Madly Farting into the Void
The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
This blog is, in a sense, an admission of defeat.
Around the turn of the millennium I became aware that the world wasn't getting more prosperous and free, but sliding into trouble. The realization came on gradually over the years, but that story is too long to retrace now. One snapshot will suffice.
Many knew better already. I didn't. I had been, then, seduced by the fable of global uplift buoyed by democracy, information technology, and free enterprise. The Internet revolution was in full swing, economies were booming, authoritarian governments left and right had fallen, the Web was turning the world into one big noisy town square. I had hope. I didn't think history was over, lots more needed to be mended - discrimination by gender, race, religion, nationality outgrown, destructive tendencies of profit-seeking curbed, technological monopolies such as Microsoft eliminated. But that seemed to be only a matter of time. The advantage in cultural, political, and economic struggles, I was sure, was now decisively with the people at the bottom, with the many against the powerful few, who would sooner or later have to yield.
When I read in the news about the anti-globalization protests in Seattle, I initially saw them much as their neoliberal critics did - quaint echoes of bygone ages, vainly resisting the forces of progress they neither properly understood nor could hope to counter. Nonetheless, I welcomed their intervention as a necessary corrective. Globalization would continue, there was no stopping it, but politicians would now surely bow to public pressure to ensure it proceeded with a human face, protecting the poor, the vulnerable, and the environment.
The protesters successfully disrupted the conference, prompting a massive overreaction by the police. An organizer later told me it was one of those "we really don't know how it escalated" moments, but yeah, it was a crackdown.
Upshot: minor shifts in media coverage, no policy changes.
The Battle of Seattle and its aftermath reminded me of nothing so much as of the repression of pro-democracy protests by the Cold War-era Communist authorities and their authoritarian successors.
Lingering doubts now surfaced and crystalized. Capitalism, it turned out, wouldn't let itself be reformed to become more sustainable and equitable. It would yield to an extent, sure, but pushing past a limit was kept off the table by police batons, just like political freedoms under the Communists. The difference was that no democratic alternative was waiting in the wings. Instead, we were expected to accept the status quo as democratic. We could vote alright, but not for anyone willing or authorized to change the rules of international politics and trade - even while these were inexorably driving our societies and ecologies to destabilize.
To win a livable world, I realized, we must act collectively and organize a challenge to established power, just like the people who fought for democracy in formerly Communist-run states.
A year and a half later I was ready to travel to Italy and join the uprising there. I didn't go, drawn by pleasanter summertime pursuits, but I had chosen my side.
Since then, I made many life choices with the mind to understand what's going on and what we can do. I looked for people to connect with, changed careers, studied social sciences, published research, joined activist initiatives, organized, protested, dug into dusty corners of eccentric politics.
I never encountered a sustained effort that fit a simple bill:
- eyes and minds open to the scope and urgency of what we're facing;
- ambition to instigate action to address it to its full extent.
Plenty of creative, hopeful, partial answers, and I'll feature a few soon enough. They never seem to connect effectively enough to clear up each other's blind spots, combine their strengths, and start transforming the world we live in.
I am defeated because, in a very important way, I am doing this alone. Without a community with whom I can think together in depth, without even one such person, there's noone to sound out my insights, noone whose consistent criticism can help me elaborate them, noone to check me when I blunder, and I am the easiest person to fool. This is too big to be tackled in a solo blog, more art and craft than science, and I am very uncomfortable with that. With only one set of eyes as I press "Publish", I will mess up in obvious and embarrassing ways.
That's how I am defeated.
But defeat isn't failure. Neglecting to go on is.
I am writing about taking responsibility, and right now, the one small thing in my hands is to close my eyes and press "Publish", gaping lacunae and all. Grudgingly, driven moderately mad, I shall thus yell at clouds and fart into the ether.
We, collectively, must take responsibility for a lot. I'll start getting into that next time.