March 26, 2006
Dear Ethel; or, What Is To Be Done? (Part One)
Part One: What Are You Willing To Do?
Ethel the aardvark makes a good point -
I think what I’m trying to say is, please can people who are trying to raise awareness so things can get better follow the suggestion in the first paragraph, and raise awareness of what I can do to respond to an issue, not simply tell me an issue exists. Then it seems things will have an even better chance of getting better.
- which seems correct as far as it goes, but consideration of which raises many other issues. (Hence this is part one – please bear with me. There are complex and overlapping issues to unfold.)
In my experience of activism, and of people who seem to give a damn talking about things and trying to figure out what to do, the question “what can I do?” tends to actually take the form “What can I do, at minimal personal discomfort and effort, that will somehow be effective to counteract the global horror and alleviate my conscience, while fundamentally not requiring me to change my privileged lifestyle?”
Personally, in the past, I have exhausted myself trying to conceive of actions which fit this criteria. (It is entirely possible to provide a practical list of solutions which a person may be unwilling to carry out. Which is their right but not terribly useful to anyone as an exercise.) Even remarkably clever minimal-effort concepts like the hunger site and the rainforest site fall foul of this apathy. How many of us are still clicking every day?
Essentially, what are you willing to do? What does your conscience require from you to alleviate its pressure? How much are you willing to change yourself and your life? When you can answer that, the answer to “what can I do?” will be a lot clearer.
The kinds of things we are permitted to do within the system are in general safe for the system. If they were effective tools for change which challenged power sources and structures we would not be permitted their use. They are symbolic acts where real acts are required to make change. On the other hand, on another level, they have value and communicative power as symbols. However, those with power will do as they wish.
In purely physical, pragmatic terms, we have solutions to most issues. For example, there is food enough produced in the world that no one needs to starve. A pragmatic solution would be: get food to people in the short term, and give them whatever they need to become self-sufficient in food in the future. The point here is to emphasise that we have the physical means to achieve most things. This is a comparatively recent development. The question is why we don’t enact those solutions; or, rather, why we then choose to achieve the things we do. (Another post!)
Solutions involve doing things differently. The process stalls because humans resist these changes. They may be unaware of them, or the necessity for them. Or they may simply be unwilling to change. As noted in an earlier post about the Weathermen, once the threat of the draft and going off to die in war was removed, the protest movement lost a lot of its momentum.
Unless we are personally affected, it seems difficult to cross the threshold to perform the actions required for change.
A parallel can be seen with climate change. As the reports grow ever more dire, we watch with puzzled expressions and think we ought to do something. (This is a good example of Ethel’s point, by the way, of talking about a problem without giving a solution. A pragmatic solution exists: if humans are causing climate change, drastically cut back on the activities which add to it. However, this remains politically unacceptable. Which cues the next post.)
Next: Awareness and Political Will
Filed by billy at 11:10 pm under culture,politics,the world
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“The kinds of things we are permitted to do within the system are in general safe for the system. If they were effective tools for change which challenged power sources and structures we would not be permitted their use. They are symbolic acts where real acts are required to make change.”
Maybe part of the problem is also that most people don’t believe the system needs to be changed. They want to look at change within the exisintg system because the existing system is known/familiar, which has a feel of safety. Talk of changing the system, for many people will trigger fears and be written off as ‘extremist’or ‘radical’. I’m assuming that you’d need to get a majority of the ‘mainstream’ on board in order to make any changes – how many of those people are going to agree that the system needs changing? So when they look at things they can chnage, it makes sense that they look at what they can do within the current system.
You’ve picked up on a tangent to the weakest paragraph in the post, which is inessential to the argument being made, so I’m not going to dwell on this beyond a brief couple of points before it goes way off sideways
First, what you think needs doing will entirely depend upon how you conceive the problem to be.
Second, your assumption runs counter to the experience of every successful revolution.
Great post – I shall come back for further reading!
This article may interest you:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2078564,00.html
FWIW I try and refuse all bags when i go shopping on the basis that all they do accumulate in the cupboard. I then try and recycle any that I already have, sometimes this is easy (CD buying) sometimes difficult (surreptitiously having an old bag in my pocket when I go to Pak n Save) Nothing overwhelming but I figure its a start…
Oh, and here’s me thinking that whether people are willing to engage in changing structures is one of the crucial parts of the question of ‘what are you willing to do?’
You can seek to change individual behaviours all you like but unless you also acknowledge the context in which those behaviours take place, and the factors that reinforce and enable those behaviours it’s going to be hard to maintain any kind of change in the behaviour of individuals.
And the use of the word ‘revolution’ is exactly the kind of thing that would put most people off acting to change structures (in my opinion).
“(Hence this is part one – please bear with me. There are complex and overlapping issues to unfold.)”
[...] (Part One, Part Two) [...]
[...] (Part One, Part Two, Part Three.) [...]
[...] (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.) [...]