Rebecca Solnit: "The Individualism That Claims We Don't Need Anyone is Ridiculous"

Rebecca Solnit's new book, 'The Unforeseen Path' (Lumen), begins with a disquieting image: she rides her bicycle through her city, San Francisco, sharing the road with many driverless cars. She tries to make eye contact with them but only sees "ghostly steering wheels" moving on their own. Once, one of these vehicles ran over a woman and couldn't detect her underneath: "You can't communicate with an autonomous car; you have to call the headquarters and wait for them to do something." Eventually, they had to lift it using traditional methods to rescue the woman. Not being able to talk even to a driver is another lost point of human contact, in the context of a "pandemic of loneliness and isolation" that, according to the author, is designed every day in Silicon Valley, right next to her city.

"I was proud of San Francisco: it was the city of gay liberation, a haven for dissenters, the place of experimental poetry, and where one of the world's first environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, was founded. Now I am horrified to witness these changes firsthand." She explains how the city itself is being swallowed by tech companies, driving up prices and fostering extreme inequality: "We can see in this local dystopia that their promises of creating utopias were always false, dangerous, or illusory. They are always telling you to trust them, in their wonders: this cryptocurrency that destroys the ecosystem, this AI that leaves you jobless, without copyright, and spreads misinformation... that's their paradise."

The book is a collection of essays covering many more topics, but all interconnected, because the interconnection of everything is one of the keys. The writer and journalist, who nearly two decades ago published 'Men Explain Things to Me', a milestone of current feminism, is in Spain these days and meets us at her publisher's offices in Madrid. In the afternoon, she will go to the Book Fair, then to several events, then to Barcelona, then always to another place. A promotional tour that contrasts with the life she enjoys: "For a writer who loves routine and having between an hour and a year to think of an idea, these tours are the opposite. Rushing, jet lag, strange schedules, and —she stares at the interviewer— answering questions from strangers in public without time to think about them. But it's part of the deal, so here I am."

For Solnit, despite Trump's return or setbacks against abortion rights in her country, neither feminists nor climate change activists should fall into defeatism. "If you have a short-term vision, you'll say 'Oh! We haven't achieved anything, we haven't succeeded, we protested on Tuesday and they didn't give us everything by Wednesday!', but by extending the view, you understand how important and effective these struggles have been." She says she feels like a millennial turtle when it comes to seeing changes pass by: "There has been an undeniable expansion of rights, for many groups and for nature. Slavery wasn't abolished overnight, nor was women's suffrage achieved. You have to have a perspective slower than the change itself, and if not... let me tell you how the role of women in society was when I was little."

Although it may seem paradoxical, she repeats that the supposed sacrifices we must make to curb climate change could actually be more than beneficial in daily life: "I believe we can create a world where we consume less, produce less, and spend less. We could have more time, not only to be with the people we love but to find more time for intimacy with ourselves. One of the tragedies of the Internet has been losing the depth of real contact and attention to ourselves, as if we were stranded whales on the shore instead of being in what could be our deepest self."

Solnit proposes replacing the terms 'right' and 'left' with isolationists and interconnectionists, clearly positioning herself in the latter group. "The version of individualism where we don't need anyone is ridiculous. Even the doomsday preppers in the United States protect themselves by going to buy things made by others. The concept of the self-made man, which the right loves, mainly manifests this idea of non-responsibility, towards no one and nothing: I can always do whatever I want."

She exemplifies this with the pandemic, contrasting the Auntie Sewing Squad, a spontaneous group of non-profit mask seamstresses who ended up generating a social and cultural movement, against some very influential voices on the Internet that said wearing a mask or getting vaccinated was a sign of male weakness. "Here we share the air, speak a language with similar roots, Indo-European, we are connected. Isolationism is almost always a fiction, and it ends up becoming a mental tragedy. Musk, Trump, Vance, or Zuckerberg are clearly not very happy human specimens: they are very destructive and have a deep emotional poverty despite their material wealth."

One of the key points of the book is Solnit's refusal to accept a supposed centrism when progressives are told they have to be understanding with the voters and leaders of 'Make America Great Again', Donald Trump's MAGA movement: "Being understanding with the perpetrator, that's what drives me crazy. They are never asked to try to understand a black feminist, so there is a one-way sympathy traffic that I think is nonsense." The communication of the immigration department, with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem publishing triumphant videos of deportations, is one of the most disturbing aspects of this legislature: "I hope she goes to jail. That several of them go to jail. She has violated not only American law but international law, taking those men to El Salvador. Immigration is costing Trump popularity. You see beautiful videos of people defending their neighbors from ICE [the immigration control service], reminiscent of the worst secret police in Europe last century. They defend their classmates, coworkers, so they aren't taken away."

Regarding the targeting of intellectuals like her, universities, newspapers, or science itself in her country, Solnit responds that "one of the most useful things for authoritarianism is to tell people to only believe them. Truth, science, and history are then competition. And intellectuals are, in some way, guardians of all that." However, the other side is not spared either: "of course there are snobbish intellectuals who don't help at all. And there are many stupid people with a doctorate and brilliant people who never went to university: sometimes that hierarchy of intelligences is actually a status hierarchy that I don't support."

Shortly after last October's DANA, this newspaper recorded a series of podcasts where a bookseller, who had completely lost her business, ended up recommending one of Solnit's previous books, 'A Paradise in Hell', which deals with how people's spirit faces the consequences of catastrophes in community. She recommended it because it was exactly what had happened to her. "I'm not surprised that in Valencia there were these beautiful reactions. Bookstores are my natural habitat, so I empathize a lot. The most important thing I learned talking to survivors of major disasters is not that they behaved with altruism, bravery, and creativity, but that they found a sense of purpose, of finding meaning in their lives. That's what we want, connection, purpose."

The essays in 'The Unforeseen Path' were published in various magazines and newspapers before Trump's return, but there is an epilogue called 'Credo', where she encourages everyone not to falter in this new situation. She ends the interview delving into this idea, addressing the young: "It's true that in some ways the world is worse than ever, but in others, it's better, for example, if you're a young woman. Young people have great power, which will grow by meeting people who share your views and taking action together. Civil society and activists have changed the world time and again, and that will never stop."