Like many people, I’ve often struggled with depression. During my darker hours I’ve been tempted by facile pessimism, the belief that the least desirable explanation for any given situation is always the most plausible one. Lately I’ve been thinking about the political dimensions of depression, and I’ve come to believe that in a world dominated by fear and anger, love and joy are revolutionary. This isn’t a wishful sentiment, but rather a position that has strong theoretical foundations.

To understand these foundations, it’s useful to consider the work of Walter Benjamin, a German cultural critic who committed suicide in 1940 to escape the Nazis. Benjamin believed that capitalism was a religion of despair that grew parasitically within, and eventually supplanted, Reformation Christianity.

The meaningless world

Reformation Christianity was the brainchild of Martin Luther (1483-1546). Contrary to the dogmas of the Catholic Church, Luther believed that salvation was brought about by faith alone, rather than by good deeds or the intercession of church authorities. Faith, however, was contingent upon God’s grace, which could never be compelled by human efforts and which was, therefore, forever uncertain. By making grace and faith the sole factors in the redemptive drama, this drained human actions, and indeed the mortal world itself, of their spiritual significance. A desanctified world is a meaningless world, a world of melancholy and mourning. As Shakespeare puts it in Macbeth, “Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The primary virtue within such a world is the capacity to endure despair, to live without the comforts of sacred meaning. Benjamin argued that by valorizing existential dread, Reformation Christianity made possible the development of an economic system predicated upon the meaninglessness of human existence, wherein all things and all people are evaluated solely in terms of their usefulness in the metaphysically pointless process of capital accumulation. Once Reformation Christianity relocated sanctity outside the circles of the mortal world, capitalism could do away with sanctity altogether. In this reading, capitalism is devoted to the annihilation of the sacred. Benjamin writes, “Capitalism is an unprecedented religion which offers not the reform of existence, but its complete destruction.”

If Benjamin is correct, then the cynical realism that currently underlies almost all political discourse of both the left and the right, and that assumes that self-interest or the material interests of one’s class or group are the only factors of any real importance in political and economic behaviour, may itself be a religious perspective, one that paradoxically seeks meaning through meaninglessness. This would explain why so many people seem to take pride in pessimism.

Origins of right-wing fundamentalism

As Rabbi Michael Lerner points out in The Left Hand of God: Healing America’s Political and Spiritual Crisis (HarperCollins 2007), cynical realism is intimately related to fear. The more frightened we are, the more we see the world as a field of dominance and submission: we strive to dominate those we’re afraid of and to submit to those we hope will protect us. This worldview, however, is psychologically intolerable. It leaves us feeling excruciatingly vulnerable and dirty, feelings we yearn to free ourselves from. Right-wing fundamentalist movements draw their strength from this dynamic. They offer people islands of meaning while simultaneously supporting the economic forces that flood the world with oceans of meaninglessness.

Lerner argues that while the left is very good at criticizing these economic forces, it’s often very poor at offering a meaningful alternative to the cynical realism that informs them. It’s only when the left offers sacred visions of its own, such as those offered by Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi (or, I might add, Tommy Douglas), that it’s able to effect widespread, transformative, and positive change. Benjamin would say that these visions offer alternatives to capitalism’s commitment to meaninglessness.

Easy on the hypocrisies

For such visions to work, it’s not enough to transport people beyond self-interest. We also need to treat human limitations with compassion. These limitations include the prejudices, ambivalences, and ignorance we all bring to the table. Too often people on the left—and I include myself in this—are ruthless in our condemnation of such commonplace hypocrisies, whether the hypocrisies are found in other people or ourselves.

This ruthlessness can paralyze individuals and shatter progressive movements. Truly sacred visions cultivate a generosity of spirit, a generosity that perceives the best in oneself and others while making allowances for the worst, encouraging our virtues while correcting our vices with tenderness and understanding.

Sacred visions also need an ecstatic or Dionysian dimension. In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Metropolitan Books, 2007), Barbara Ehrenreich examines the historical role that festivities involving costumes and collective dance have played in undermining social hierarchies, encouraging open-heartedness, generating revolutionary fervour, and protecting people from depression. The rulers of highly stratified societies have always been hostile towards collective celebrations, but in its obsession with productivity, capitalism has taken this hostility to new levels. Capitalist powerbrokers have attacked collective celebrations wherever they’ve found them, whether among their own working and peasant classes or among the indigenous peoples of colonized nations. Such festivities are regularly condemned as expressions of savagery and stupidity, and have often been forcibly suppressed. This suppression continues, as the history of rock-and-roll and, more recently, of the rave movement and Pride parades amply demonstrates.

Generosity of spirit vital to the left

It seems that progressive social movements thrive when they care for the souls of their participants, and wither when they don’t. Rather than remaining a generalized ideal, this generosity of spirit must be realized in practice with everyone involved in the movement, and it must be expressed in dealings with those outside the movement. Failure to do this causes divisions and apathy within the movement and isolates the movement from those it wishes to persuade. It can also lead to misanthropy. Without a generosity of spirit and a community that makes them feel valued and honoured, people with progressive values can succumb to hatred for anyone who doesn’t share these values or continues to support unjust social structures. That hatred can easily corrupt a person’s heart, and this, in turn can make cynical realism of the sort peddled by right-wing authoritarians seem very appealing. Such corruption may at least partially explain the disillusionment of many American leftists in the post-Vietnam era and the subsequent rise of Ronald Reagan and the Religious Right.

To avoid making the same mistakes that helped undermine the counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s, we need to start talking seriously about the importance of meaningfulness, and of love and happiness, for our social movements and, indeed, our world.

Emma Goldman said it best in her 1931 book, Living My Life: “I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. ‘I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.’ Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world— prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”