There’s a longer poetic piece I want to write, that properly honours the courage of the Just Stop Oil soup-throwers (among others), while ALSO lamenting the state of the climate “movement” for its lack of capacity, its lack of strategy, its substitution of moral calls and acts for any form of politics.
I am busy, unwell, bewildered, groggy on steroids. This is what you get instead. I hope to come back to it.
Short version, pretty much laid out as some Theses. Let’s say 11 of the blighters, to pick a number at random
- As a species we are in extremely deep trouble, though most of us seem not to know it. The juggernaut we created is crashing through various “planetary boundaries”. We’re running every red light.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
- Those of us who do know it are stuck in various “praxis traps” and cognitive traps of our own making. We write excellent essays about our lassitude, our fatigue, and/or we throw paint at works of art in the hope of shocking “The Powers That Be” (state? Civil society?) into action – a version of what I have called elsewhere the “Scraped Knee” theory of activism.
- When the soup-throwing (etc) happens, it acts as a kind of Rorschach test (the inkblots where you see what you want/need to see.”Immature alarmist narcissists blocking ambulances!” “Brave truth-tellers”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test
- Others use the events to have side-battles about the evils/idiocy of the State/Capitalism and its ecocidal trajectory. Arguing tossers arguing the toss. Everyone is confirmed in their own righteousness.
- These events act not just as inkblot tests, but also “affordances” – they allow and disallow certain responses. The responses are along established, comforting lines. They DISALLOW/render harder OTHER responses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
- The key thing they prevent (to most everyone’s relief) is a discussion of the failure of Western societies to take ecological limits seriously. 35 (well, 50) years of warnings, ignored. Fantasies of market or technological salvation instead. Failure.
- The failure is that of parties, politicians, churches, unions, industry associations, social movements, academics (ESPECIALLY academics. Court jesters without the lulz). Failure to be honest, brave, persistent, clear-sighted. Failure to resist co-optation, repression. So much pain, shame.
- The impossible failure humiliates us. We can’t face it, so we pick villains (and villains DO exist). This politician. That oil company. That craven professor. That astroturf group. ANYONE but OUR tribe. Hooray for our side. We are pure. We are good. We are the victim.
- We are trapped tight in webs of complicity, futility, hate, anger, despair, self-loathing, narcissism (much of this encouraged, of course, by the machine, the juggernaut).
10 Conversations abt what to do differently – to have a vibrant rigorous, vigorous “civil society” response – would require us to already HAVE a vibrant rigorous vigorous civil society. If we had had that over the last 35 years (plus), we would possibly not be in such a god awful mess.
11. Final thesis – Activists have always tried to interpret and “win” (status, policy footholds, social changes) within the rules of the game. The point is to change it.
How? Who? Which herds of cats get belled by which mice doing what differently? FIIK.
See also – My response to Tim Winton’s really useful essay