Hopeless or Hope Free? Eric Utne Reads the Times

Hopeless or hope free? Seeing no way forward through climate issues, the founder and namesake of the Utne Reader, an alternative Reader's Digest, describes himself as the latter.

[Photo by Scott Takushi, Pioneer Press]

I heard Eric Utne interviewed on the podcast Climate One about his memoir Far Out Man. The title is both a Boomer equivalent for "awesome, Dude" and a literal translation of his family name.

When the Utne Reader first appeared at my favorite indie bookstore Lemuria (Jackson, MS) in 1984, its headlined articles all excoriated the Reagan Revolution. Though I was intrigued, I didn't touch it, guessing that arguments might shake my faith in my beloved President.

The man Eric Utne turns out to be a gentle soul who abandoned his successful periodical to teach seventh grade awhile, then retire.

Regarding climate and all the other issues on the progressives' catalogue of concerns, Utne sees no room for hope. Now that nearly half the electorate has voted to re-elect a man who shrugged off a quarter-million deaths, he concludes that denial rules; if this crisis can't break the gridlock, no facts, no person, will.

Yet Utne calls himself not hopeless but hope free. If I understand him correctly, someone hopeless has lost only the sort of "positive thinking" that Trump imbibed growing up in the church of Norman Vincent Peale.

Peale's book The Power of Positive Thinking was on my parents' bookshelf, so I understand his idea that you lead best when you exude confidence and enthusiasm. Utne observes that Trump's personal creed seems to be a child's version of Peale's message: that you can make something true simply by repeating it with enough conviction. With money enough to pay a staff of sychophants, that creed has worked for Trump until the election. Ranting to Republican state legislators that the Democrats lost, they cheated, he won, that he just needed to find "some judge" to believe him, he'd never sounded so furiously hopeless.

But what is "hope free?" Though Utne has no hope that his efforts will mitigate the worst effects of global climate change, he makes those efforts anyway. It's the right thing to do, and it's for love of his children and grand-children; hopefulness doesn't enter in.

I would call that acting in faith.