Wendell Berry on Hope, Despair, and the Measure of Effective Protest – The Marginalian
The current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind.
Protest is what we call the resistance we launch against our reasons for despair — personal, political, existential. Although in its healthy and potent form, protest is both a natural stage of grief and a motive force for new beginnings, we live in a culture that chronically mistakes outcry for protest, a culture yet to learn that what lifts anything or anyone out of despair is not fist-shaking but a helping hand.
The irreplaceable Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934–August 31, 2026) calibrates our modern misuse of protest in one of the essays in his altogether wonderful collection What Are People For? (public library).
Contemplating the challenge and urgency of creating in times when hope is difficult, times of darkness all the more needful of the lighthouse that is art, he observes that the very notion of protest art places us “directly in the presence of one of the bewilderments of our history and one of the mysteries of our nature,” and writes:
We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species. The list of its undeniable abominations is long and hardly bearable. And these abominations are not balanced or compensated or atoned for by the list, endlessly reiterated, of our scientific achievements. Some people are moved, now and again, to deplore one abomination or another. Others… deplore the whole list and its causes. Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
The very need for protest, Berry notes, illuminates “the part that suffering plays in the economy of the spirit.” Half a century after Carl Jung detailed the relationship between suffering and creativity, he writes:
The voice of our despair defines our hope exactly… We cannot know of hope without knowing of despair, just as we know joy precisely to the extent that we know sorrow.
A generation before him, the visionary artist René Magritte had championed the courage of joy by insisting that “life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.”
For Berry, effective protest asks the same thing of us as making art does: to preserve our “wholeness of heart in the face of despair.”
Couple with Audre Lorde’s antidote to despair, then revisit Wendell Berry on how to have enough, delight as a force of resistance, and how to be a poet and a complete human being.
