Us and Them

NINETEEN. October 20th 2024

Two years feels quite a long time to have ‘paused’ in the middle of doing something. I can’t really say I was just ‘taking a break’. The long gap between the last post here and this one does signify a decrease in activity and a commensurate growth in reluctance. I’ve been doing some activist stuff, but sporadically and with half a heart; save for a sustained and intense campaign alongside fellow enthusiasts locally to get rid of our illustrious MP at the last election – a glorious failure which had its own negative effect upon morale. I can see the bigger picture now of course – we got rid of the bastards at a national level and our local efforts at an effective progressive voting alliance may even have helped that in some way. But still it’s quite hard to take that, ultimately, most of  my community preferred to elect a slime ball who had been fully complicit in all the worst atrocities of the last government instead of the thoroughly decent, thoughtful, able and hardworking candidate – a genuine local hero – whom I was supporting. And it’s not like that ‘bigger picture’ is looking all that sunny so far either. It’s early days, but I don’t think there are many people who would yet say that, in any respect (including the most obviously urgent one of the climate crisis) it is looking that much like a new dawn.…

A poem I’ve always liked very much and have mentioned before, written in 1919, says this:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” 

and shortly afterwards….

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity”.

(W.B.Yeats, The Second Coming)

I feel like I’ve been reminded regularly of those lines, with a rate of frequency which has increased exponentially, since I first realised about 40 years ago how apposite they are to the condition of the contemporary world. The bit about conviction feels most important now. I’ve always felt that it meant that, when you are really, really up shit creek without a paddle, those whom you would most want to lead the way out will tell you that they don’t know how, while those least suitable will claim to have the answers; worse, they will be believed.

It seems to me, not to put too fine a point on it, that what I’ve been doing over the last 6 years, through my journey into activism, has failed to produce very positive results. I could point to benefits for myself – the enjoyment and reassurance of a process of collaboration with like-minded people, many new friendships, a sense of purpose and even virtuousness, a lot of learning and a surprising amount of fun. I can even  speculate about benefits for my friends and associates. And people often kindly say to me “But you lot have made a bigger difference than you think”, or words to that effect. But still, we ARE up shit creek without a paddle aren’t we? In fact we are considerably further up there than we were six years ago and the route out is looking markedly less clear.

In light of that, and with my thinking probably clarified through a couple of months out of the country and properly disengaged from any sort of activism, I would say that I do now lack conviction. It’s not just that I can’t see the way out of shit creek (I generally feel that it would be no bad thing if more of our leaders were willing to say “I don’t know” from time to time): I am beginning to feel that there isn’t a way out and, further, beginning to feel that I no longer want to make the effort to look for it.

It may be worth emphasising that, for me, this business about conviction has little to do with belief. I am still absolutely sure, even surer than I was, that the climate is breaking down, and I’m fairly confident that it’s all happening much faster than anybody (including me) had expected a few years ago. It’s extraordinary that the political right and its climate-change-deniers have been able to get away, to some degree, with casting climate protestors as ‘zealots’ and with claiming that our movements are like religions or cults. There is no faith involved. Our ‘beliefs’, if it is proper to call them such, are simply calculations based upon the considered observations of practically all climate scientists – which basically lead to conclusions which are so overwhelmingly probable as to be certain. This is happening. There are some just about feasible things we could do to stop it happening but we are not doing them and it doesn’t appear that we really intend to do them. There is literally nothing which would delight me more than to find out I am wrong about this. My position is about as far as you can get from ‘faith’ or ‘religion.’

Perhaps unfortunately, the strengthening of my ‘beliefs’ about this is not serving to make me more determined to do something about it because the evidence also suggests to me now that I may not be able to do anything useful about it. I can’t ignore my feeling (I won’t say it’s a fact, because I’m not certain) that what we have been doing as climate protestors hasn’t worked. (Or, at least, that if it did work a bit for a while, it isn’t working now). To exacerbate the problem, I’m finding that the more I ‘believe in’ climate breakdown and its associated  spin-offs (wars, oppression, societal collapse, famine etc) coming soon, in combination with my belief that I can’t do anything effective about it, the more reluctant I am to be active in trying to prevent it. The lure of pleasurable things I always wanted to do more of once I’d retired from paid work gets stronger and the counter-balancing desire to be useful / serve higher purposes lessens: I’m conscious of the clock ticking and I want to have a nice time while I can.

And yet I find myself now drawing back towards activist groups and roles I’ve largely neglected for months. Various possible explanations for this include guilt, habit, a desire to impress and the not inconsiderable pull of relationships with fellow activists which, naturally, have grown strong over time. But I think that there’s something else too. It seems I can’t just give up and walk away. I guess you could characterise this either as a neurotic failure to recognise a truth which I find too painful to bear or as a noble self-sacrifice. I don’t have much faith in the power of the latter. I always thought our most important task, which we’ve failed at, was to build a mass movement, and I see little convincing evidence that martyrdom has achieved much in any field; rather it is an appealing retrospective focus for narratives about why things eventually changed like they did.

I expect that, in fact, a more accurate characterisation of my motivation to get back into things would draw from various mundane factors to do with my personality, itself formed by experiences and reactions to them as well as some natural or ‘ingrained’ features: I tend to stick at things and if one approach doesn’t work, I try another one; I don’t feel content if I don’t have a balance in my life between things which feel like meaningful work and things which feel like play – both bring psychological rewards; I have a low tolerance for bullshit (and am thus a natural ‘rebel’); perhaps most important, I get really, really frightened when I think carefully about what I think is going to happen, and I don’t find it easy to turn off that kind of thinking. It was the need to be able to turn it off which got me into this in the first place: I felt that I couldn’t settle to doing anything at all with my time – pleasurable or otherwise – if I wasn’t trying to do something to change the future that I foresaw, usually late at night, in increasingly grim detail.

A recent public statement by Chris Packham has maybe also helped to guide me back in. I’m mistrustful of leaders generally, despite being fully convinced that we need them. I have an uneven experience of Mr Packham but I basically have him in the category of people I would trust to lead the way out of shit creek, assuming he offered, so I listen to what he says. (By the way, an ally of his in the clean water campaign, Feargal Sharkey, is also well worth listening to if you haven’t – such a relief to hear someone who is properly and justly outraged and knows how to convey this to others and encourage them to do the same –  an example from which the Labour leadership could usefully learn in my view). Packham has been appointed a Director of the Climate emergency Fund, which has channelled significant amounts of money to climate protest movements, and he has used that platform to call for climate activists to more directly target the individuals – CEOs in the oil industry and the like – who are leading us in the charge towards extinction.

One of the things I like about Mr Packham is that he tends to say things exactly as he finds them without worrying about how others will react (which has made him extremely unpopular with some people, of course) and he also said that climate activists should stop sitting in the road because that isn’t working. I’ve spent quite a lot of time sitting in the road over the past 6 years and I think it’s a pretty congruent and appropriate means of expressing the outrage and desperation that I feel – in line with the example of Mr Sharkey previously mentioned – and of conveying the message that “ordinary people” (whoever they are, really) need to stop getting on with “business as usual” and start paying attention to the awful catastrophe which is just around the corner. But I can’t deny that sitting in the road isn’t working. Even if it did seem to for a while. As I’ve indicated above, I’m a great one for ‘try, try and try again” and I can even buy into the slightly mysterious notion I’ve come across of simply ‘failing better’ but I do also subscribe, as a fully paid up supporter, to the notion  attributed to Einstein, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Part of what has demoralised me during the last few years is that our efforts as climate protestors have had diminishing returns. Our basic response to the charge that sitting in the road isn’t working has been that we need to get more of us sitting in the road. I have been on board with that, but that isn’t working either, so…..

An attractive thing about the direction that Packham’s intervention indicates is that it would recognise some important realities which can all too easily be overlooked: the climate crisis, although overwhelmingly urgent and important, is only a symptom of deeper systemic problems like our addictive compulsion towards extractive consumerism, our reluctance to behave with a modicum of humility and respect towards other beings with whom our own welfare is inextricably linked, our hubristic belief that we can get away with anything and our readiness to stick our heads in the sand and pretend to believe that the emperor is wearing a cloak when he clearly isn’t. All of these things help to create fertile ground from which have emerged selfish, cynical, greedy and increasingly powerful individuals (mostly men, of course) who are ready to take advantage of these favourable circumstances to make themselves more powerful and to pursue their (insatiable) appetites for more than they already have, whatever the cost to others or to humanity and nature in general.

Packham’s plea is to stop hurting ourselves and to go for these people instead. It’s simplistic and it’s not, in my view, the whole answer, but I do think he’s right that it’s time for a change of tack. At this particular point you cannot fail to be aware of the shadow of Trump looming over everything you think about and hope for. He is the archetype of what I just described. It was his incredible ascent to power which finally triggered the start of my journey into activism and he is rightly the bête noire of progressive activists all over. Stopping him and stopping people like him – the cynical and self-serving CEOs of corporations operating in the realm of the oil industry, for instance – won’t be anything like sufficient to address the climate emergency. The whole answer has to include addressing and changing the faults in our collective behaviour and culture referred to in the last paragraph, otherwise we will just create and promote new bosses who are just like the old ones. But stopping these people is absolutely necessary.

The climate protest movement to which I’ve attached myself has a set of principles and values which I greatly admire. Without them I might never have got involved; they describe a systemic view of the world, recognising that everything is connected and that, to overcome the severe difficulties we face, we must behave with tolerance, kindness and civility and that we must recognise the need to work together, all of us, collectively.  These principles and values recognise implicitly that the ascendancy of Trump and his ilk is a symptom of the malaise, the disease, into which we have descended. Arising from all that, logically enough, is the idea that we should resist blaming or targeting individuals. Personally, I’d become convinced long before I signed up that that is basically the right approach. Even if you choose to support a theory that it is special individuals who shape events – whether for good like Mandela, or for bad like Trump – you would be hard pressed to deny that the crucial thing which allows the bad ones to hold sway is the connivance, the collusion, of large numbers of other people. In Trump’s case (or Hitler’s come to that) we have the people who voted for him, as well as those who actively promote him. In the case of some of the more stand-out obvious abusers of recent history, whose behaviour and treatment illustrates this point well – for example, (Sir) Jimmy Savile, Jeffrey Epstein and now Al Fayed – there are, obviously, the bystanders, those who knew about and sometimes witnessed abusive acts and did nothing about it. The same basic pattern can be observed regarding the many ‘business-leaders’ and ‘investors’ and their powerful cheerleaders in the media: they are doing great harm, committing appalling moral crimes in plain sight, but, due to a complex of reasons which basically condenses into a disgusting cocktail of cowardice, deference and complicity, we do nothing about it. Abuse and abusers arise from a decadent and dysfunctional culture and, if you want to end abuse, that culture has to be changed.

But, and this is a very big BUT, this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to challenge and, indeed, take down, the abusers. While it is true that blaming Trump and his ilk won’t get us anywhere in the long-term – it’s our own selfishness, greed, brutishness, arrogance and stupidity which needs to be confronted and reformed – it would be very naive to suppose that these mad, bad and dangerous people are going to go away unless we make them. We should not equate the notion of blaming someone with the object of stopping, or fighting (or even destroying) them. Destroying is a strong word, I grant, but I use it deliberately to convey just how forceful and determined we might need to be, as a society, to rid ourselves of the monsters we have created. You don’t; have to look far to find myths and stories which attest to this. Whether you grew up with the Narnia stories, read The Hobbit as a teenager, idly enjoyed Dracula and Star Wars movies or got into Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, you know in your heart of hearts that good doesn’t conquer evil just by being nice. Fighting is a necessity. The principles and values we need to build a good society have to include rigorous honesty and congruence. We need Love and Will – a bowl AND a sword.

Of course, Chris Packham is not suggesting violence as the right means to the end, and neither am I. But these people and organisations and corporations which support them are undermining and ruthlessly opposing, with all resources available to them and for their own selfish ends, the urgent and radical measure which need to be taken immediately to have any hope of preserving a liveable planet. We will not defeat them without being absolutely ruthless in response. Much as I tend to concur with people who might feel that following a policy of targeting and exposing individual ‘villains’ is neither very ‘nice’ nor kind nor free from unpredictable risks, I happen to feel the same about the likely impact of climate breakdown. For a while, the wish to be nice and kind and not to seem like a dick deterred me from sitting in the road but I got over it because I could see a bigger picture. Same with this…

Whether or not thinking like this is going to help propel me back more fully into activism, my personal Second Coming, I don’t know. My natural character and inclinations puts me closer to Bilbo Baggins, who wanted to stay in his hidey hole eating cake in preference to setting off to look for a big dragon, than to Luke Skywalker or Katniss Everdene. Howsoever I find myself motivated by the exciting desire to ‘get the bastards” I am at least equally drawn by the prospect of more time in the garden or beside a cosy fire with a book of poems. And I know to my cost, and from my observations of the journeys of numerous friends, how a full immersion can be too wearing, making one not really good for anything at all. As ever, the question remains how to live satisfactorily while, all around, things are falling apart.