We Need Radical Hope, Not Radical Acceptance
Words matter
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about radical acceptance and how it is the right way to think about climate change and other aspects of our polycrisis. My initial reaction was visceral: NO! Radical acceptance will doom us to inaction! It elevates passivity and devalues the many steps we need to take to mitigate the damage we have inflicted on the planet, our fellow humans, and most other species.
But when I’ve suggested this to some of my favorite writers, who have been tossing the term around recently, I’ve been told I’ve got it all wrong. Radical acceptance doesn’t mean what I think it means (echoes of Inigo Montoya here).
Here are some examples of how the term has been defined recently:
So what is radical acceptance? For me, it means: accepting that no single technological civilization based on finite resources is sustainable. Neither in the bronze age, nor in the iron age; let alone in an era of industrial revolutions. (source)
We are well beyond a soft landing for the planet. There are no moderate pathways ahead. The only move we have left is radical acceptance of our situation, of the human predicament. (source)
“Radical Acceptance” of the coming COLLAPSE is NOT about “giving up”. It’s about accepting that Collapse is happening. So that we can stop holding on “to the world that was” AND start the “Managed Retreat” to the “world that will be”. (source)
I have no problem with these statements. I agree with the sentiments expressed, my problem is with the terminology used to express them.
“Radical acceptance” is a term from clinical psychology
Defining radical acceptance as accepting a need to act runs counter to its original meaning and purpose. The term has a deep history in the field of clinical psychology. Key to its meaning is the idea that radical acceptance is acceptance of a situation you cannot change, but must live with.
From “Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha”:
Radical acceptance is the courage to face and accept reality, our current experience, what’s happening now. … Radical acceptance also means accepting what we can’t accept in that moment.
Radical acceptance is an emotional coping strategy. From the book “How to Embrace Radical Acceptance”:
Radical acceptance can be defined as the ability to accept situations that are outside of your control without judging them, which reduces the suffering they cause. By accepting things for what they are, you can acknowledge your emotions without denying, avoiding, or ignoring the situation. It can be an effective way to process your emotions and manage difficult experiences.
I’m reminded of the famous Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Notice that accept is associated with things I cannot change, but courage is associated with things I can. I believe this is the generally-accepted meaning of the term “acceptance”. When you try to use it to mean something else — indeed, to mean the opposite of what it normally means — you’re just asking to be misinterpreted.
“Radical acceptance” is too easily associated with End-Times Doomism
Another problem with trying to define radical acceptance as “acceptance of the need to change” is the fact that the term has already been pretty successfully appropriated by the Doomist narrative, where it is defined as “acceptance of the fact that change is futile”. Prominent Doomist Erik Michaels, for example, has made this connection clear in his work emphasizing the futility of trying to avoid human extinction:
Since so much of the predicament of ecological overshoot is caused by this denial of reality and our mental separation of ourselves from nature, we often fail to see just how much a part of nature we really are. We fail to acknowledge our lack of agency and/or deny our lack of free will. …
Rather than deny reality, one way to begin resisting this denial is to begin investing in truth instead. In this article about embracing death and the “death positive” movement, Steffie Nelson introduces us to Death Cafes and the work of Caitlin Doughty. Discussing these issues is one of the primary ways to begin true acceptance of the predicaments facing us. Once again we are reminded of the Cycle of Life and that our best response to all of this is to Live Now! (source, emphasis added)
Death Cafes? If you don’t want to be conflated with this kind of denial of agency and embrace of powerlessness, it’s best not to use the same terminology, and then have to explain that you mean it differently. Wouldn’t it be easier just to use a better term?
I’ll take radical hope over radical acceptance
If you try to define radical acceptance as “accepting the need to act” in the context of climate change and other global challenges, it seems to me you are putting the emphasis on the wrong word. Accepting the need to act is the easy part (relatively speaking). The hard part is figuring out how to act. What needs to be done? Who needs to do it? How urgent is it? After we have “radically accepted” the need to act in the face of climate change and resource depletion, we still need to ask: what should we do? “Radical acceptance” is a feeling, a mental state, it is not a recipe for action.
If you believe there are things you can do, or that humanity writ large can do, to make the future better (or at least less horrific) than it might otherwise be, then you are expressing something different from acceptance. You are expressing hope, i.e. “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen”. Synonyms include: aspiration, wish, longing, ambition, aim, plan, dream.
I suspect “hope” is a term serious students of climate change and resource depletion are reluctant to use. It sounds naive, given the depth of trouble we’ve gotten ourselves into.
Hopey-dopey. Hopium. Hope is for chumps. We can’t hope our way out of this mess.
All perfectly reasonable responses. But if you truly believe there are things we can do to make our future less bad than it could be, then you have hope. And it’s not just any-old-hope, it’s radical hope, because it’s a pretty radical stance to be hopeful despite the dire challenges we know we are facing.
One climate scientist who is not afraid to talk about hope is Katharine Hayhoe. I wrote in a previous post about her approach to “changing people’s minds about climate change”. Hayhoe’s strategy basically comes down to three principles, which I summarized as follows:
If you want to change people’s minds so they feel empowered to act, you must reframe your message so the information you provide is personally-meaningful, locally-relevant, and induces hope, not dread.
All good advice. With regard to inducing hope, Hayhoe makes an important distinction between false hope and real hope. As I was reviewing her ideas the other day, I was struck by how closely her definition of “real hope” seemed to capture what others are trying to jam into the box called “radical acceptance”. Consider these two slides from her talk:
The difference between Hayhoe’s “real hope” and “radical acceptance” as used above can be found in those last two items. Real hope (like the Equation of Change I’ve introduced in other posts) requires a vision and a plan. Radical acceptance requires … acceptance.
As the saying goes, “Hope springs eternal …” Does it? Hope is a tricky thing. It is not an emotion that is imposed on us by the outside world; it is something we impose on the world from within ourselves. Hope is a motivator, a driver that arises within us. It prompts us to take action, to move. Without it, we have no reason to move. With it, action becomes not only possible, but desired.
Hope has value, paradoxically, even if it is futile. When we act on the basis of hope, it increases the hope available to us. We find action in hope and we find hope in action — a potentially powerful positive feedback loop. If we act in a hopeful manner, we will find more ways to feel hopeful.
Hope is like fuel, it keeps us going. It gives us a goal, a reason to go on. It is the opposite of acceptance, which is, as the dictionary tells us, “the action of consenting to receive or undertake something offered”. When it comes to climate change, the last thing we should be doing is consenting to receive what is being offered.
Radical hope leads to radical resilience, the one attribute nobody who wants to survive this century can do without
I have written about the importance of resilience before (here and here).
I fear that those who embrace radical acceptance as my writer friends are suggesting will be unprepared to survive the turmoils of the next several decades.
I believe those who survive, whomever and wherever they may be, will be those who reject radical acceptance, embrace radical hope, and accept the challenge of building a sustainable life in whatever circumstances they find themselves, using whatever resources and tools are available to them.
In other words, the resilient — those who bend with the wind but do not break — will be inheritors of what remains as this civilization collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
Here’s the interesting thing: when you start looking for things to be hopeful about, there are actually quite a few of them out there. Radical acceptance blinds you to seeing any progress that is short of totally fixing everything. We need to build resilience, not acceptance, regarding the damage we are inflicting on the planet. We need to be prepared to act, not to sit around and accept our fate. We need to be … radically resilient?
