AT One phrase you come back to again and again is “civil society.” Why did that concept capture your imagination? What does it mean to you?

RS I’m a writer, so I spend a lot of time alone at home, but I also spend a lot of time as an activist in the streets, in gatherings and things like that, and following revolutions around the world: the Velvet Revolution, Tiananmen Square, the Zapatistas . . . In those moments, I’ve discovered in myself and in others a deep happiness, an unknown desire that’s finally fulfilled to be purposeful, to be a part of history and society, to have a voice.

One of my arguments in A Paradise Built in Hell is that we have almost too much language for private needs and desires and not nearly enough for these other things. This need and desire is so profound that when it’s fulfilled, you find these weird moments of joy despite everything in disaster. The whole world is falling apart, but I am who I was meant to be: a citizen, a rescuer, a resourceful person who belongs to and is serving a community.

[…]

RS My running joke about Hope in the Dark is that it’s a book in which I snatch the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left. There are ways in which people are very attached to these despairing narratives—a lot of people got very upset with me.

AT You were trying to disabuse them of their comfortable cynicism, which they didn’t like.

RS Yeah. I’d get attacked by old, middle-class liberals and leftists who felt that you can’t be hopeful while people are suffering. I’d be like, “Well, people who are suffering are hopeful.” Look at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, or the Zapatistas, who speak so beautifully about hope, and keep going.

AT Maybe despair is a privileged position.

RS That’s exactly what I realized. For some people, the alternative to hope is to surrender to the horrible things that menace them. The alternative to hope for the upper-middle class is to stay home and watch television or whatever. These alternatives don’t involve death, torture, annihilation, starvation, exploitation, or slavery. So despair is easy, or at least low cost.

Rebecca Solnit, interviewed