The Australian author Tim Winton has written an essential, bound-to-be-controversial essay (1) about climate change and why the kids are so upset. And why all of us are, except we can’t really name it or see it. Winton borrows some language and ideas to help us see the world differently. It’s bold, and uses an analogy – with colonialism – that might get him in a lot of trouble (we shall see).
In this essay (blog post, article – someone please PAY ME to think) I want to explain what Winton says, why it matters, where he might be wrong or misconstrued, why that matters, what is missing from his essay (not much – it’s really good. But one crucial piece…). Finally, crucially, I try to suggest what “we” are supposed to do differently now.
I can’t match Winton’s eloquence, so I won’t even try. (2) What follows may come across as bland, boring, hectoring, irritating. It is probably all of these things and more. But this isn’t an aesthetic argument he is making, nor me. It’s an existential one. Please attack the content not the form.
What Winton says
You should read it. It’s not long, but it may take you a while. The title is clickbait (presumably not chosen by Winton – headlines rarely are)
“Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists. This is the source of our communal dread”
Calling people kapos tends to get their backs up (even if – especially if – they are, in fact, kapos) and lead to tedious Godwin’s Law invocations etc etc. Get past that.
In a nutshell Winton says
- There are tedious attacks on young people for being “out of sorts”
- It’s not an “it was ever thus” situation – the kids ARE NOT alright (mood, despair)
- They are out of sorts because they know their parents and grandparents have utterly fucked the planet and that all that is left to an impossible hellscape that makes Mad Max look like the Alps in Sound of Music before the Nazis rock up (I paraphrase, but not by much)
- To understand all this, says Winton – why everyone feels gutpunched, sucker-punched and helpless, we could turn to the experience of colonised people, for example in Algeria (North Africa) in the mid-20th century. Winton then uses a French-Algerian thinker, psychiatrist and resistance figure called Frantz Fanon, who wrote a famous book called “The Wretched of the Earth” and was a crucial figure in helping colonised people figure out what was being done not just to their bodies, but their heads
- There’s a lot of work to be done. Hoping for technomiracles or kvetching about Labor politicians being no better (worse, in fact) than the Liberals won’t help anyone or anything.
- Winton then closes out with some suggestions, but since I am going to expand on them, “problematise” (4) them etc, I will save that for later.
Why it matters
Winton is onto something (a lot, imo). The “debates” about climate change – and who is supposed to do what – are sterile, repetitive and have allowed us to DO LESS THAN NOTHING FOR THIRTY SIX YEARS. We were warned, very very clearly, by scientists. From 1988 we’ve been allowing politicians and business (and civil society figures) to blow smoke up our asses. It was easier than taking actual action, and we liked the ticklish sensation, I guess.
Other people (not white, not male, not Western) have been pointing out the horrific colonial nature of climate inaction (who is causing the problem is not who has been on the pointy end) and the implications of the “solutions” being proposed (white comfort continues, black death escalates) for all that time, louder and louder.
What Winton is doing is actually using good tools developed by people of colour to analyse (to an extent, to an extent) our impasse. It matters.
“Where Winton might be wrong,” or at least, how he will probably be misconstrued, attacked.
Winton is sticking his shaggy head above the parapet (not for the first time. The man has a track record). He won’t just be shot at from one direction.
If he’s not ignored, he will be attacked from the “right” (Australians can fill in a long roll-call of mouths–if-not-actual-brains-for-hire media commentators here) for being a woke snowflake fruitloop Luddite hysterical alarmist who wants us living in caves gnawing on bones of our neighbours [continues in this vein for several paragraphs at least] who is making excuses for slacker kids “we’ve always had it tough. Interest rates were 17% thanks to Paul Keating” etc etc
More significantly, I think he may be attacked from the position of some people of colour and their allies. (5) To paraphrase, something like this –
“FFS. Another white guy who is trying to colonise “decolonisation.” Another white guy who can’t even just keep his hands off other people’s ideas about other people’s struggles/oppression/identity. White People ALWAYS gotta play the victim card, even when they are the ones with the goddam boot on everyone else’s neck, even when they are the overseer of the Plantation(ocene), the whips, the slave ships. They will not be happy until they have eaten and destroyed everything, forever.”
This is a grotesque caricature of a solid argument that could be made against Winton’s use of Fanon. I am not saying anyone will make it. I am putting it up as the polar opposite of the right attack. The actual responses (such as they are) to Winton will probably have more hand-wringing. Sorry “nuance”. (but also, Fuck Nuance).
Why that matters if Winton is misheard, smeared
It’s an important thing Winton is grappling with – the fog, the miasma, the sense of futility and helplessness that most of the people reading his article and mine live in. Most of the time this fog is personalised and then therapised out of its political importance. Winton is, in my opinion, really on to something here.
“We” (people of good faith actually wanting to advance both action and strategy) can’t afford for voices and messages like this to be defeated. It deadens thought, and makes future efforts at drawing analogies, expanding the floor of the mental cage more difficult.
What I think is missing from what Winton is saying.
Here’s where I think Winton missed a trick, and could have forestalled the (as-yet-hypothetical) attack.
The way to do it is… drum roll please… to deploy the insights of ANOTHER black French intellectual, Aime Cesaire. To quote Wikipedia
Aimé Fernand David Césaire (/ɛmeɪ seɪˈzɛər/; French: [ɛme fɛʁnɑ̃ david sezɛʁ]; 26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician.[2] He was “one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature”[3] and coined the word négritude in French.[4] He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. He was also the Mayor of Fort au France for 56 years, from 1945 – 2001.
The key insight that Winton could have added is that what is done in the colonies, to the colonised ends up ALSO being done to the colonisers back home in the “metropole”.
Techniques of surveillance and repression are tested out among people who can’t resist as easily. They are honed, perfected and… then used on domestic populations.
It’s the same for the psycho-sociological impacts of colonisation. You start brutalising others, well, you’re stepping on rakes like Sideshow Bob.
That’s it. That’s my “insight” (well, my theft of Cesaire’s). That’s all that Winton missed. Perhaps he already was way across it and the Guardian sub blue-pencilled it for reasons of space/tidiness. Tim, if you’re reading, is that what happened?
What is to be done? (by who, when)
So, as mentioned earlier, Winton had some specific suggestions. I’m going to mention those, and then close out with two of my own exhortations.
Here (spoilers) are some of the last lines of Winton’s jeremiad in italics. My comments in [square caps]
So, while we continue to scoff at each other’s generational follies and insecurities, we remain harmless colonial subjects, not potent, patriotic actors. Bitching about snowflakes and hating on old folks prevents us from becoming a united force of potent citizens.
[MH – The very idea that we will ever become a ‘united force’ of potent citizens seems misplaced. The striving for ‘unity’ (which people will assume is harmony, consensus, agreement, shared situational awareness) will be a tar pit. This is not an advocacy of ‘vanguard parties’ with an alleged privileged position’, it’s simply to say that using words ‘united force’ ignores the inevitable messiness, confusion, hybridity, whatever, and sets up impossible expectations, and allows the worst among us to have a veto role.]
What we need is the courage to liberate ourselves from these merchants of desolation.
[MH – yes, but courage comes in many flavours and needs more adjectives. Courage is also a COLLECTIVE VERB, not a personal noun. We as individuals don’t “have” more or less courage which we then sort of maybe hoard or share. It’s far more fluid, interactive than that. Situational, contingent etc.. We need to think in terms of collective emotions, collective intelligence, all that mushy mystic “emergent properties” stuff, all that “dissipative systems” metaphors and models. Anything else, sticking with courage as an object we “have”, brings us back to a Hobbesian, neoliberal failurepath.]
It’s a battle being fought on many fronts.
[MH – It’s not “a battle.” It’s war. Actually, it’s worse than that. Because it is not just any old World War. Or even a Forever War. Not even a civilisational war. It’s beyond all that – civilisations have risen and fallen, fine. Ozymandias blah blah. This, this is about at least the Sixth Extinction and whether we can haul anything back. This is possibly about going Full Venus (though, right now, who can know?) And it is not “many fronts” – EVERYTHING is a front. From the most trivial purchase to the genocides being perpetrated in far off countries and abattoirs nearby, and everything in between. There’s a scene near the end (spoilers) of the novel “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card where the screen isn’t just discrete dots of the enemy, it’s just a glow. They are everywhere, they are everything. But that’s the end of me carping about Winton’s choices of words, because a) it’s boring and petulant b) generally Winton’s has all the excellent words in all the excellent order.]
But in joining it, and to sustain it, we must foster new alliances, more creativity and deeper empathy. That means decolonising ourselves, resetting our outlook, so we can adapt to new conditions, and hold each other up in the struggle.
[MH – Joining – you’re already in it, you just don’t know it.
Sustaining – YES. Everything has been spasms. With my academic hat on I could bore for Gaia about Multiple Streams Approach/Policy Windows, or “Movement Cycles” or “Hype Cycles”. Happy to do that (too happy), but for now, this – XR says we quit – why radical environmental movements have a short shelf-life (Conversation, 2022)
Foster new alliances
[MH – yes, but watch out because to me it’s almost always the people on the pointy end who are asked to bite their tongues and get along with unashamed bigots, assholes and criminals for the sake of “unity”. Am not advocating endless stagings of the Oppression Olympics (obvs – I would keep losing), but when we talk about new alliances, rich white privileged people really need to do better. Thicker skins, and more self-education. People of colour have enough going on without doing the emotional and intellectual labour at a granular level. White people gotta be better at calling each other out/in/hokey-cokey-shake-it-all–about, while also not just rolling over in cowardice when absolute hustlers (who do exist) guilt them into silence. None of this is easy. See above hybrid/emergent blah blah_
More creativity
[MH – yep. And that doesn’t mean more colourful creche puppets for the next demo. It means making mistakes, being embarrassed, wrong, outlandish. More tolerance for failure (as long as there are plausible mechanisms for learning from it), more tolerance for ambiguity. All at, of course, exactly the time our amygdalas are shutting that down. Oh my the rest of the 21st century – however far we get – is going to be so fun. So fun.]
we can adapt to new conditions,
[MH – yes, but there will be no new stable normal. There will be a new ‘normal’ that shifts again. And then again. It will be profoundly unsettling. The systems are “flickering” and they are going to flicker more.
and hold each other up in the struggle.
[MH – yes, of course. But sometimes when you are held up it feels like you are being held back, and vice versa. And people whose amygdalas are getting the better of them (all of us most of the time, some of us all of the time) are good at claiming that any criticism, no matter how praise-sandiwched, no matter how constructive, how Vytosky-and-his-bloody-zone-of-proximal-bloody-development is an imposition. It’s the easiest thing in the world to refuse to accept feedback/support under the banner of “my feelings.” I say this with a solid half a century and counting of that.
Exhortation the First
Learn from people of colour. There is nothing “magical negro” here. It’s not that – in my opinion – African people are inherently superior/stronger/smarter. It’s Darwinism, in the sense of natural selection – thanks to what they’ve been on the receiving end of, their intellectuals have had to be that much smarter, that much tougher. Audre Lorde, June Jordan, James Baldwin, Aime Cesaire, Fanon, lots and lots and LOTS. For the most part, white people ignore them, or “at best” use them as a prop to signal their own virtue (6).
Exhortation the Second
Be brave. That means getting out of the rut of laughing/shouting at deniers, at criticising the state for being a plaything of the corporate death machine. All that is necessary but insufficient. The key thing now is what “we” – civil society (neighbourhoods, professional bodies, education groups, unions, religious outfits, social movement organisations etc) DO. We can fall back onto the scraped knee theory, that someone else is going to come save us.
We can ignore the fact that for thirty five years we have failed to build the pressure on states and corporations for non-blowing-smoke-up-our-asses action.
We can ignore the fact that social movement activism has come and gone in spasms (or waves, if you’re being super-generous) because we SUCK at holding meetings, recruiting people for more than marches and into sustained activism that is incapable of being ignored, co-opted, repressed.
If we were good at those things, we would not be in quite the funk that Winton so brilliantly describes.
We. Have. Failed. Lots of reasons for that. This stuff is really difficult. We were having kids, careers, breakdowns, breakups. Fine. We were forced to work horror jobs by kapos with whips, that left no time for anything but momentary escapes and pangs of hope for a less fucked world and now the bills are due.
Fine. All good reasons. But right now, if we don’t discuss why we failed, propose some ways to try things differently, and then DO those things, then we absolutely
- Waste our own time
- Destroy the last shreds of credibility in our own and anyone else’s eyes
- Really nail down the extinction not just of our own species but the so-many other species on this planet.
Links below to a small fraction of the stuff I have proposed and done over the years. It’s so pathetically inadequate that I cry about it. But if we all cry and post, maybe we can float our boats, our arks, on salt tears, and something can be salvaged.
We have to take a look at civil society. We have to find, name and combat the ways it has been failing. Everything else is a waste of the few breaths (Cheynes-Stokes ones at that) that we have left.
So, finally, what do you think? What did Winton get wrong? What do I get wrong? What do “we” actually need to do
Footnotes
- This essay was kindly brought to my attention by a new Twitter follower of my All Our Yesterdays twitter feed. It is a pale horrible shadow of its best, but Twitter
- Further excuses – I’ve had both medical and computer ailments, neither fully resolved. And I am trying to get this up and circulated before Australia properly wakes up.
- Fanon deserves a far better gloss than this, but a) time b) my various limitations, both temporary and permanent).
- I know, I know. You have my permission to cyber-slap me for that. Hard as you like. Ideally you’ll provide post-slap balm and also alternative words for same.
- And if/when I see it, I will have much more sympathy for this position while still, for reasons stated above not thinking it is a fatal impact on what Winton is trying to do)
- Not me, obviously. Noooo, not at aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalll.
Those promised suggestions etc.
I have road-tested some of these. They “work” in the moment. But long-term? The incentive structures are all wrong. Check out the Cher blog post.
On meetings not sucking
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this”
Our unwillingness to see the cycles
XR says we quit – why radical environmental movements have a short shelf-life (Conversation, 2022)
Specifically on XR and JSO
Has XR got the right tactics – a debate
Debate: XR has done more harm than good
Just Stop Oil – anthropologically fascinating, politically terrifying
Cher, incentive structures and our inevitable doom
2019: How we blew it again (written in 2017 and published in Peace News
Dear New Climate Activist – unsolicited advice (2018) – Hashtag was #OldFartClimateAdvice
How to hold a rally (from a 2011 marriage equality rally)
How to hold a film showing and discussion
How to hold a REALLY big climate meeting full of people who don’t know anyone and may not come back: Global warming, local swarming; or “Does this clown EVER shut up?” #oldfartclimateadvice
The need for accountability and commitment mechanisms and what those might be.
Will you marram me? Of “grassroots” and the need for commitment mechanisms.
See also
