Homer-Dixon on the power of commanding hope

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon's forthcoming book — Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril — hits bookstores and online book sellers in September.

Here is a selection from the excerpt in the Toronto Sun:

As the feeling that things are going wrong becomes palpable, people become more likely to perceive the world as fraught with uncertainty and bounded by constraint, and they’re more likely to think that danger and awful surprise lurk just beyond the edge of their day-to-day reality.

And as they become hesitant and anxious — as their faith in progress shrinks — they become more inclined to talk to each other in the emotional cadences of doubt and fear, and the stories they tell about their future become muted and drained of excitement and positive possibility. (The French word inquiétude — a disturbing emotional state caused by fear, worry and uncertainty — captures this feeling well.)

Mood matters. When hundreds of millions if not billions of people start to feel these ways, the basic dynamic of humanity’s politics can shift abruptly — as we saw, for instance, during the Great Depression and its aftermath.

[…]

What does all of this portend? Are we at a point where the curve of our collective well-being begins to bend sharply downwards? It appears so: when we dispassionately weigh the evidence, the negative trends I’ve just described seem to be starting to overwhelm the positive ones highlighted by Pinker, Gregg Easterbrook, Matt Ridley, and like-minded commentators. This new downward trend isn’t inexorable, though … at least not yet. There are still many things we can do to bend our curve upwards again.

And by “we” here, I mean not just North Americans or members of the richer western societies, but all people, everywhere. The entire human species is involved today; our fates are too intertwined on Earth for it to be otherwise, as the COVID-19 pandemic’s explosive propagation through our tightly connected global networks has made abundantly clear.

Humanity can’t and won’t address its urgent challenges unless enough of us from a broad range of cultures and societies recognize ourselves as one group, with a shared sense of identity, facing these challenges and developing solutions together.

This article appeared in the Toronto Star.