"Hope as Prologue and Hope as Epilogue"

Photo by Faris Mohammed on Unsplash

On Wednesday, my wife and I went to the Toronto book launch of the Egyptian-Canadian writer Omar El Akkad’s new nonfiction book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The book tackles the West’s hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy regarding Gaza. It also examines how the West is built on many groups of humans—those who fall outside of the boundaries of privilege—who are treated as less than full humans.

At the launch, El Akkad was in conversation with Elamin Abdelmahmoud. Their discussion covered so much ground, including what it means to bear witness to a live-streamed genocide and the personal toll that takes, how the load-bearing pillars of institutions are failing to address these events, and the struggle of creating and enjoying art — and even just living an ordinary life — while bearing the weight of such atrocities and the outrage at the world’s inaction in one’s heart, along with much more.

Their conversation made you pause and think, and there was so much in it that hit close to home for my wife and me, the same way it does for so many others, I’m sure.

Today, I want to pick up on one thread of what El Akkad discussed — his idea of hope as prologue and hope as epilogue. I wasn’t taking notes at the event (though I wish I had), but luckily, I’ve been able to find a quote from him from a couple of years ago about this:

I think of hope as a function of survival. I think I differentiate between hope as prologue and hope as epilogue. Hope as epilogue is of no use to me, which is this notion of no matter what happens, everything's going to work out. I think that's a privileged position that if you live in a certain part of the world you can afford to take, but conveniently turns a blind eye to all of the wreckage that happens before that epilogue. Hope is prologue, I think is vital. Hope is the starting point. You know, in order for us to manifest this hope into something, we need to get down and do some work.

Omar El Akkad - Quoted from the Futureverse Podcast

This has stuck in my head since Wednesday. As a straight, white, British (now Canadian) man, I have had, throughout my life, the privileged position to treat hope as epilogue. To believe in that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” But that argument is wrong. As Chris Hayes has argued, “Nothing bends towards justice without us bending it.”

This is where hope as prologue comes in. El Akkad’s idea of it as a starting point and something you must actively work for to realize.

This makes me think of what Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued in their book The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty. They make the case that liberty, security, and long-term prosperity only emerge from a delicate and precarious balance between the powers of the state and the powers of society. But this balance is not fixed. It is a matter of constant struggle. Acemoglu and Robinson compare it to Lewis Caroll’s Red Queen telling Alice that “here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere, you must run twice as fast as that.” In their framing, hope can only ever be prologue. We must constantly do the work to even maintain where we are and we must do even more work if we are to realize a brighter future.

And today, amidst suffering and chaos, we have to treat hope as a prologue on many fronts and do the work needed if we are to achieve that brighter future and avert further devastation.

We are at a pivot point in history. The confluence of many intertwined factors and events has forever changed the ground we stand on. The collapse of international norms, the erosion of rights, a live-streamed genocide, environmental devastation and climate change, polarization, affordability crises, transformative technological change, the accumulation of unprecedented wealth and power to a select few individuals, the rise of China as a geopolitical power, the rise of an authoritarian, expansionist United States—all and more are inextricably linked and feed off of each other.

To try and understand any of these in isolation, or to try and ignore any of them, if you’re privileged enough to do so, only serves to accelerate the risks of others.

As El Akkad argued on Wednesday, Western journalism’s failure to report on Gaza in accordance with what Mahamad Elmasry has called the “great myth of Western journalism”—fairness, accuracy, comprehensiveness, balance, neutrality, and detachment—weakens the institution’s “load-bearing pillars” in a way that compromises them when it comes to reporting on Trump, for example.

We can also see the great harm being caused by innovation and technology and their role in our current crises, yet that is also so often ignored. We can look at Israeli surveillance technology firms prototyping and refining their products in occupied Palestinian territories before exporting them. Or Western technology being used in the surveillance and suppression of Uyghurs in China and then being iterated on and sold globally, sometimes with the input of Canadian researchers. Or we can look at how AI is developed, which “often relies on hidden human labor in the Global South that can often be damaging and exploitative,” such as the manual tagging of horrific and toxic text and imagery to help train algorithms. Or just look at AI’s immense environmental impact.

There is a direct link between many of these and the crises we face. The rise of surveillance technology in the West, with its follow-on impacts on our brains, behaviours, and rights, flows from the denial of rights to Palestinians and Uyghurs. The growing use of AI is rapidly accelerating our climate crisis. Yet, in our place of privilege, we don’t connect those dots early enough. We still treat them as separate domains and separate issues.

For those of us in the policy space in Canada, how can we meet this moment and treat hope as prologue? How can we “get down and do some work” that moves the needle?

There is, of course, no singular answer to this. And probably, any answer is insufficient in the face of the suffering in the world. I have some inadequate thoughts to start, though.

I argued last week that business as usual is over, and I think it is so important to begin by recognizing that. We have to get rid of any illusion that we are not in a transformative moment, and we need to be honest about what is happening in the world. As David Moscrop argued, we “need to say true things out loud.”

If you are in a policy conversation on basically any topic that doesn’t start with a recognition of the gravity of our situation, the immense suffering that is happening across the world, and its linkages to our problems here, then that needs to be challenged. We can’t make change happen unless we recognize the playing field we’re on and the challenges we face.

We then need to tell the stories that connect these dots, that present a vision for the future, and that identify the path to change. Rhiana Gunn-Wright argued for this in an essay in All We Can Save:

I have spent my life trying to rewrite systems of power, and policy is nothing if not a system for creating and distributing power. That is why, contrary to popular belief, the most important part of a policy proposal is not the details — at least not at the beginning. It's the vision that the policy presents and the story it tells. The best policy proposals — that is, the proposals that move the most people to fight for them — present a clear narrative about what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how the government plans to fix it.

We also need to do the work of building and sustaining the coalitions needed for change. As Chris Turner has argued:

You want change? This is what it looks like. Messy and maddening, compromised and contradictory, led (often as not) by dishonest, self-interested brokers who are in command (often as not) of political systems and institutions designed to resist change. And there’s no skipping past the politics. There’s no magic lever that, once pulled, will simply grant war-footing-like command and control, allowing the best ideas to be transformed into policy and enacted with frictionless ease by a populace that has granted full consent to the program for as long as it takes.

This is all difficult — so very difficult — but it is also necessary. This is El Akkad’s hope as prologue. So much life and beauty have already been lost in the wreckage of our times. We can’t sit in our privilege and hope everything will be well in the end. We need to get down to the difficult work of translating hope into reality.

To paraphrase the Red Queen, it’s time to run twice as fast.