Derrick Jensen on despair and hope
by m
I’ve blogged about the anarcho-primitivist writer Derrick Jensen before. When I read him, I am simultaneously energized and inspired, terrified and furious. But I think what he says here about despair is quite right:
PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.
But this passage is part of a larger article written against “hope.” (The essay is itself an excerpt from Vol. 1 of his two-part book Endgame.) If Jensen recognizes that he is a “complex enough being” that he can feel radical despair but at the same time feel that “life is good,” I wonder why he cannot come up with a more “complex,” more truthful understanding of hope.
Comments
This reminds me of an Onion article about Noam Chomsky I read once.
i think you’ve more or less hit the nail on the head with jensen. that is: if you apply your critique of how he is handling the word “hope” to about 99% of what he says it turns out that he’s pretty much useless as a thinker.
or maybe better put: it looks to me like he falls into all of the same traps as most of the primitivists: they reject (in practice, if not verbally) any sort of dialectic. some do it out of a fear of the “marxist” connotations of “dialectic”, others because they don’t like the complexity any sort of dialectic brings into the equation. because of this, it is difficult for them to allow any words, or concepts in general, to have any complexity beyond the aspects they wish to rigidly define in order to reject.
so, apply the same critique to the word “civilization”, or any number of the words primitivists associate with “civilization”, and you’ll generally find the same lack of complexity or depth. just a lot of passion. all together: this is why, in my estimation and experience, primitivists are generally more crypto-fascist than anarchist.
side note: the only primitivistic folks i’ve really found useful at all, with reservations, have been jacques cammatte and fredy perlman.
“...at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.”
I remember I once had a brief flirtation with primitivism (for about a week or two, when I was 17, atheist, and really depressed); I listened to Jensen give a talk against hope and if I remember correctly, I was kinda pissed off by it.
Jensen being a non-Christian, though, I have to respect his rejection of hope; I myself think it better to be without hope if without God, than to pretend that there is hope in a godless universe.
“you’ll generally find the same lack of complexity or depth . . . primitivists are generally more crypto-fascist than anarchist.”
So much for complexity, nuance or depth in what you have to say at all either. First of all, Derrick Jensen is NOT an anarchist let alone a primitivist. He has explicitly said he’s not anarchist on many occasions. A little research on your part, or actually reading people you have so many empty words for, would go a long way.
Jeff, meet Andy. Andy, meet Jeff. You two should meet in real life.