The Beginning Comes After the End — Rebecca Solnit

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” —Martin Luther King Jr.

The beginning comes after the end. A chrysalis is the beginning of a butterfly, but in that chrysalis is no elegant transition. The caterpillar falls apart—it turns to goo, and something profoundly different reconstitutes from it, guided by the hitherto dormant imaginal cells. In that slurry, the dissolving caterpillar’s immune system perceives the imaginal cells as alien and attacks them. But they survive, multiply, and set in motion the instructions to become a butterfly. A many-legged crawler becomes a six-legged winged creature, an animal that devours leaves becomes one that sips nectar from flowers. In recent years, as we’ve paid closer attention to the natural world and learned more about it from scientists, this metamorphosis has become a metaphor for the transformation of society, often with the sense that we are at the stage of dissolution, imaginal cells under attack. A butterfly is the end of a caterpillar. The beginning—the next era—comes after the end of the last one, and in between comes a lot of falling apart.

There is a way to tell the story of who we were and where we were in that fall of 2024 in terms of electoral politics that is, to put it mildly, dismal and discouraging. But deeper currents of change are at work. This era is not one in which everything is fine and all ancient wrongs have been righted, but it is one in which important parts of a society, maybe a civilization, have changed profoundly, even while the right is trying to change them back. The most profound change is in worldview, when it comes to how settler-colonialists recognize and understand Indigenous presence and rights, and so many other foundational realities about our world, around gender, around race, around justice and equality, around nature itself and the science that explains it. The practical, tangible changes are consequences of these changed views.

stability is not an option, but participating in directing change might be, if we recognize it.

the poet Antonio Machado put it, on “a road made by walking.”

a shift toward the idea that everything is connected,

We often speak as though we are here to toil, endlessly planting and cultivating seeds and seedlings, but we have also feasted on harvests from what was sown and tended by those who came before.

This is a reminder that you do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking—though that metaphor makes it sound as though it already exists, if at a distance, rather than that the process itself creates it and covers the distance between the idea and the actuality.

We have stories. They are seeds with which to plant forests of possibility.

If knowledge is power, memory and perspective are among its most important aspects.

King wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

sermon “The Man Who Was a Fool,” he followed them with “I can never be what I ought until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

His introduction of nonviolence as both ethic and strategy drew from Mohandas Gandhi’s satyagraha, often translated as soul force, though King called it truth force and love force.

saw his age as a transformative one, preaching (in words that echo Gramsci’s) in 1956, “Those of us who lived in the twentieth century are privileged to live in one of the most momentous periods of human history. It is an exciting age, filled with hope. It is an age in which a new world order is being born. We stand today between two worlds—the dying old and the emerging new. I am aware of the fact that there are those who would argue that we live in the most ghastly period of human history. . . . They would argue that we are going backwards instead of forward, that we are retrogressing instead of progressing. But far from representing retrogression or tragic hopelessness, the present tension represents the necessary pains that accompany the birth of anything new. . . . We are all familiar with this old world that is dying, the old world that is passing away, we have lived with it, we have seen it, we look out and see it in its international proportion and we see it in the form of colonialism and imperialism.”

prefigurative politics,

“Whereas desegregation can be brought about by laws, integration requires a change in attitudes. It involves personal and social relationships that are created by love—and these cannot be legislated. Integration will enlarge ‘the concept of brotherhood to a vision of total interrelatedness.’”

If a stone is thrown into a lake, it’s the water that’s splashing, then rippling outward, not the stone.

an eloquent voice, not a catalyst.

The social revolutions of the 1960s insisted on other points of view as valuable, legitimate, and deserving and urged other people to try to see from those perspectives (including via alternative spiritual and cultural practices). And, to use a phrase that became popular, the resonance of which may be hard to understand now, to “question authority.”

But what’s most striking and least noted about this old world I’ve tried to describe is how cruel it was, how much its appearance of smooth functioning relied on suppression, repression, and outright oppression, on the silencing of challenges to that hierarchy and the status quo.

Perhaps cruelty is nothing more and nothing less than the exercise of inequality as the entitlement to commit harm and the lack of empathy that allows it.

an old woman participating in Occupy Wall Street in lower Manhattan looked straight at the camera and said, “We are fighting for a world in which everyone matters.”

what’s striking in so many of them is how normal it was to mock and make jokes at the expense of women, queer people, disabled and divergent bodies, nonwhite people,

the perpetrator doesn’t care about the victim, that they are not connected, that the suffering imposed on the latter doesn’t affect the former or makes the former stronger, gives them pleasure and status. The white supremacist lynchings of Black men that became the occasion for picnic gatherings and souvenir photographs have always struck me as celebrations and affirmations of disconnection demonstrated by means of the ability to enjoy oneself in the face of horrific suffering. The same goes for, in more recent times, the videos made of sexual assaults by perpetrators shared around as trophies, boasts, exercises of power and lack of empathy. Cruelty erodes when either the consequences of acts of cruelty are no longer rewarded but punished, or when the sense of separation is replaced by one of connection. In this light, the revolution in the nature of revolutions, from the 1970s to the 1990s, reflects this move toward a world in which everyone matters. L. A. Kauffman’s book Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism traces how feminist and Quaker ideas were incorporated into

Quaker process of making decisions by consensus. Decision-making and running meetings by consensus seek to democratize activism, to make it inclusive and horizontal rather than hierarchical

Kauffman quotes Clamshell Alliance participant Ynestra King, who says that the women’s movement had created groups “in which everyone was expected to speak, and everyone was expected to listen respectfully,” and, in the Clamshell Alliance, “Certain forms

more about cooperation than obedience, more process than product, and where horsemanship is less about a perfectly executed stop or achieving a snappy flying lead change than it is about creating mutual trust and understanding.”

white supremacy, misogyny, authoritarianism, transphobia, savage hypercapitalism, tragic consumerism, ecocide, and climate denial,

In the 1930s, Ignazio Silone declared that “fascism was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place,” and the phrase has often been quoted in the

The backlash is a revolt against more horizontal social forms and against a world in which everyone matters, against treating everyone with respect (not that we’ve arrived in that world, but we’ve gotten closer in some ways and places). Against a world in which everyone and everything matters, since it’s usually also anti-environmental, seeking

This version of freedom is seen as inseparable from independence, and independence in turn is defined as lack of relationship or responsibility to others.

considers himself, in two resonant phrases, to be “self-made” and to “not owe anything to anyone,” with literal or social indebtedness seen as oppressive obligation and unfreedom.*

Categories are necessary: we think in categories; words are categories (that can be modified by other words). Thoughtfulness requires recognizing that categories are leaky, that anomalies and exceptions abound, that virtually every description falls short of the actuality. But in the ideology of isolation, blur and overlap and uncertainty and ambiguity are intolerable,

conceptual and literal boundaries. A system is by definition in motion, connecting and circulating, made up of the flow of interactions and exchanges; it is a process of change.

systemic discrimination do not exist, and, as conservatives regularly assert, circumstances such as poverty are the result of personal failure rather than collective structures.

institutions are the only effective response to systemic problems.

This ideology suits capitalism’s notion that everything can be commodified, including living beings and systems, and all commodities are disposable. (Disposal itself imagines a nowhere, a beyond, that in ecological terms does not exist; an old environmental motto was “You can’t throw anything away, because there’s no such place as away.”)

climate science and climate activism both announce that everything we do has consequences because everything is connected.

when they were not defined they were not defended.

The term extractivism describes the ideology of taking as much as you can, giving as little as you can, disregarding the wreckage left behind. It’s the logic of colonialism and capitalism that arises from having no relationship to a place, at least none that includes a commitment to its continued thriving.

You who are reading this, like every other human being, did not give birth to yourself or raise yourself through those first few years of absolute dependency; someone gave birth to you, and someone else gave birth to her, and so it goes; human beings emerging from other human beings down the generations and the millennia,

For any one of us to exist, every link in the series of births and bestowal of nurture leading to us was necessary; if a single one were missing, we would not exist.

David Graeber’s assertion in Debt: The First Four Thousand Years, that money was invented so that transactions could be finished, connections severed, that what we regard negatively as indebtedness can be seen positively as an ongoing exchange, a continuing social relationship, that is ultimately mutually beneficial, seems relevant to this desire to owe nothing to anyone.

Writing history is often an act of disentangling, of creating the impression of a linear narrative, which sometimes clarifies and sometimes simplifies, and sometimes the simplification becomes a stripping down of context to create the appearance of coherence at the cost of meaning

One of them saw networks. The other saw hierarchies.”

She proposed that evolution proceeds through, so to speak, marriages rather than divorces—two species coming together rather than one splitting apart.

holobionts, to describe how none of us is really a single species but a package that includes the bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microbes on which we depend for our survival,

waiting for dad the provider.

Adam Smith theorized the inevitability of capitalism by ignoring the unpaid labor of women, including his own mother, who tended to his needs into her old age—he outlived her by only two years.

On the national and global scale, we have no absolute shortages, only distribution problems and a lot of waste, from uneaten food to unused second homes.

own thriving depends on the thriving of those people and systems around you, might alter the emotional and spiritual poverty of a worldview driven by notions of scarcity and competition.

Many of these economic theories were premised on the existence of the rational individual, who wasn’t really humanity,

who has internalized capitalism as an ethos of “give as little and take as much as you can”). Countless examples exist of how traditional cultures took care of the land and established practices and rituals to protect the continued abundance of plants and animals by limiting the time, means, and quantity taken.

huge quantities of non-capitalist and anticapitalist activities take place every day in most of our lives and communities. They write, “What is usually regarded as ‘the economy’—wage labor, market exchange of commodities and capitalist enterprise—comprises but a small subset of the activities by which we produce, exchange and distribute values.”

Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist revolutionary and astute naturalist whose 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is still a valuable overview of human and animal communities.

It’s a deft reversal of the convention in which Europeans spread civilization and impact traveled from east to west, not the other way around. In other words, Indigenous worldviews and values were hugely influential then.

Recognition of our inseparability from nature has grown significantly in recent decades. In the early 1990s, I heard a New York artist say to us on the West Coast, “You don’t understand. Nature for us is in the past tense.” In those days, I often encountered the view that nature and culture were opposing and more or less equal phenomena, and nature was maybe optional. It was a view in which nature was pristine scenery way out there, not an all-pervasive part of life on earth including the food that became our bodies, the soil it came from, the water we drink, the air we breathe, our own animal selves.

The rise of Indigenous influence, the shift in scientific understanding, the return to a view of nature as essential and omnipresent, the move toward more equality and inclusion, brings into focus the change in how we tell the overarching story of the last five hundred years and more. Rather than telling it as the triumph of European and Christian civilization, we increasingly narrate it as one of destruction and division, the result of a worldview driving a society that was tremendously powerful and also tremendously harmful.

processual biology looks at the world as made up of processes rather than objects,

many definitions of each of us as individuals attempt to describe a discrete and autonomous being by denying the constant flow—the breaths of air, the gulps of liquid, the bites of solids that keep us going, the more complex exchanges that are sex and reproduction, conversation and mutual aid, society and community, to say nothing of the microorganisms within us we depend on for our most crucial functions, and the other species for other aspects of our survival.

the heady feeling of leaving the house to step into a world where you were on your own, resourceful in navigating space, maybe with a paper map or just an inner compass and memory, choosing routes, hailing taxis, finding pay phones if communication was needed, keeping appointments and sticking to plans that could not be renegotiated a dozen times en route, the necessity of talking to strangers, of being intrepid in public and present in shared experience that began to be erased by portable cassette players, and then iPods and then smart phones.

Baba Ram Dass’s Be Here Now;

I also remember all the oppressions of my youth yet to be named, all the silences around all the abuses, all the inequalities yet to be recognized and denormalized, all the forms of separateness enforced in various ways. Since we don’t live at the end of history, I assume that new light will be shed in more dark corners, new frameworks of what justice and equality should look like will arise. That we are, as ever, in the middle of the story.

hope has come from both the future and the past,

socialist geographer Mike Davis drew hope from that past he lived through and participated in, saying to an interviewer not long before his death at age seventy-six, in 2022, “This seems an age of catastrophe, but it’s also an age equipped, in an abstract sense, with all the tools it needs. Utopia is available to us. If, like me, you lived through the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, you can never discard hope. I’ve seen social miracles in my life, ones that have stunned me—the courageousness of ordinary people in a struggle.”

But it’s the past that shows us the possibilities, how the world was changed, how power can appear in places and among peoples assumed to be powerless and irrelevant, how the most foundational things can be transformed, how ideas and arts matter in making the world.

Erin Thompson, a scholar of public monuments,

Anand Giridharadas published a remarkable essay. He wrote, “I see then that this is both a very dark time and, potentially, a very bright time. It’s important to hold these truths together. When I look down at the ground of the present right now, I feel depressed. If I lift my head to the horizon, I see a different picture. This is not the chaos of the beginning of something. This is the chaos of the end of something. And on matters of race and identity, the Trump era doesn’t have the crackle of a launch. It has been a mourning. A mourning for white power. A mourning for a time when simply to be white and show up was enough. A mourning for an era in which simply to be a man, and not necessarily an especially capable one, could get you ahead of other people.

Arundhati Roy had put it another way in her address to the World Social Forum in 2003: “Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”

future is foreordained, decided, rather than something that we’re making—or competing to make—in the present.

adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy.

we face the past to remember, we face the future to dream.