to negotiate with Hitler. The idea being that, if Chamberlain had been more forceful at Munich, World War II would have been averted. 

Chamberlain and Hitler at the Munich Conference.

Here’s the thing: This is not the moment in which we could’ve stopped World War II. It’s chosen more or less arbitrarily, and usually by people who are trying to justify the use of pre-emptive force. Chamberlain went to Munich in 1938. This is one year before the start of the war. It is five years after the Reichstag fire, five years after Hitler banned all other parties in Germany, five years after Germany had begun to rearm. It would be very easy to argue that 1938 was already far, far too late. 

If you chose to, you could make the argument that the right time to stop the Nazis was 5 years earlier, when they started violating the peace agreement from World War I.

But why stop there? If we wanted to really stop World War II, the Holocaust, and the Nuclear Era, we could just as easily go back to the mid-20’s and build a less speculative American banking system, averting the crash of ‘29, the Great Depression, and the global rise of authoritarianism that came with it. 

Or we could go back to the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI, which put such onerous terms on the Germans that their interim democracy was pretty much doomed from the start. We could go back and prevent the absurd and utterly pointless violence of WWI, we could undo all of those antiquated alliances and pointless squabbling, all the constant jostling for colonial supremacy. 

At this point, if you’re keeping track, we’re reaching back into the 19th and even 18th century.

I could keep going back and never stop, but I’ll spare you, as doing so would miss the point. The point is that there is no one moment in history where we could’ve prevented World War II. There were millions of moments. The point is that when we discuss the big moments where the course of history could’ve been changed, we almost exclusively focus on moments where old powerful men were making important decisions in closed rooms. Most of us weren’t alive when these decisions were made, and if we had been, we would not have been in the rooms where they were being made. 

Looking at history in this manner, where the only people ever making a difference are powerful old men, and where there’s only one moment in which the right decision can be made, is fundamentally disempowering to the rest of us.

Gentler alternative histories

I would like to offer a few alternative moments to when the horrors of Hitler could have been prevented: like the moment in 1905 or so, when, at a dinner table in Austria or Germany, someone could have spoken out against an anti-Semitic, war-mongering, or hypernationalist comment made by a friend or relative, and didn’t.

We do not know anything about this moment specifically, but we’re all more familiar with what it would have felt like than we are with what sitting in the room at Munich or Versailles would have felt like. This is because we have all been having these types conversations lately. These conversations are often terrible. They are tense and awkward and sometimes they lead to fights we would rather not have. 

But they are as important now as they were in 1905 Germany, for a single reason: there are often children present at dinner tables, and children listen. Children that hear about how war is glorious, that hear their country is destined to rule all, and that hear that Jews or gays or immigrants are untrustworthy and subhuman, are going to have a very hard time shaking those ideas off in adulthood, no matter how well-meaning and decent they grow up to be.

It would be tempting to imagine that if Hitler had heard an adult he respected speak up for the humanity of the Jews at a young and impressionable age, that he would never have been more than a failed painter, of the harmless type that still lives in your Uncle’s basement. But I think most of us have trouble imagining Hitler as a child, without the mustache and swastika, without the seething, furious charisma. It is hard to imagine the most evil, warped human being most of us can think of as ever being anything but evil and warped, even if we ourselves have never met a truly evil 5-year-old.

Instead of trying to imagine a better Hitler, let’s think about all of the other dinner tables in Germany, the ones filled with the 5-year-olds that would one day join the stormtroopers, attend the rallies, work in the factories, and turn a blind eye as their neighbors were beaten in the streets and dragged into cattle cars.

Imagine if they had learned, at a young age, that a person is a person, regardless of race or religion, that their country was beautiful but that others were, too, that their destiny was not one of conquest and domination, but of peace and cooperation. Imagine if a country full of those kids would have been quite so willing to follow an embittered, failed painter into the violent oblivion of the Second World War.

Now: None of the parents of 1905 could have possibly seen the future that was bearing down on them and their children. None of them could have possibly fathomed the decades that lay in front of them. You can’t really fault them for not being able to see the future. But if you can judge a parent by the children they raise, they were among the worst parents in history.

It is because these kitchen table moments are not recorded in our history books that we don’t remember them, but there were far more of these moments than there were treaties, sanctions, or proclamations, and even in those important, historic instances, all of the men who were in those big important rooms had once sat as children at humble kitchen tables.

The argument is not that the acts of the powerful do not matter, but that the tone of them is set by the accumulation of millions of tiny little acts of kindness or cruelty in a thousand little communities over the preceding centuries. 

What is true of genocides is true of hurricanes: the real life saving work is done long before the crisis point hits.

The darker timelines we never lived

Most importantly, you do not hear about the genocides that didn’t happen. You don’t hear about lives that were saved, about children that were unharmed, about women that weren’t raped, about family heirlooms that weren’t stolen, because if we’re successful in our work, those people don’t exist. If we’re successful in our work, no one will ever thank us, because no one will know there’s a reason to give thanks. 

It’s impossible for us to compare ourselves to darker, more violent timelines that may have resulted had people been crueler in the past, or brighter, more peaceful timelines had we chosen to be kinder and wiser. But there is reason to think that we’ve been getting better as a species over time.

There’s a school of thought out there right now, most notably put forward by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, that says that rather than focusing on short-term, horrifying anecdotes, we should be looking at the broader trends of history. And the broader trends of history are much more positive than you might imagine: violence has steadily declined over the course of history, as have the number of wars, massacres, and genocides. Fewer people are dying of preventable disease, life expectancies have lengthened, and respect for human rights has risen around the world.

There are, of course, major weaknesses in this theory: past performance is not an indicator of future success, and “fewer genocides” is not the ideal, “no genocides” is. A decrease in violence and hardship also doesn’t really matter all that much if we destroy the world with nuclear weapons or climate change in the next few decades, which seems increasingly possible by the day. 

But this outlook does give us a dose of much-needed hope for the future. It does show that human beings can change, and that they seem to gradually, glacially, on an almost generational scale, change for the better. 

A more realistic system of thinking is offered by Rebecca Solnit in her physically slim but emotionally massive 2004 book, Hope in the Dark. Solnit, unlike Pinker, sees the flaws of humanity with clear eyes, but she suggests that hopelessness is still an irrational response to the world. The sheer amount that has changed in our small lifespans alone should lead us to reject the idea that we can see the future and that it’s bleak. 

When I was a kid, virtually no one used the internet, which, for good or for ill, now shapes the world in massive, unpredictable ways. When I was 3, the Berlin Wall fell. A few years before, a world without the USSR was unthinkable. Until I was 16, gay sex was still illegal in 14 states. After Bush’s devastating reelection in 2004, virtually no one would have told you a black man could ever be President, let alone in the next Presidential term. 4 years ago, before Obergefell v. Hodges, there were 15 states where gay marriage was either banned or was not totally legal.

The work that led to these changes started small. It was not Reagan who knocked down the wall, but ordinary Germans, Czechs, Poles, and Russians, dissidents who for decades had been writing poetry and fiction and essays in jail cells and gulags and in the secret corners of their homes. It was not the Supreme Court that legalized gay sex and, eventually, gay marriage, but groups of activists who insisted on their dignity for decades, and were willing to sacrifice their time, money, and personal lives to demand that dignity in court. It was not Obama who brought us a black President, it was thousands of activists who, for centuries, demanded equal rights for blacks, even if it meant being beaten, imprisoned, and sometimes murdered by the very state that was supposed to protect them. 

The "great men" are just surfers. We are the waves.

A butterfly flaps its wings

Most people are terrified of the apparent chaos of the world, but there’s something beautiful about it. Chaos, for one thing, makes the future impossible to predict. This is because small, even microscopically insignificant actions now, can snowball into something massive. This, for those of us who feel insignificant or small, should inspire hope rather than dread.

Most of us are familiar with the Butterfly Effect, the idea that a butterfly can flap its wings in China and that this can cause a hurricane in the Atlantic months later. While no one has ever caught this asshole butterfly in the act, the idea itself is now widely accepted among meteorologists and climate scientists. 

In historical terms, the idea is similarly expressed by the old proverb.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

You cannot predict what will change our future. You cannot predict what it will look like. We do not see the horrible futures that collapse every time we choose to act with kindness rather than cruelty, or the bright, beautiful utopias that evaporate when we lash out at those around us, but those futures are as real for us now as they were for the parents of 1905.

Push it in the right direction. Start seeding more good into this chaos.

Go ahead, little bug: flap.