Hope is a Discipline

Amherst College’s motto is Terras Irradient: Let them enlighten the lands. It is a strange sentence to carve over a college, because it is not about us. It assumes that what we learn here is meant to leave here, that an education is something owed outward. I have been thinking about that assumption this semester, and I am not sure we are honoring it. We are very good at understanding the world and much less practiced at acting in it, and this fall, the gap between the two has a date attached: Nov. 3.

It is easy to look at a midterm date like Nov. 3 and assume your individual participation won't move the needle. But if you want proof that everyday voters still hold power, look at recent municipal races. Zohran Mamdani entered the race for mayor of New York polling around one percent, with little money and most of his own party’s establishment lined up against him. He won, with a hundred thousand volunteers who knocked doors and answered phones, through a grassroots campaign that asked ordinary people to show up. You do not have to admire the winner or agree with a word of his political platform to see what happened. The common people who had been told their participation was fruitless came in anyway. And won.

The same thing has been happening this year in places that have little else in common with New York. In June, Republican voters in Iowa passed over the early favorite for governor, a congressman President Donald Trump had endorsed days before the vote, and chose Zach Lahn, who had spent the race outspent and opposed by his party’s establishment. By September, eleven House incumbents from both parties had lost their primaries, far more than usual. I do not think any one of these races proves much by itself, but it does prove that the people who called the power of the mass futile were wrong at least once. Political hope is not something we have outgrown. It is something we, especially Amherst students, are allowed to want, entitled to hold on to, and obliged to put to work.

However, I understand that the contempt many of us feel toward institutions has been honestly earned, and much of what passes for politics today is simply absurd. We inherited a political world shaped long before we arrived, one that answers to organized money far more readily than to people, and that asks us to believe in institutions that rarely seem to believe in us. And life gets in the way. We are busy in the particular way Amherst students are busy, and there is always something more immediate to answer to than politics: a paper due in the morning, an internship application closing Friday, an email that needs a reply before bed. Meanwhile, the largest problems, a warming planet and a technology being built faster than any government can decide what to do about it, seem to have been settled somewhere far above our heads, by people and forces we will never meet. The money is entrenched, the incumbents are entrenched, and the outcomes feel decided long before any of us is asked. Faced with all of that, the conclusion arrives almost on its own: There is nothing I can do. So we do the reasonable thing — we close the news tab, open the feed, and let the small distraction machine in our pocket pacify us until we can go back to our lives. From where any one of us sits, political apathy looks rational. 

That is exactly why apathy is so seductive to people like us, paralyzed almost by nuances of knowledge and a ruthless desire for perfection in action. Apathy in the knowing glance past the voter registration table outside Betty’s Kitchen joking about how nothing we do will matter anyway, the sense that eagerly caring in politics is a little naive. However, we ought to think twice about that posture. The cynic predicts that nothing will change, and since most efforts do fail, the cynic is usually right and never embarrassed, which makes cynicism feel like an intelligent when it is really the easiest, most cowardice position in politics: It costs nothing to hold, risks nothing when it is wrong, and asks nothing of the person holding it. Hope, on the contrary, is the more demanding stance, because it can be disappointed, and because the only way to justify it is to go and do the work that might vindicate it.

If you have spent any time in a seminar room at a place like Amherst, you know the dynamics in any heated intellectual discussions. Someone makes a strong claim, and before the sentence is finished, three hands go up to complicate it. It depends on the context. It depends on who is asking. There are contingencies we have not considered. We are trained, beautifully and rigorously, to see how tangled the world is, and after enough years of that training, it can start to feel almost improper to say plainly that something is right and something else is wrong — let alone mobilizing and taking concrete actions to do anything about it. We decline to sign the petition because we have not read the full bill or leave the ballot question blank because we could argue it either way. 

Yes, the world is very much complicated, but it has always been complicated, and every generation that changed anything did so without complete information. Complexity is a reason to act carefully, to hold our positions with humility and revise them as we learn; it is not a reason to stop acting, and it is certainly not a reason to stop voting. But there is no perfect action waiting on the far side of enough reflection. There is imperfect action, or there is nothing, and nothing is never neutral. To put it quite frankly, a provisional political stance shown in a concrete political action can be corrected through action, but silence and keeping all the intellectualization to yourself offers no such chance. 

The Athenians thought this retreat into inaction was serious enough to outlaw. Solon, who rewrote the laws of Athens in the sixth century BCE, decreed that any citizen who refused to take a side when the city fell into civil strife would lose his citizenship, on the reasoning that such indifference abandoned the one thing citizenship asked of him: an interest in the city's fate.

Twenty six centuries later, the abstention he punished somehow reigns triumphant as the primary political posture, in rooms like ours? So I would ask plainly whether political apathy, no matter how rational and convenient, is a posture any of us could defend. Is it just? Is it moral? Is it the set of values you would sign your name to if someone made you write them out in plain language, stripped of every excuse? Make no mistake: Apathy is not the absence of a political choice. It is a choice with consequences, and those consequences rarely fall on the people making it. They fall on the worker whose wage is set by legislators who never heard from him, the family whose health coverage hangs on a single line in a state budget, or even the classmate whose right to remain in this country can shift with one election. Many of them cannot afford to look away from politics, and some are not permitted to vote at all, so when those of us who can vote and act yet choose to sit it out we are giving away a voice they would never have given away, and giving it to people who were never going to use it for them. Standing for nothing is not a subtle position — it is the one position that requires no thought at all, and people who have spent years learning to think should find it beneath them. Nor is the reflexive centrism that splits every difference and calls the midpoint wisdom any better.

What I am trying to say is that none of this is a case against moderates or nuance, since a moderate view that has been reasoned into and argued for is a conviction just like any other. The trouble lies in the neutrality we have enshrined as our default, fastidiously meeting every hard question with “it depends on the context” and proceeding no further, as though context existed somehow to absolve us of judgment rather than to refine it. Political theorist Hannah Arendt held judgment to be the most political of our mental faculties, and like every faculty it atrophies when it goes unused. Sooner or later, too, judgment has to become something material, and politics rarely offers the nuanced choice we would have designed in a seminar. It offers a ballot bearing two names, or a "Yes" or "No" on a question we would have phrased with greater finesse. Such choices are crushingly binary and never wholly unsullied, yet they remain the sole medium through which our convictions reach the world. To abstain because neither option honors the intricacy of our position is not to keep our principles immaculate but merely to ensure they were never tallied at all. A conviction never voiced, never defended against dissent, and never permitted to exact a cost is scarcely distinguishable from none at all.

This is why political life has to be practiced rather than merely believed in. Silence does more than forfeit a single outcome; it sets a drastically low baseline, a prior of apathy we carry into our careers, our friendships, and every hard conversation we decide to skip. Aristotle’s claim, 24 centuries old and still unanswered, is that nobody is born just or brave. We become just by doing just things and brave by doing brave ones, until what once took effort becomes who we are. The same is true of indifference. Every time we take the easier course when our political duties are asked of us, the next act of attention becomes harder to summon, and the tolerance for the unacceptable that we settle for now becomes the ceiling much later. It works in the other direction too. The first call to a representative’s office will feel strange, the first rally will be awkward, but by the fifth time it is simply something you do. That is why our youth matters: Habits are easiest to build before life fills up with obligations, and the disengagement we allow ourselves at 19 tends to become the default we live with at 40.

What hangs on those habits, though, is larger than our own character, and Arendt understood better than anyone what is lost when people stop practicing. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” she argued that the mass movements of the twentieth century drew strength from large numbers of isolated people who belonged to no party, union, or association, and who had long assumed that politics was not their business. Watching the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961, she concluded that great harm does not require monstrous people, only people who never stop to think about what they are part of. We are not living in the 1930s, and I do not want to exaggerate — but the habits she described, withdrawal, isolation, thoughtlessness, are not limited to one era.

Those who would erode the moral commitments and hard-won strides of the last century, whether aspiring strongmen, the oligarchs who fund them, or the movements content to let old protections quietly wither, have never needed to win our agreement, because it has always been enough for them to inundate us until we are too tired to object and too scattered to defend what we once took for granted. Arendt understood this with unsettling precision. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule, she wrote, was never the convinced believer, but the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, between true and false, no longer existed, someone who had been buried under so many lies and contradictions that they had simply stopped trying to tell them apart, and who could therefore be led anywhere without ever needing to be persuaded of anything. Historian Timothy Snyder, writing about how democracies fall, observes that much of the power authoritarianism enjoys is freely given, and his first lesson is simple: Do not obey in advance. Fear, fatigue, the conviction that nothing you do could matter — these are not mere phenomena of political fatigue in the moment felt by just you but a part of a grand political project producing mass exhaustion and apathy.

If exhaustion is their aim, then a naive kind of hope that waits for good news and certainty for you to act is never going to be enough. This is what the moment asks of us, and it is why I have come to think of hope less as a feeling than as a discipline.

Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and dissident who helped launch the Charter 77 human rights movement, was jailed for nearly four years under a regime that punished his hope, and later became his country’s first president after the Velvet Revolution, insisted that hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out, which means it cannot be the kind of hope that waits for good news before it acts. It has to be the stubborn, even radical kind of hope that shows up when the odds are poor and the outcome uncertain, because that is the only kind capable of answering to the demands posed by the current political times.

So here is the first repetition. If you don’t like what AI is becoming, show your face. A handful of companies, stewarded by people no one elected and answerable to scarcely anyone, are building the most consequential technology of our lifetimes faster than any legislature has managed to govern it, and they are counting, quite rationally, on our distraction. Massachusetts now has a rare chance to be the first to stringently regulate these companies. The Mass Wins Act, the economic development bill being negotiated on Beacon Hill, could carry real safety and transparency obligations for the developers of the most powerful AI models, but legislators seldom find their courage in private; they find it when they can see a public that pressures them to do so. This Saturday, Oct. 3, a group of Amherst students is going to Boston to show legislators exactly that kind of public, joining students from MIT, Harvard University, and other colleges on the State House steps at noon. We leave from Converse at 9:15 a.m. and will be back by 5 p.m. You can sign up through the registration form. It costs only half a Saturday, so bring a friend.

Then vote on Nov. 3, and not only about AI, but about whatever you cannot stand to watch happen without having had a say. The state legislators and members of Congress elected this fall will be writing the rules on housing, climate, labor, and technology for the next two years, and senators for the next six, which covers most of the time we spend here and the first years after we leave. Whether you register here in Massachusetts, where the deadline is 10 days before the election, or request an absentee ballot from home, do it this month, look up the names you do not recognize, and fill in every line. Organized money buys access, advertising, and lobbyists in every capital, but it sure does have a harder time with a public that keeps showing up and doing things long after it was expected to lose interest. We were told on our first day here that what we learn is meant to leave this place. This fall, the least we can do is carry it as far as the polls — exercising hope in challenging times.