Hope, Optimism, and the Ottomans

I’ve been listening to a deluge of history podcasts recently. I’m trying to get a handle on

what has preceded us – you and me, now, here at the fag end of the pandemic and staring

down the barrel of planetary cataclysm. I’m curious about why empires fall, who started

which war, why was Suleman magnificent, what made Peter great, that sort of thing. I have

learnt about the extraordinary Theodosian Walls around Constantinople: towered double

battlements with moats between which kept out every stripe of medieval besieger from the

5 th century until the city was taken by the Ottomans a thousand years later, led by Mehmed

the Conqueror and his Enormous Gun (I highly recommend reading Anthony Doerr’s Cloud

Cuckoo Land for a far more entertaining way to learn about THAT piece of history). I have

consumed stories about Mongols. Nazis. Crusades. Normans and Normandy. Stalingrad and

Dagestan. Troy. Uganda. Separatists. Insurgents. Abolitionists. Sultans and Mujahadeens.

Slaves.

Perhaps a more accurate motivation for this task, rather than just the ambition of a

fool, is an attempt to understand the conflicts currently burning – some like never-ending

peat fires – around the world. Why Ukraine? What is this invisible, movable line of

murderous hatred between Palestine and Israel? Islam against Islam. China against Taiwan.

Tigray forces in Ethiopia. Uyghurs. It’s exhausting, trying to keep up. So much war. So much

bloodshed of innocents. As Susan Sontag wrote in a New Yorker essay in 2002: War tears,

rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins. The why,

however, remains elusive.

It is said that Zeus decreed he would set mankind on a path of eternal warfare so that

humans would never find time to set their eyes upon Olympus, and thus far it has come to

pass. Again, Susan Sontag, in response to a piece written by Virginia Woolf: Who today

believes that war can be abolished? No one, not even the pacifists.

Of course, in our relatively peaceful nation, there are no wars, no skirmishes armed to

claim and reclaim borders. But there are, unarguably, battles. Constant, energy-consuming

conflicts. For example, and stop me if I am droning here, there are rabid anti-trans protests

through the city streets, there is the right-wing push to defeat the enshrinement of The

Voice in Parliament, there is a bloviating billionaire trying to sue the Australian Government

(that is, you and I, and even more so, the downstream dependents on tax-derived money)

for a cool 300 billion dollars. There is a partisan and politicised pandemic response. There

are fossil fuel lobbyists and water diverters and forest levellers. The core of so many of

these struggles is ideology not much different (apart from the weaponry) than all the

conflicts throughout history. Human set against human. Human greed for self-interest.

Groups of privilege prepared to lay waste to other humans and the environment that

sustains them to support even more privilege. It is said that civil wars are fought because

the divisions between humans are stoked to the point that both believe the other side to be

evil, amoral, a danger, sub-human (and, as an aside, how close might the Unites States be to

civil war currently – not far off, some pundits believe).

Every one of these, and a thousand more you could name – from huge conflicts down

to micro-aggressions – all require energy to address and fight. And it’s the way these

conflicts use up our precious energy that keeps me awake at night. Energy diverted from the

critical battle we have ahead of us.

What is my point? I know, despite my advancing years, my shortening telomeres, my

experience on the ground, I remain head-shakingly naïve and unworldly taking up these

positions, these simplistic connections. What am I trying to say – that we should all just be

nicer to each other? Get along and everything will be OK? Perhaps I am simply taking the

opportunity to express my frustration, to share with you, my like-minded compadres, those

of you NoWEMers, you committed warriors for social justice and equality. Frustration, and

occasionally despair, that we must expend that most precious resource of all, our energy, in

fighting pointless battles. But to admit that this is our nature – warlike, greedy, xenophobic

and happy to destroy others in our hunger for power – feels defeatist, and drains the desire

to keep searching for a path to unity when it comes to the climate catastrophe upon us – for

this is finally a battle on which we all need to be on the same side. And, of course, I am

ignoring the breathtaking gains humans have made in areas of justice and equity, both

globally, and in front of our eyes.

Because right about now I will remonstrate with myself. Wallowing in frustration is

also a colossal waste of energy (one might say the same thing of my podcast obsession).

Hope is energy itself, mired firmly in looking forwards after seeing what has been possible in

the past. It is optimism with practical intent.

Few describe the power of hope in dark times better than Rebecca Solnit: Hope is not

a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. Hope is an axe you break

down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it

will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the

annihilation of the earth’s resources and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope

just means another world might be possible.

To steal from and rearrange Sontag’s words: Hope builds, mends. Hope unites us to

form action within uncertainty. Hope strengthens. Hope is the soil and the seed and the

water. Hope is essential. Hope is a rally cry. Hope is found in both the mightiest of world

movements and in the smallest moments of our shared humanity.

Hope, my dear friends, will keep us, arms linked, shoulders together, as one team,

respectful of all the voices speaking, moving in the same direction, not homogenous but

strengthened by our individuality. Entirely what NoWEM does best. Whatever form it takes,

let no day go by without hope, even if it is as small as a raindrop, as ethereal as morning

mist, as easy as a word. It may be as consequential as history. After all, such things add up.

I’m writing a third novel. This is purely a consequence of me being not quite right in

the head. Talk about event horizon for energy – a supermassive black hole sump of time.

But it is also a leap into the dark. Hope that I can produce something worthwhile for others.

Plus I have been gripped by a theme and it will not let go. Whereas Tiny Uncertain Miracles

explored why we humans believe the things we do, this one is trying to understand how

simultaneously enormous and intimately personal human history is. The opening line is:

Time rumbles. Wish me luck, dearest friends.