our doomedness

Of Greta, misogyny, patriarchy, technology and shattered dreams

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On Twitter right now (in my stream anyhow) people are talking about why Greta Thunberg, Jamie Margolin and AOC are triggering such incandescent (old, white) male rage.

I’ve written a bit about this here and here, but here’s a recap/short0version.

This, in my opinion, goes back way further than August 2018, when one Swedish girl started her solo strike.

Let’s take it back to 1945 (you could take it back hundreds of years if you like, as whip-smart eco-feminists like Carolyn Merchant have, but I promised short).

In August 1945 the “Good Guys” won. They unleashed the power of the sun, via some crazy expensive and smart scientists on two previously untouched Japanese cities. And the bombs were called? Little Boy and Fat Man.

And the next twenty years were all about how white, male, heterosexual scientists were going to control everything. Electricity would be too cheap to meter, DDT would kill all the pests etc. Holiday on the moon, jetpacks, you name it. Production Science, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, would control EVERYTHING. Women in the kitchen, queers in the closet, blacks in their place, mother nature under the thumb/in the test tube.

Then, between 1960 and 1975, all that (was) unravelled. The heroism of countless Civil Rights activists (far too few of them white, but that is another story) meant that black people could no longer be treated like fifth class citizens. Learning from those struggles and disgusted by the patriarchy and male supremacism of the ‘peace’ movement, women’s liberation activists decided fuck your kitchen. Then Stonewall…
And meanwhile, that nature that was going to be under the thumb? Er, no. Impact science began to show the damage that the industrial dreams were creating (thalidomide, Silent Spring -written by another of those damnable women – , DDT, Ozone hole, through to Seveso).

So, if you were a hetero white man, in the technostructure, your simple Great Chain of Being narrative, with you at the top, just went to hell.

Shortly after, with the post-War Keynesian consensus in tatters, the neoliberal pushback succeeded. Now the old settlement – that if you were a working class/middle-class white man, you’d have enough money to keep (interesting word) a wife and two kids on your wage – evaporated. But rather than blame our lords and masters (again, interesting phrase), it’s easier to pin the blame on the feminazis, the uppity you-know-whats, the eco-freaks.

And then, finally, there is also this. The old white men have spent thirty years denying the major consequence of all their dreams – climate change. And now, it’s kinda obvious – even, perhaps – to themselves, that they were…. gasp…. wrong.

NONE OF THIS CAN BE THEIR FAULT. Reflectiveness, humility, none of that was selected for, in the Darwinian sense, at the Darwinian schools and universities they went to.

Therefore, it must be someone else’s fault. Ideally someone young, and whose demeanour (not ‘neuro-typical’) leaves them – and they hope others – uneasy.

If Greta Thunberg, with her guts, her clarity, her humour, did not exist to enrage these [insert your favourite noun here], they’d have had to invent her.

 

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out to me that this is an extremely US/Europe-centric view of the resistance to these things in the 1960s and 1970s (Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, etc).  Indeed yes. But I was promising to keep it short and as an ‘explanation’ for the white hot old white male rage at Greta…

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our doomedness, Social Movement Learning, Social Movements

Of cargo cults, social movements and accelerating transitions. #magicalthinking

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Imagine tribespeople in the South Pacific. Sure, lots of trading, and contact with Europeans (good and bad).  But what happened in 1942 and 1943 must have blown their minds.  Giant white men who could fly arrived in big metal birds, with chewing gum and coca cola.  And then, as quickly as they came (with the war won), they left.

How to bring them back?  How to achieve something so far out your own experience, your own cosmology? Well, if you clear runways, and make bamboo representations of the big metal birds, perhaps this display of faith and begging would be enough to convince the gods to send back the coca-cola and the gum…

And anthropologists call these cargo cults.

Imagine ‘advanced’ people, with literacy, indoor plumbing and other markers of civilisation in, oh, England. Sure, lots of reading, and contact with the idea of ‘sustainability.’ But what was called upon them to do in 2018 and 2019 must have blown their minds. A giant need for immediate and fundamental change in not just their big metal birds, but their big metal factories, their small metal vehicles, the food on their plates, the visions of the good life (more of everything, all the time).

How to bring it about? How to achieve something so far out of experience or cosmology? Well, cast your mind back, rifle through the accepted images. Social movements … What images? What folk tales? Ah, the “I have a dream” speech, the march on Washington in 1963. (Forget – or never know- that it was contested as a time-and-energy-suck, as an ego-driven distraction by those struggling on the ground in the South, and indeed the North).)

Perhaps if we repeat this display of faith and begging, this march, it will be enough for the magical transition (or transformation – it’s a live debate), perhaps it will convince the gods to send back harmony and balance (that never really was).

And social movement scholars (okay, me) call this a cargo cult.

We are, individually and on our good days, away from the groupthink that degrades us, smarter than this. Or most of us are, or can be, at least some of the time. But rather than be better, think through what is actually required, we seem to want to cling to incantations of ridiculous precision (3.5 per cent? Really? Really??).

We seem hell-bent (interesting phrase) to be seen building ever bigger bamboo planes – that is to say, our rallies, our sages on the stages, our redolent and indolent blockades and barricades which we then recreate once “back home” (and so then alienate hundreds of potential supporters). And the smugosphere thickens, and the emotacycle rolls on…

We need to accelerate the socio-technical (or socio-material, if you will) transitions/transformations. We really do. And the evidence (from my own life, from the literature, much of it quite interesting), is that the state usually has a role to play (tough luck, anarchist dogmatists). And the power of the state (however you understand it) is probably best leveraged via decent social movements, movements that can stick around, not get co-opted, repressed, bored into oblivion. Movements that grow, learn, organise, win, grow, learn, organise….

The tl:dr – We need to act as we never have before, NOT precisely as we always have. That requires honesty, and guts. I am not hopeful, because I am not an idiot (subs, please check). But on my good days, with courageous friends, I have courage.

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Trying to talk with people about (stopping) the end of the world. And failing.

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Since I got back from 7 weeks and 10 tonnes of climate criminality, the same conversation – if you can call it that – has been had several times.

Here’s the dynamic of it (not obviously direct quotes, for various reasons, and a certain l’esprit d’escalier, but this is my website, so suck it up).

 

Me: Protest groups have come and gone – not at this scale on this particular issue, granted – and have a dynamic I call the emotacycle.  Tl:dr – it doesn’t last, and what is left behind is anomie, despair and unkept promises.  If we want a different result, we should probably do things differently.

Person 1: Yes, but at least we’re doing something.  You are saying we shouldn’t do anything.

Me: Really?  Really?  When did I say that?

Person 1:Look, a squirrel (scuttles off).

Person 2: Well, okay, then what’s your big idea about doing things differently?  You haven’t proposed anything.

Me: Really?  You know me.  You know that I have been writing about – and doing where possible – how to hold meetings differently, how to design events so they are not alienating to new folks, that I have been designing and holding skill-shares, talking about how we could change activist culture and expectations  etc etc etc for literally over a decade.  And you say I haven’t proposed anything.  And you expect me not to get angry at that?  Well, luckily for both of us I am not going to get angry. Not because I’ve been on anger management training (though perhaps I should) but because I am not even exasperated. I can’t take you seriously.  You know – and you know I know you know – that  I do in fact have a series of implementable proposals.  And you know that those threaten the status quo, and force today’s ‘we are winning’ crew to think differently, and they won’t – can’t?- do it.  And that all scares and frustrates you, but rather than deal with that, you simply say that I haven’t proposed anything. A convenient falsehood, instead of an inconvenient truth.

So, um, nice talking, but maybe I should be walking, ‘kay?

 

 

our doomedness, Social Movement Learning, unsolicited advice

Karma does what karma does.

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About 15 years ago I went on a training day (it didn’t work – I stayed a douche).

It was union steward training. Mostly those days were death by powerpoint, info-deficit tosh.  This one thing I am about to describe, though, it stands out.

It was a card game/exercise.  Each individual was given a card that only they could look at.  They were allowed to answer questions about it, but they could not freely describe what was on the other side.  All the cards together – in some format – added up to a picture or pattern that would be obvious if they were all turned face-upward and re-arranged.

One person in the team was supposed to co-ordinate, and the team ‘won’ by being able to describe the picture on the back simply by communicating with each other, within a time frame.

The trainers in chief chose me to be co-ordinator. And I fucked it up, because they (astutely- though it wasn’t difficult to figure out)  put the key info in the hands of more diffident, older and – gasp – female people.

And because those people weren’t asked the right questions at the right time, and actively listened to/space created for them to speak, we didn’t solve it.  One person’s fault only – mine.

Though I haven’t been able to act (consistently) on that particular lesson, the experience stayed with me   (To be fair to myself – on my good days I try, and on my very best days I succeed in overcoming this. I obsess about it a lot – the quiet voices being the ones with the most important pieces of the puzzle – being unable to pierce the smugosphere ).

 

So, 15 years on, the big wheel has turned, as it does.  Now I am on the receiving end. Not because I am diffident or fit any of the usual low status categories, but because I am dissident from the dissidents. I can’t take their particular riding of the emotacycle seriously.  And so I am easy to overlook (who knows, perhaps that’s what I want – to be the ‘Cassandra’).

 

I have important pieces of the puzzle (I think I do, anyhows – and I don’t see anyone else asking the same specific questions about social movement organisation longevity, effectiveness, self-defeating rituals and norms: Maybe I need to get out more).  And I am being ignored – the way I ignored other people 15 years ago, if not for quite the same reasons.  And I don’t think the team will win, I really don’t.

What goes around, comes around. Karma gets you like that, eh?  So it goes.

 

 

[19th August- Minor edits and fixes]

activism, our doomedness, Social Movement Learning, Social Movements

Desolation angels

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She had been asked to attend a shit meeting, at which one of the blithely ignorant assholes the electorate seems to love was talking among his friends.  She was sent on an intelligence-gathering effort, for an environmental pressure group. And she told me, fighting back the tears, that it had been a truly awful, traumatising experience.

Younger me would have thought she was over-dramatising.  Younger me might even have told her to – in effect – grow a pair.

(Younger me was, to use a technical term, an asshole.)

She has two kids. And she doesn’t want to believe that Extinction Rebellion is likely to go up like a rocket, and down like a stick.  She doesn’t want to believe that the research of Chenoweth is being misinterpreted, mis-used.

She doesn’t want to go to more shit meetings.

We met at what was, really, a shit meeting.

I only stuck around for the food. (which turned out to be as good as advertised)  I suppose I also wanted the chance to ask my standard question – “given that we’ve known  about serious environmental problems at a global level for 50 years, and climate change for 30, what have we – the social movements, the ‘good guys’ been doing wrong?”

I got the chance. But of course I didn’t get – I never get- a meaningful answer to that question: talking about your own tribe’s mistakes is not gonna get you promoted or protected or whatever.  And so we slop around in our smugospheres, talking excitedly of the new 3 and 4 letter acronyms, and the new implementation plans, and invoking the magical words like participation, and democracy.  All from the stage.  All top-down, information deficit, that goes on twice the advertised time, leaving virtually no time for questions.  It meets the organisational needs of the organisers, the ego-needs of the speakers and – sad to say – the absolution needs of (most of those) who attend.

Absolution is no solution, as an abandoned blog post, ‘inspired’ (or provoked) by a shocking event six weeks ago was going to go.  We don’t, we really really don’t, need more opportunities for the grey and the white to turn up and relive the seventies, and hear first-hand from An Expert about how screwed everything is if that Expert is not going to present some plausible innovations.  The audience gets to feel absolved, for still demonstrably caring, but are not called upon to do anything differently. Shambling towards Bethlehem.

And we don’t need ego-foddering and incompetent social movement organisations that want us to get up but are unable to help us help each other, but persist with the shame old shame old info-deficit ways of “mobilising”.

But it’s what we get, and I think what we will always get.

Yes, yes, I should come up with some way out. But so far I don’t know how. I don’t seem to have the skills, the reputation, the energy, to take on a culture that claims to be about participation and a brighter future but is stuck in its rut of ravenous egos and incompetence.

It seems to me that the skills we need to change the expectations of meetings – to make it easier rather than harder for people to be involved in meaningful ways for the long-term –  are extremely high-level. And using those skills requires, I think, more time, energy, patience, credibility and courage (as distinct from that stupid thing hope) than I currently possess or can see myself coming to possess. And maybe there are loads of other people working on this, doing better, and news just hasn’t reached the provinces.  Or maybe not.

So it goes, I guess.

She has two young children. She was crying in front of a stranger.

our doomedness, Social Movements

The need for/inevitability of magical thinking

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We can laugh at the people buying their Make America Great Again hats (made in China) and chanting at Trump rallies for the return of a mis-remembered past.  It’s easy to see that they want something that is difficult (impossible) to deliver and that they want it with no particular effort on their part, beyond emotional affiliation to an Idea, as represented by a particular individual in front of them, an opportunity to emote collectively.

That’s easy.  Fun too, if you want to unleash your inner condescender…

Nastier, brutally harder and likely to lead to a short solitary life is the following: seeing those same dynamics among those of us who want a habitable planet.

As it becomes so-difficult-as-to-be-impossible to ignore the signs of the times, as it becomes impossible to see a narrative that leads to us getting out of this fix, this sixth great extinction, this anthropo-bad-scene, then we progressives – with the right bumper stickers in our brains-  are just as prone to the same kinds of magical thinking we can spot and deride in those Trump supporters.

We are clinging, will cling, to our own saints (Saint Greta is the obvious one), and our own magical incantations.  Not so much ‘build that wall’ as ‘3.5 per cent!’.  Not so much the 2020 election as a citizens’ assembly, as if that would solve anything, as if that would result in anything more than a confused shopping list that could then be killed off in the committees.

The one sticking point is that those on the reactionary right, the unreflecting nativist, ‘anti-reflexive’ blood and soil crowd don’t PRETEND to understand or desire nuance, complexity, difficulty.  There is black and white, good and evil, zero and sum.

On what passes for the resistance to such binary thinking, there is the ritual obeisance to complexity, emergent properties (hundredth monkey my fat arse) and to feedback loops. We go for timey-wimey feedback  loops, consilience, holarchy, ecosystems approaches. Or rather, we SAY we do, we’d like to believe that we do.  But by and large, we don’t.  Some of us don’t all the time, and it seems like all  of us don’t, at least some of the time.  It’s too hard – cognitively, emotionally, socially.  The temptation to slip into comforting half truths, where the sun in our eyes makes some of the lies worth believing, is so very strong.  And as nobody likes a smart-arse, nobody likes a buzz-killer.

Does any of this matter? I suppose not. If (as I suspect, and have thought for all my adult life, since about 1991 or so) ‘we’ as a species are not going to respond to this emergency with the kinds of actions that we need – that (to use a more recent term) avivocracy cannot rule – then why not let people have their illusions?  Why not let them spout their 3.5% baloney?  Where’s the harm?

Answers on a postcard please, to the usual address….

And, for the benefit of anyone who has wondered in late, the usual address is marcmywords@gmail.com

(The answer, of course – is that the harm is to our dignity. (or amour-propre, if we’re going to be cynical?) The thing that humans can be good at, on their good days, is to see things for what they are, not what we wish they were, what we think they ought to be.  Because then at least you can fail into the abyss, rather than flail into it.  But maybe that’s just me, reaching for theoretical comforts.)

Note to self –  neologism flalling – combination of flailing and falling?

brain vomit

The same Joe?

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Twenty plus years ago I got hold of a book called Suspects, by the film writer David Thomson.  The conceit was that Jeff Bailey – the Jimmy Stewart character in It’s a Wonderful Life and George Bailey – Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past (amazing film noir) – were brothers.

Well, what if “Joe” were the same guy in a bunch of songs?

Yeah, I know, it’s piss weak, but the oxygen deprivation was kicking in as I yomped around Unley Oval with by backpack half-full-of-bricks.

There’s Old Black Joe from Cohen’s Everybody Knows.  The guy who is still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows….

There’s Joe from Hanging on to Heaven by Randy Vanwarmer who got laid off last week because the cars he made don’t sell – so now he’s printing paper money for the government to shell out…

And then there is the entirely awful anger-management-issues Joe from the Jimi Hendrix song (fun fact – it was Aussie politician Bob Brown – then a junior quack in the NHS – who declared Mr Hendrix dead).

I am sure there are others. As I said, oxygen deprivation….

 

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