EIGHT. August 23rd 2019
I suppose discontent is inevitably a characteristic of the committed activist. We are, more or less by definition, unhappy about things and we spend our time making this apparent to others – pointing out what we consider to be wrong with the current state of affairs, demanding changes, and so forth. There are some amongst my very close acquaintance who might, I suspect, suggest that I was psychologically suited to this role long before I took it up, with critical and even judgemental faculties quite honed and with a tendency, in the manner of mythical old blokes like Alf Garnet and Victor Meldrew, simply to complain. But we’ll leave that to one side for now.
One thing I can’t complain about is the diversity of my life as an activist. The last couple of months have brought a variety of challenges which have stimulated emotional uplift, intellectual interest and, occasionally, the sense of existing in a very weird dream; the kind which defeats attempts at analysis but which you feel sure would reveal itself as deeply meaningful if only you could work it out.
The weirdest moment, perhaps, took place outside a large and quite grand official-looking building. I was standing at the end of a path leading from the doorway of the building. I was playing a slow loud beat on a snare-drum suspended around my neck by a thick blue ribbon. I was wearing a bear mask. From within the building stepped a man in a suit, evidently someone with authority. He stepped over and between an array of 40 or 50 dead people lying on the ground on and around the path, all of them also wearing animal masks. Approaching me, he called my name. I stopped drumming and lifted the mask to speak to him. A short while later I cheered from a gallery, alongside all the dead people now magically come back to life, when the man in the suit stood up in the chamber below and said that there was a climate emergency.
The actual meaning of these scenes is, it now seems to me, much less interesting than the imagery or the visceral experience at the time; signifying only that a Council Leader had decided to make a gesture of concession in what is shaping up to be a long battle to get him and his largely-unconvinced political colleagues to Tell the Truth about the climate crisis and Act Now, as if that truth is real. This battle, of course, involves a great deal of less fancy stuff behind the scenes including a laborious process of emails, meetings and whatnot. Even this stuff is mostly very interesting, although the ratio between effort and product, admin and action, often seems disproportional – I suppose in the same way that it can take years to make a film which eventually lasts just a couple of hours.
A while after the ‘die-in’ action there was another ‘dreamy’ interlude from the frenetic rush between communications, meetings and strategising which makes up a good deal of daily activism. This one involved hanging about for a few days in central London and witnessing numerous inspiring speeches, songs, poems, musical recitals and one particularly delightful dance performance from the deck of the one of our now proliferating fleet of boats, which was moored in the street outside the Royal Courts of Justice before being sailed across Waterloo Bridge to be anchored outside the Old Vic theatre. All this was a part of the advertised ‘Summer Rebellion’, conceived and birthed quite rapidly as a sign of our developing confidence that we needn’t feel constrained to stick to the social movement theory which says that rebellions are only likely to work in the spring and the autumn.
It did seem but an interlude, nonetheless, with the feeling of powder kept as dry as possible for the coming ‘big push’ in October. Curiously enough, the end of the same week took me, along with numerous partners-in-crime, to another of Her Majesty’s courts of law (the City of London Magistrates Court) to answer charges of failing to comply with a section 14 notice issued under the Public Order Act back in April, for which the 30 or so rebels assembled that morning had all been arrested – part of a much larger group of about 1100 against all of whom, it would appear, charges are to be brought. It was a noisy and good-natured atmosphere in the court anteroom, with lawyers and court officials evidently as bemused as the defendants about how proceedings were to be managed, especially given that about ninety percent of us seem determined to plead not guilty. Even with group trials and joint defences (the arrangements for which took up more or less all of the morning), it will, according to my rough calculations, be about a year of court time before we all get through the system and emerge on the other side, most probably with a conditional discharge. Again, the ratio between admin – conversations with and between lawyers and endless checking of paperwork – and action – How do you plead? Not guilty. – was highly disproportionate.
I was fairly sanguine about the prospect of being charged, as I had been about being arrested. According to my understanding of the model of civil disobedience which we are pursuing, large numbers of arrests and the penalties which are bound to accrue are a necessary part of the process; as are the disruptions and delays created within the legal system by our not guilty pleas. I felt less at ease about all this when actually in attendance at the court, however. This was not to do with finally being confronted with the consequence of my actions in refusing to move out of the road when told to do so, but to do with the internal conflict created by my own behaviour and later response.
Viz: there I am one sunny morning calmly refusing to move when politely asked to do so numerous times by numerous police officers who offer careful explanations for their requests. In doing so, I claim a moral high ground, saying that the sacrifice of my arrest is necessary to bring attention to my cause. (This I fervently believe). Then, later, in order to create further disruption and dilemmas, I employ fine legal minds (the owners of which are clearly making sacrifices of their own to do their best to provide outstanding service for minimal costs) to try to demonstrate that the crime, for which effectively I wanted to be arrested, was not a crime at all but merely an expression of my human rights and an action necessary to prevent a much greater harm. (This I also fervently believe). If the paradox of this is not felt by the arresting officers and the rather urbane and dapper District Judge – which I doubt, they all seemed intelligent and reflective people – then it is by me. “Please arrest me”, I say, more or less (in lighter Pythonesque moments on the bridge some people actually did say that) but then I insist that I have committed no crime.
Our theory, of course, suggests that these dilemmas are for the authorities to struggle with – arrest the activists and it feeds publicity and sympathy, don’t arrest them and we have to give into their demands; subject them to lengthy trials costly to them and the public and generate more publicity and sympathy, or let them go unpunished and undeterred to do the same again. I have to say, however, that in the moment of being required to confirm my personal details and then say “Not guilty” (my only real contribution during four and a half hours at court) I felt that the dilemma created for the authorities through my behaviour was also a dilemma for me. It was difficult to feel comfortable with it but I equally felt that I had no choice – according to the moral imperative – to do otherwise. The outcome of this was that I felt a level of discontent – and even outrage – that I was in this position – a position which, of course, I had put myself in. I recalled that I had experienced a very similar feeling when in the police van on the journey from Waterloo Bridge to Belgravia Police Station. I had wanted to be arrested but I objected to it, inwardly, strongly. I genuinely appreciated the restrained and compassionate conduct of the police officers and I refused to do as they asked me, or even to lessen the inconvenience to them by walking to the police van rather than insisting on being carried.
The absurdity of such dilemmas had made me laugh on the bridge but made me cry in the police van; we were all putting ourselves and each to such a lot of trouble, marshalling huge resources in creating a series of impossible conflicts and problems. Surely it would be easier to work together to set about solving the very challenging but probably not impossible problem of climate and ecological breakdown.
Apparently not. As a society, it seems, we would prefer to remain in denial, unconscious to the seriousness of the climate problem and the need to get on now with doing something about it and distract ourselves with the sorts of games described above. Notwithstanding that these games are often fun- in the sense of providing emotional and intellectual interest as already described – this is nevertheless counterbalanced by a sense of stress, anxiety and frustration (in short, discontent) associated with constantly trying to face the world – and thus face it oneself – with how bad things are. Some on the ‘other side’ of course, might claim that the activism through which we try to bring the problems to awareness and demand their solution is itself a form of denial; the problems can’t be solved, we are just using our activism as a manic defence to escape our feelings of discontent. I sometimes wonder if this is right.
I’ve also been troubled lately by the idea that my activism is enabling others to remain in denial of the need for them to do something: it’s ok, no need to worry so much now, ‘those people’ are doing something about it, I can just get on with business as usual and support them from the sidelines. I’m not intending to dismiss the value of this ‘support’, even the armchair variety, but if it ends up looking to too man people like an alternative to real activism then we’re sunk. In the end this is a numbers game. We don’t need everyone by any means but we do need more of us. Three times the number on the streets, three times the arrests and the dilemmas presented to the authorities start to look completely unmanageable. Five times and maybe everything changes.
And of course this – everything changing, as quickly as possible – is what we need. It seems increasingly blindingly obvious to me that all of the alarming trends in the world – alongside climate crisis, the rise of nationalism, the election of corrupt egomaniacs to positions of leadership and the visible collapse of civil society – are all connected. This seems equally obvious to most people I speak to and I am therefore increasingly at a loss to understand why there isn’t a really massive collective uprising. It would be less incomprehensible were it not for the inclusion of climate breakdown in the mix. The other stuff, although signifying a deep malaise of decadence difficult to reverse, is at least technically changeable at the ballot box. Not so with climate change. Eleven years and counting.
These thoughts bring growing impatience with the armchair support and the potential for discontent to develop into a kind of fundamentalism, forming itself into questions like ‘Are you with us or against us?’ and possibly into a more radical agenda for those who have left their armchairs. I’m pretty sure that this wouldn’t be helpful, and it brings me back to the earlier reflections about my Alf Garnet / Victor Meldrew subpersonality. The task, it seems, is to manage, contain and direct the discontent, possibly even to transform it into something more careful and loving. I recall that something like this did indeed take place when we were on the streets together in April. Maybe anticipating another outpouring of creativity and goodness in October can help me control my discontent until then; and perhaps encourage a few more to get out of their armchairs and be a part of it.
A Reluctant Activist 