'The Interview': Rebecca Solnit Says the Left's Next Hero Is Already Here

From the New York Times, this is the interview I'm David Marquesi.

As the old saying goes, the only constant is change.

Lately though, the change can feel overwhelming.

We are, after all, living through an era of widespread democratic backsliding, massive

technological disruption, and the ongoing slow-motion disaster of the climate crisis,

to name just a few.

But what if there was a different and more hopeful story to tell about all that upheaval?

That's the question at the heart of the beginning comes after the end.

The new book by the prolific and critically acclaimed writer Rebecca Solnit.

A thematic sequel to her earlier classic Hope in the Dark, the book takes a longer view

on progress and offers a more optimistic philosophy of change based on ideas of interconnection,

feminism, ecological care, and political equality.

It's not a naive book, Solnit is keenly aware of the massive challenges we're all facing.

But it provides a stabilizing counterweight to the feeling that the world has spun dangerously

off-kilter.

Here's my conversation with Rebecca Solnit.

You know, Rebecca, it's a real pleasure for me to speak to you in part because a field

guide to getting lost was a really big book for me, and I read it not long after I had

moved from my home in Toronto to New York City, and it felt like a real companion at the

time.

And all just the way it captured the idea that like displacement and a kind of solitude

can actually be positive things.

So thank you for that.

I'm so glad you found it at the right time for you.

And yeah, that book, we just put out a 20th anniversary edition, and I got to spend some

time revisiting it and rethinking what the hell it was I was doing in the early 2000s

with it.

And it's been really interesting.

I wrote that book, and then I wrote Hope in the Dark, and I thought, like, am I schizophrenic?

These books are so different.

And then I realized that Hope in the Dark, which is very political and very upbeat, and

the field guide to getting lost, which is introspective and kind of melancholy, were both

about coming to terms with uncertainty.

But of course, I also wrote a field guide to getting lost, as I do a lot of my books,

to kind of react against something happening in the culture, and something that was already

happening with tech was idea that we want to live in a safe, circumscribed, known world.

We don't want to leave the house without knowing exactly where we're going, in a sense

that we need to be in control, that we need to know everything, and of course, we're

never completely in control, and we never completely know everything.

So how do we look at it in a way that lets us accept it and maybe work with it instead

of deny it or work against it?

What in the culture would you say your new book is reacting against?

Really a kind of cultural amnesia.

I think of time in increments of a year, five years, 50 years, centuries, and across

that time span, you can really see how profoundly the world has changed and is changing.

You can see that these good things, you know, feminism, civil rights movements, environmental

awareness, indigenous resurgence, have had a profound impact.

So often people seem to think in these very short term intervals in which they either

think nothing has changed, or they just see the last bad thing that happened and think

we're losing.

So context is everything, and I often feel that a lot of pessimism, despair, humorism comes

from not knowledge about the future, even though they think they're thinking about the future,

but from lack of knowledge about the past, despair and amnesia go hand in hand, and so

to hope and memory, I think in many cases.

So when people are reading the news or thinking about changes from day to day or month to month,

or even year to year, and it's making them feel like they're just barreling into a grim

dystopian future, what else should they be thinking about, or what additional context

should they have that would help them complete the picture and show them that there are these

deeper currents of positive change.

I think even the right tells us something, if we listen very carefully to what they're

saying, something very encouraging, they tell us, you all are very powerful, you've changed

the world profoundly, all these things that are often treated separately, feminism, queer

rights, environmental and climate action, ideas of equality, etc, are actually all connected.

So they're basically telling us we're incredibly successful, which is the good news, the bad

news is they hate it and they want to change it all back.

So much of what we're seeing with Trumpism, with the far right resurgence or surge right

now, is a fear yet how the world has been changing a desire to change it back, to put

women back, you know, kind of barefoot pregnant in the kitchen, to recreate racial hierarchies

that have been dismantled, to some extent, to impose mandatory Christianity, mandatory

heterosexuality, to punish, difference, and to deregulate protecting the environment for

which you also have to pretend that there are no consequences to destroying the climate,

polluting rivers, destroying the natural world, etc, and pretend that we're not connected

and it's an anti-connection ideology.

And so there's a backlash, it is significant, but it is not comprehensive or global.

I was on book tour last year in Europe, and the Europeans kind of astounded me by being

like, oh, versus Wade was overturned, doesn't that mean feminism has failed?

And I was like, the United States is 4% of the population.

Meanwhile, all these Catholic countries, Argentina, Mexico, Ireland and Spain have greatly expanded

reproductive rights and abortion access.

And even though returning of Roe vs Wade just took away the national protection, a lot

of blue states, strengthened it, you know, so it's really how you tell the story, and

there's a lot of different ways to tell it.

So I always want to give people these broader perspectives, these deeper perspectives,

this equipment for understanding change in ways that empowers them to see it, to understand

it, and to participate in it, in ways I think you can't with the short term perspectives.

Do you think progressive change is inevitable?

I think nothing is inevitable, but I do think the word evitable should be used, if we're

going to use inevitable, in some ways everything is evitable.

We're deciding in the present what the future will be, and I think there's a lot of strengths

and tendencies, but recognizing that the future does not exist really dismantles a lot

of defeatism, despair, doom orism, cynicism, which often pretend to know what the future

can and can't be as a way of pretending to a power they don't really have, while abandoning

the power we really do have, which is to make a future that doesn't exist yet in the present.

And I've spent my life listening to people talk about what can and can't happen, and

usually not coming back to Apologize when it turns out that actually Donald Trump can

be elected, same-sex marriage is going to pass, we are going to stop the keystone pipeline,

and so there's what I want to be kind of an asshole, I'm like, wow, do you bet on the

horses because you seem to be really good at knowing the future?

You know, I was just reading an essay by this writer named George Shilaba.

I think he's one of the best political writers in America, but he was pointing out that,

you know, there can be a kind of value in certain forms of social conservatism that sort

of maintaining certain cultural or religious traditions, you know, it helps with social

stability, it helps with inculcating large-scale trust among groups of people, but the problem

in this essay was pointing out is when those traditions are based in illusions.

It's like an illusion could be the authority of white men, or that a certain kind of

Christian morality is the only valid kind of morality, or that, you know, one's country

can do no wrong.

But my question is, how do we promote stability and solidarity in the absence of the old

illusions?

I think that there are some really deep cultural traditions that are worth keeping, some of

which are older than Christianity, and one of the really magnificent things I see happening

in the United States right now is the recovery of some of the really old stories.

And so I feel like part of the future, the best future we aim for is built by going back

to the oldest stories, back to recognizing that patriarchy is not inevitable or natural

or the only way people have ever done things, that there are in indigenous cultures,

the Americas, in Asian and African cultures, there are matriarchal traditions, a lot of

hunter-gatherers, just seem to have a lot more gender equality.

So I think you can move forward with anchors in a deeper past and hope for a kind of

stability and a deeper relationship to the old stories in the past.

But why is it that it feels so much easier to internalize the upsetting aspects, the retrogressive

aspects of the world we live in, rather than the more positive context?

You know, it's like we're more drawn to pay attention to the fire than to the place where

there's calm.

I think you understand what I'm getting out of this question.

I do.

In some ways, you're coming to the wrong person.

My friend Sam calls me the hope lady and I remain hopeful and partly as defiance, they

would like us to surrender, to feel powerless, that there's nothing we can do.

But I think the evidence speaks to that.

I think part of it, that you're addressing is narrative itself, most stories are something

goes wrong and then we have to address it.

And when nothing goes wrong, there's literally no story.

You walk through the jungle and the flowers are beautiful, but you better keep an eye on

the tiger because the flowers aren't going to eat you, but the tiger will.

You've got to keep an eye on what's wrong.

But also I think a lot of the stories of what's right are these stories of incremental change.

And one of the stories I feel people don't really comprehend is the energy revolution at

the turn of the millennium.

We didn't really have an alternative to fossil fuel, which is part of why so many people

are still stuck in a kind of austerity of energy consumption, which is a good thing.

But because solar and wind have suddenly become these incredibly cheap, incredibly effective

adaptable technologies, we can rent almost everything on earth, on renewables, have more

energy than we could possibly use.

And that's such an incremental story.

I feel like very few people comprehend it because it's nerdy, it's technical, and it's really

about something very incremental.

I need to reveal my party pooper attitude about renewable energy or clean energy, which

there's a comfort in knowing that clean energy is the future.

But at the same time, the United States is pumping more oil than ever before.

Our global climate temperature increase targets, we're going to blow past them.

We have no idea what the feedback loop effects of rising temperature, what those effects will

be or how bad they'll get.

So while there is a comfort in knowing what our shared energy future is, it can feel

like a cold comfort to me.

Well, cold is good in the climate movement.

You know, I need to talk about comfort.

I am not comfortable with where we're at.

I am a climate activist, I donate a bunch, I do a bunch of work.

The wonder and horror for climate is that the great majority of people on earth support

climate action.

They want to see their governments implement it.

They want to see the world around them change to a more climate-friendly world, whether

it's around transportation, urban design, agriculture, etc.

The obstacles are not technological, they're political and a minority of vested interests,

the fossil fuel industry and the rich and powerful and governmental figures who either

are or serve the fossil fuel industry are what's holding us back.

And so the wonder and horror exist side by side.

That's part of the complexity I try and embrace.

You can be thrilled by all the things that are happening and horrified by all the things

that should be happening, but aren't.

And so essentially everything we can save is worth saving.

Everything we can do is worth doing every tenth of a degree.

We can prevent of temperature rise, saves places, species, communities, etc.

So of course we're going to lose a lot.

We've already lost a lot, but we don't have to lose everything and we don't have to

surrender.

You got me all worked up.

I feel like it probably didn't take that much.

You know, I'm just passionate about these things.

They are so worth doing, it is so not over.

And we don't know what's going to happen next.

And I was so shaped by the 1989 revolutions on Tenement Square ultimately was a tragedy,

although it may have sown some seeds we don't know.

I went back and read a bunch of the media in the English-speaking world in the sort of spring

and summer of 1989.

Nobody foresaw that all that unrest in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,

the other Eastern European countries was going to mount too much or they just thought it

was going to be chaos, which governmental people are always afraid of.

The fact that they would topple totalitarianism across that whole swath of Soviet-dominated

Eastern Europe, largely non-violently almost all at once in October and November, was really

inconceivable.

And I think it was inconceivable to the people who did it and knowing that we don't know

is a really important kind of knowledge because pretending you do know when you don't is

stupid and misleading.

Something I wish a few more people would apologize a bit more for about all these things that

were never going to happen or were inevitable that turned out not to be quite that way.

You know, if we're talking about counter narratives that can lead to positive change,

I think one of the defining counter narratives of the last few years could loosely fall under

the umbrella of, you know, the resistance or another thing that is related in some ways might

be called wokeism.

And I would like to hear your perspective on whether any of the strategies or tactics against

Trump and Trumpism have maybe been counterproductive because I wonder if, you know, calling him in

the movement, you know, fascist, sexist, racist, almost regardless of whether or not

individual thinks that those terms are legitimately applicable has pushed people into their

respective corners and maybe alienated people who, you know, might otherwise be brought into

the progressive fold, you know, so do you think there have been any missteps over the last 10 years

in terms of?

And that's the least of our problems.

I mean, they are racist, they are authoritarian, they are misogynist, they are homophobic,

and tiptoeing around it protects them and not the targets of the hatred and discrimination.

I just get so tired of the idea that progressives have gone too far in asserting that like every

human being deserves human rights when people are being shot in the streets of Minneapolis.

And we are facing such horrific brutality and that politeness is not really the problem to start with

I think we got into this situation in part by a lot of people in the mainstream thinking it was

more important to be nice and polite than call things by their true names. This is really extreme

stuff. If we need to use extreme language to describe it, let's be truthful, let's be accurate,

and let's be bold. There's a wonderful historian, scholar of nonviolence named George Laky,

who says polarization is good. That's when you have clarity. So many people have to pick sides,

and you know, you do not get authoritarians to behave better by being meek and gentle and polite,

you get it by being strong. Thank you for asking. Thank you for answering. But I want to

switch subjects for a minute because you got a lot of attention for your book Man Explain Things to

me, which I think was published 2014. Yes. Adapted from an essay you wrote that went viral,

an essay that was credited with helping popularize the term man-splaining, even though I think the

term does not appear in the essay. But was there anything about that book or that essay that you think

got lost somewhere along the path to virality? Yeah. No, I wrote the essay in 2008 after joking

for years that I was going to write an essay called Man Explain Things to Me. And you never really

know what you're doing as a writer in terms of you don't know how the audience will respond,

which is one of the glories of it, you know, at least for me, I don't know. And it went super

viral then. It got sent around in a bunch of interesting ways. But what I find a little disturbing

is that people love to tell the original anecdote over and over, which had happened in 2003 when I

was passing through Swanky Aspen, Colorado, and got taken to the Swanky Party full of Swanky

people in the Swanky host. Sounds swanky. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, not my scene.

When we were trying to leave the party and he sat us down and said, so I hear you written a few

books and I'd written seven and what are they about? He said the most recent one was about Edward

Moibridge, the photographer whose revolutionary technologies laid the groundwork for the birth of

cinema. And he said, oh, have you read about the very important Moibridge book that had just come

out and it turned out to be mine? It's a very funny anecdote. It's also should be a horrifying

anecdote about how deeply not listened to women are. But the next anecdote in that book is about a

woman running screaming out of her house in the middle of the night saying that her husband is

trying to kill her and a nuclear physicist, the uncle of my boyfriend in my 20s, told me that

anecdote and thought it was funny because he firmly believed in his upper middle class nuclear

physicist suburb. Men do not try to kill their wives, but women are crazy. And men kill their

wives all the time, including an upper middle class white suburbs. And women die all the time of

not being believed whether they say that you know, something's going on with their body, they need

medical care, or they say a man's trying to kill them. And nobody talks about that anecdote,

which I think is actually much more important. So I felt that the normity of the situation really

got underestimated when everybody enjoyed telling that opening anecdote. And I don't regret the

way I wrote it. I wrote it in one sitting one morning because that anecdote really kind of got

people's attention. But I just wish people would kind of hold the whole thing rather than that

opening. I want to ask about the possible limits of storytelling because the power of storytelling,

the transformative, the socially transformative power of storytelling is something that comes up

in your work a lot. And again, to be a David Downer, I think we can look at the last 10 years

to take a span of time and say, Hey, you know, over the last 10 years, there has been more

powerful storytelling and powerful first person storytelling about any number of things, whether

it's police abuse or the climate crisis or sexual assault. At the same time, one could plausibly

argue that despite being a wash in all this powerful storytelling, the underlying systemic

issues that necessitate that storytelling, not only maybe aren't improving, but in some cases

are perhaps getting worse. So does that maybe suggest that storytelling can only be effective

within a constellation of other strategies and tactics?

I think absolutely have to be other strategies and tactics. It's always important to recognize

that stories can be destructive, imprisoning. They can obscure the truth as well as reveal the truth.

There's this period a while back when people were kind of flouncing around with this. Aren't stories

wonderful? And there are stories to justify white supremacy, misogyny, environmental destruction.

The right has its stories, which the fact that this regime has to lie constantly says a lot

about who they are. But yeah, stories can be destructive. A lot of stories can oversimplify.

I do often see the stories people on the left towel and the left I think is a lot of different

things, not a monolith, as very driven by their own version of sectarianism, grievance,

often stories of oversimplification. Everyone in that category was like this and everyone in

this category is like that. And I talk a lot about the fact that categories are leaky and often see

one of the jobs I try and do is just trying to give people more complex understandings.

So yeah, I think the idea that stories are these magical devices that will do all our work for us

is itself a bad story. But the story is often only the beginning when you change the story

that doesn't fix everything. But it often is the beginning of changing everything else.

Rebecca, thank you very much for taking all the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it.

And I'm looking forward to talking to you again next week. That was a wild gallop, my pleasure.

After the break, Rebecca and I speak again about what she wishes Democrats would do differently.

I'm watching the left gear up to attack Gavin Newsom just in case he's the nominee in 2028

and it kind of makes my heart sink.

Rebecca, I'm happy to be speaking to you again. Likewise, David. What do you got for me?

You know, there's something that I said to you earlier that I've been thinking about and

want to amend. We were talking about green energy transition and how how clean energy

shots definitively on the rise. And I pessimistically did some like, well, but kind of

quibbling with that. I was thinking about that. I was like, well, that was a stupid thing to say.

Like, obviously, any sort of clean energy transition is to be encouraged in every 10th of a

degree of warming that we can prevent really matters. I think what got my back up a little bit

when we were talking about that was this idea that somehow like the market will solve or help solve

the climate crisis, even though the market is kind of the thing that got us into the climate crisis

in the first place. So I think that's where my comment was coming from. I didn't want to come off

like a kind of nihilist or something like that. Well, thank you. I figured you're just playing

devil's advocate. And yeah, I thought about that 10th of a degree thing. And it's one of the complex

things. And it's I always feel like I'm asking people to go for nuance and shades of gray rather

than black and white and the existence of contradictions and complexities. You really have to hold both

that there's still a lot to hope for and there's a lot to mourn. And those things can exist at the same

time. I feel like a lot of the trouble we get in is people who need those all or nothing stories.

And they literally hear me too often as saying if we're not losing everything, then surely you

just said we're winning everything. And I'm never saying that. And so you can be kind of heartbroken

and exhilarated about climate at the same time. And you know, show up and keep doing the work,

which keeps getting done with a lot of pushback, including from the current horrendous

administration here in the US, whether it's to do with environmental degradation or degradation

of our politics or degradation of people, it really seems to me like the public is hungry

for an individual to be some sort of real counterweight or foil to Trump and Trumpism. And

you know, I don't know whether that person is sore on Mamdani or Gavin Newsom is clearly trying

to position himself as that person. I might be interested in knowing your thoughts about him.

But for whatever reason that person has yet to be identified or yet to identify

themselves, why do you think that is? I often think one of the great

kind of weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies over and over that suggests

that our big problems are solved by musli guys and spandex who superpowers ability to inflict

an indoor extraordinary violence, but actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort.

It brings up something really beautiful that Ticknott Han said at some point before he died a

few years ago, which is the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha in Buddhist terminology is

the community of practitioners. It's the idea that we don't have to look for an individual for a

savior for an uber bench. Maybe the community is the next hero. And that's exactly what many

apples is. And I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society.

There's all this disparagement about wine moms. And I read two things yesterday. One from the left,

one in the new republic about centrist despising Trump resistance. And those of us who are making

a racket were often coded female as in hysterical overwrought need to calm down no big deal,

etc. And the left also was taking some swipes at wine moms. And you know, a huge amount of

the important work I was thinking about this when I woke up in the middle of the night is done by

nice ladies. And I think a lot of people with platforms and a lot of the left wants social change to

look like, you know, the French Revolution or Che Guevars or something like that. And so the fact

that nice ladies actually change the world. Maybe it's about the fact that changing the world

is more like caregiving than it is like war. But too many people still expect it to look like war.

I and I denigrate politicians. I don't respect his win socks. I think a lot of our billionaires

are also win socks. You know, they looked liberal when Obama was president and being liberal got

you ahead in your pursuits. They now have become right wing authoritarians because the

winds blowing in the other direction. If Trump falls and I don't know AOC or whatever becomes

president, their wind is going to blow in another direction. But I just want us to understand that

most of the important changes collective. Do you think Governor Newsom is a win sock?

Not exactly. I do think he's, you know, I think he's trying to counter Trump by

sound making fun of Trump by sounding like Trump might have had its moment.

But it's also one of those things I'm watching the left gear up to attack Gavin Newsom just

in case he's the nominee in 2028. And it kind of makes my heart sinks. I watch people tear down

Al Gore. I watch people tear down Hillary Clinton. I watch people tear down Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

And there's definitely major things to critique about every one of them. But at the moment

when, you know, like the job is to defeat the other guy, you know, we defeat ourselves when

that's what happens. I want to go back to your new book for a second. So the new book is kind of

about the inevitability of social and political change. But there's also an inevitability to

personal change in all our lives. Has there been a personal change that you went through

that affected how you think about or respond to bigger change in the world?

Right. And there's so many of them that it's hard to pick out one. I have an interesting experience

every now and again that I think a lot of people have, especially if you're old enough to remember

the 80s and the 90s and let alone the 70s, you go back to something that you remember fondly and

you find out it's just racist or sexist or cruel in some way that we kind of didn't notice or

have tools or language for that was normal then that's not so normal and acceptable now.

And there's so many things I wrote at this book about Purple Rain, which I loved when it came out

in 1984 and tried to watch during the pandemic. I love prints. I love what feminist things a movie has.

But there's a lot of just big time abuse of Apollonia, Prince's love interest that was kind of

played for laughs and normalized in that movie. And I just thought who was I when I was in my early

20s watching that movie without even the language or the space in which to feel that that stuff

wasn't okay because if it wasn't okay, you were just at odds with the world. You know, there's

kind of no place to go with it. So I probably just laughed along. So yeah, I think about, you know,

I have changed so much and my change isn't really separate from the social change in so many ways.

We've all been reeducated around so many or educated around so many things. Can I just as I'm

a big prince fan and I think there are there's been stuff that's come out since he died about his

treatment of women and also like you're suggesting that the culture has moved in certain ways that

cast his attitude towards women or what seems like his attitude towards women was in a different

light. How do you think differently about the art of someone like that now? And it really depends.

I don't think there's a man who made art before if I had a wristwatch, I'd check it, you know,

about 10 minutes ago, who was not, you know, there's some, but you go back a certain amount of time

and I don't know, I had a wonderful English professor, Dr. Pelin, who used to say, but fortunately,

Shakespeare hadn't read Freud, you know, that there is a way in which we can't ask people from

long ago to have our values. There's historians call it presentism. It depends. And I think there's

some people who weren't better than their times. But some of that stuff, you know, is just was kind

of ugly then and is really ugly now. And it came up somehow in conversation. I think because Woody

Allen is all over the Epstein papers as a good buddy of Epstein's. The last Woody Allen movie I saw

was Manhattan. I'm exactly the same age as the 17 year old or 16 year old who played his love

interest, the middle-aged love guys love interest in the movie. And it creeped me out. I knew

those kind of guys in the late 70s and they were creepy and I was repelled and I've never seen

a Woody Allen movie since. I want to read a line from your memoir, recollections of my non-existence

and then ask you about it to the line is sometimes now I envy those people who are at the beginning

of the long road of the lives they'll make who still have so many decisions ahead as the road

forks and forks again. You're no longer at the beginning of the long road of your life. Yeah.

Can you see an exciting or pivotal or or momentous decision coming? Other than refusing to ever do

another book tour now and you know I'm pretty happy with the path I'm on and really I grew up with

people telling me to have low expectations for myself. My mom told me point blank that my writing

was just a hobby when I was in my mid 20s and that I should just glum onto my lovely successful

boyfriend forever who was in the process of leaving. My father told me the only advice he ever gave

me I think was I should be a business major because I'd never make a living in the humanities.

And I didn't really expect to quite have the trajectory I did and so I'm kind of thrilled with it

but you always have a little nostalgia lots of points where you make decisions and just

that so many of them are ahead of you I think is both hugely burdensome and also really exciting

for young people I watch them decide who to marry how to have whether to have a start of family

and how choose their profession choose their major in college. I kind of hate the way people treat

your later teens in your 20s as though it's all light and fluffy when

it's tremendously weighted because you're making decisions about who are you who are your people

what is your life going to be about and even though they're changeable they're often permanent

decisions you're hitting so many forks in the road and they're such big ones and some of them

are revocable some of them aren't so I think about that a lot partly because I hang out with people

of all ages and yeah from three to their 90s. Rebecca thank you so much for taking all the time

to speak with me I really enjoyed it and I appreciate that you did it. Absolutely pleasure David take care.

That's Rebecca Solne. Her new book The Beginning Comes After The End is available now.

To watch this interview and many others you can subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com

slash at symbol the interview podcast. This conversation was produced by Seth Kelly. It was edited

by Annabelle Bacon. Original music by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, Rowan Nemisto, and Mary and Luzano.

Photography by Devon Yalkin. The rest of the team is Priamathu, White Orm, Paula Newdorf,

Joe Bill Munoz, Eddie Costas, Kathleen O'Brien, and Brooke Minters. Our executive producer is

Allison Benedict. Next week Lulu talks with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. I'm David Marquesi

and this is the interview from the New York Times.