Educated hope provides the basis for dignifying the labor of teachers; it offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change, affirms shared responsibilities, and encourages teachers and students to recognize ambivalence and uncertainty as fundamental dimensions of learning. Such hope offers the possibility of thinking beyond the given. As difficult as this task may seem to educators, if not to a larger public, it is a struggle worth waging.
In an age of predatory capitalism and an emerging fascist politics, educators, students, and other concerned citizens face the challenge of providing a language that embraces a militant utopianism while constantly being attentive to those forces that seek to turn such hope into a new slogan or to punish and dismiss those who dare to look beyond the horizon of the given. Fascism breeds cynicism and is the enemy of a militant and social hope. Hope must be tempered by the complex reality of the times and viewed as a project and condition for providing a sense of collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and engaged participation. Without hope, even in the most dire times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and struggle. Agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency. Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present.
Hope is the affective and intellectual precondition for individual and social struggle. Hope, not despair, is the precondition that encourages critique on the part of intellectuals in and outside of the academy who use the resources of theory to address pressing social problems. Hope is also at the root of the civic courage that translates critique into political practice. Hope as the desire for a future that offers more than the present becomes most acute when one's life can no longer be taken for granted. Only by holding on to both critique and hope in such contexts will resistance make concrete the possibility for transforming politics into an ethical space and a public act. Building a better future than the one we now expect to unfold will require nothing less than confronting the flow of everyday experience and the weight of social suffering with the force of individual and collective resistance and the unending project of democratic social transformation. At the same time, in order for resistance to take on the challenges posed by the rise of a fascist politics, it will have to develop an awakening of desire. This form of educated desire is rooted in the dream of a collective consciousness and imagination fueled by the struggle for new forms of community that affirm the value of the social, economic equality, the social contract, and democratic values and social relations.
The current fight against a nascent fascism across the globe is not only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas, consciousness, and the power to shift the culture itself. It is also as Arendt points out a struggle against "a widespread fear of judging."[13] Without the ability to judge, it becomes impossible to recover words that have meaning, imagine a future that does not mimic the dark times in which we live, and create a language that changes how we think about ourselves and our relationship to others. Any struggle for a radical democratic socialist order will not take place if "the lessons from our dark past [cannot] be learned and transformed into constructive resolutions" and solutions for struggling for and creating a post-capitalist society.[14]
In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice. Democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as public and higher education in which civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting pedagogy to the practice of freedom, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good.[15] Neoliberal capitalism strips hope of its utopian possibilities and thrives on the notion that we live in an era of foreclosed hope, and that any attempt to think otherwise will result in a nightmare. Yet, the fact remains that without hope there is no agency and without collective agents, there is no hope of resistance. In the age of nascent fascism, it is not enough to connect education with the defense of reason, informed judgment, and critical agency; it must also be aligned with the power and potential of collective resistance. We live in dangerous times. Consequently, there is an urgent need for more individuals, institutions and social movements to come together in the belief that the current regimes of tyranny can be resisted, that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs through collective resistance will make radical change happen.
Notes.
1. Peter Thompson, "The Frankfurt School, Part 5: Walter Benjamin, Fascism and the Future," The Guardian (April 21, 2013).
2. See, especially, Stuart Hall, Chapter 1: "T he Neoliberal Revolution," The Neoliberal Crisis, ed. Edited by Jonathan Rutherford and Sally Davison, [London: Lawrence Wishart 2012]. David Harvey: A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005);Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, (Princeton University Press, 2008). Wendy Brown, "Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, (New York: Zone Books, 2015). Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality (St. Martin's Press, 2017); George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage (Verso Press, 2017); Henry A. Giroux, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights 2018).
3. Charles Derber, Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance for Social Justice and Democracy in Perilous Times (New York: Routledge, 2017). Heinrich Geiselberger, ed. The Great Regression (London: Polity, 2017). Ã "'
4. See, for example, Jane Mayer, "The Making of the Fox News White House," The New Yorker (March 4, 2019).
5. Jon Nixon, "Hannah Arendt: Thinking Versus Evil," Times Higher Education, (February 26, 2015). 6. Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism," The New York Review of Books (June 22, 1995).
7. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Trade Publishers, New Edition, 2001). Ã "'
8. Paul Gilroy, "Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line", Chapter 4 -'Hitler in Khakis: Icons, Propaganda, and Aesthetic Politics,' (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 144-145, 146 Ã "'
9. Pankaj Mishra, "A Gandhian Stand Against the Culture of Cruelty," The New York Review of Books, [May 22, 2018].
10. Joshua Sperling cited in Lisa Appignanesi, "Berger's Ways of Being," The New York Review of Books (May 9, 2019). Ã "'
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