This is the same blog post I have written dozens (?) of times. I am doing it now as a howl of despair (1)  

It will change nothing, except providing a fleeting spasm of catharsis. That’s all we have left, after the world historical defeat of the “left” (always a label that hid at least as much as it revealed, but that’s a different cathart). 

What the problem is

Look around you. Does it look like the good guys are winning? Unabashed fascists in power. Carbon dioxide emissions surging (40bn tonnes a year). Cars getting bigger. Public spaces getting smaller. Climate “movements” and movement “organisations” going up like a rocket and tumbling down like a stick. “Smart” technocrats witter on about technofixes and make sententious comments about how since a third of primary energy is wasted then the “energy transition” is in fact happening, if you squint and click your heels together.

Everyone “progressive”  will have different items for their top ten signs of the times.  And there will be competing Bad Guys – capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, Human Nature, technology, nature deficit disorder, white supremacism, misogyny, the Judean People’s Front, whatever (2).

My thing? For this essay at least, it’s the carbon dioxide concentrations – 425ppm, 100 higher than when I was born, and I am not THAT old (reader, I am).

We knew, we were warned endlessly (see allouryesterdays.info for gory details).

The emotacycle

There have been several spasms of “civil society” concern, during which state actors (politicians, bureaucrats) and corporations pretend to care, and make pledges, promises, policies. And as soon as the spasm passes – mostly on three year cycles – those pledges and promises are broken. These spasms were 1988-1992, 2006-2009, 2018-2020. Obviously there has been waves of “activity” (as distinct from action) outside of these – see for example the 2014 climate march in New York that was going to Kickstart A Movement.

After each spasm there are many people who have been burned out, disillusioned (more accurately, disvisioned) (3) and are unavailable for future action. And their friends and families see this, and then THEY are unavailable too.  These spasms are massive exercises in deferred (for three years or so) decruitment (the opposite of recruitment). 

So the first question is this – why aren’t civil society/social movement organisations in societies with freedom of information, speech and assembly able to sustain any serious level of activity without burning out or selling out (becoming figleaf green confucians)?

Fwiw, there are actually good answers to these questions, btw, around ideology, co-optation, lack of resources, exhaustion, defence mechanisms of incumbents etc etc.  Blah blah Gramsci blah blah resource mobilisation blah blah emotacycle. I have written about this till I am sick of the sound of my fingers on the keyboard.

And the second, bigger question is this – why don’t “we” – the public intellectuals and academics and “movement participants” and so forth, ever ask this first question in public (to my knowledge).

This is also a question I have answered (to my satisfaction) a bunch of times in those aforementioned blogposts.. But I am answering it again, to cope with my exhaustion at various podcasts I should like (looking at you, Drilled, among others), at the ritual vacuity of endlessly Naming The Enemies without ever taking a good hard look at ourselves.

Why we don’t ask the second question

This is brief, because I am on the clock (I want to get this done in an hour because there are other things I am supposed to be writing. It may not be as complete as I think it is – if you have other reasons, please comment and I will steal your insights and pass them off as my own.

We don’t see it

Number one, is we just don’t really register the failure, because we lack an historical overview and because we are wrapped up in today’s urgent (and perhaps even important) fight. 

As for those who are invited on podcasts, to give public lectures, keynotes etc. (“movement stars, academics), they are like – and I nicked this from a Douglas Adams novel, one of the Dirk Gently ones iirc – the people on the horse who never think about the horse, whereas the horse has plenty of time to think about them.

For the movement “stars” the system seems to be working – they get to sell books, get their ego-fodder doses, hear themselves oraclise. 

The academics get to write papers read by a couple of reviewers and maybe a few other people (or cited anyway – which is better).  They pretend that they are providing value to civil society because people are listening, asking polite questions. But mostly they’re just saying “the cat should wear a bell. Isn’t it awful that the cat isn’t wearing a bell.”

Meanwhile, the “grunts” on the ground are like one of the six blind men with the elephant, but unable to confer. They get at best a disneyfied version of other movement history. They tend to invoke the law of two feet after a couple of years, and then try not to think about the painful past, and certainly not extrapolate to other times, other movements.  What would the incentive be, in any case?

For those that stick around, well, they are captured by the culture, they are the goldfish unable to sense the muckiness of the water.  

For ALL of these people who have stuck around, there is an additional problem – to admit that things are “sub-optimal” (or “fucking shit” as I would put it) they would have to admit that they were complicit in this – in not seeing its shitness, or seeing it and not acting.

This raises all sorts of questions of guilt and complicity. Awkward as fuck, and given the times, not something people want to address.  And given that the organisation you “joined” offers friendship, and helps you to cope with all sorts of messy emotions, do you really want to examine it too closely? What are the incentives for doing that??  Also, who would you talk to? Where are the spaces where you could have these conversations??

[On those emotions check out this interview with Rosemary Randall about disavowal]. 

We don’t know how to solve it so we don’t see it/unsee it

But say you DID admit, in private, that things had been shit for a very long time and that there has been failure upon failure.  Okay. Then the solutions are a root and branch complete overhaul of the culture, incentives, behaviours etc. Yeah, sure THAT is going to happen.  And so if you can’t solve a problem, it’s too painful to keep seeing it so you learn to – unsee it. Again, disavowal.

We don’t want to solve it, because The System (“man”) is providing stability and status tokens.

It’s not just the movement stars who benefit from the status quo. There are benefits to the ego-fodder. There’s a set of behaviours you can engage in (organising petitions, rallies, attending meetings and marches, getting arrested etc) that are easily understood and allow you to know your place, gain or maintain your status. This is the smugosphere.

We fear the (social) consequences of seeing it

Movement stars don’t want to bite the hands that feeds.The opportunities for getting ego-fodder might dry up.

Academics don’t want to get a reputation for being “judgemental” – the access to interviewees, and the co-signers on research proposals might dry up. And the more humble ones – they do exist – might feel that it is not their job to shout advice/”criticism” from the sidelines.

Those “on the ground” don’t want to get a reputation for being awkward.

All fear the label of being a “Debbie Downer”, of being “sectarian” (the magic word to shut down and shout down any criticism).

All need to cling to the belief, however delusional, that the great god “Movements” will provide (see footnote 6). We are all watching the naked Emperor, but most of us don’t even know, consciously, that he is naked.

Who is “we” anyhow?

Without going all Robert Michels on yo ass, there ARE leaders in any subculture/field etc and they do control organisations and discourse, even – especially – in “non-hierarchical” (ha ha ha ha) groups (4)  It’s not a shadowy cabal of silhouetted men in a smoke-filled room (check out the Parallax View or that). It’s functionaries keenly aware of what the “consensus” is, of what things it wouldn’t be good to air in public.

This is the smugotariat – those who control access to who will speak, for how long, on what topics. What questions are safe and sensible, what ones are too dangerous “disruptive, unhelpful, irrelevant, sectarian” etc etc.  

Far better (and easier, emotionally satisfying etc) to focus ENDLESSLY on the Bad Guys, than to take a look at the simple question – “if we are so right, and so many, how come we keep losing, time and time and time and TIME again?”

• Why is that?
• What might we try to do differently?
• Who would be upset by that, and why? 
• What might they do and say to prevent experimentation?

AndI could go on – I have in the past.

What it would take to “solve” it?

The glib answer is “a miracle”. But I am trying to minimise (okay, reduce by 1%) my glibness.  So this: there are (or were) a set of basic behavioural innovations that we could have applied to make our nascent groups and “movements” (5) more likely to be welcoming to ‘newbies’, and retaining of the ‘peripherals.’  I stole or developed and implemented a small number of these (are meetings institutionally sexist, stuff around potemkinclusivity, ego-fodder, goldfish bowls etc etc etc ad nauseam ad infinitum).  They work at the micro.  They probably would work at the meso, and who knows, that might have had macro effects. With a few miracles.

But people’s appetite for innovation is limited, especially the old macaques who don’t like what that upstart Miss Triggs – sorry “Imo” is doing with the sweet potatoes. And so it went.

What will happen when we don’t solve it

This one is easy. Newton’s first law applies – the object will continue on its current trajectory. In other words. BAU – which stands for Business As Usual and also Bullshit Activism Unchallenged.

There will continue to be “resistance”, and our Lords and Masters’ faith in the capacity of technology to surveil and suppress will come unstuck again and again (the Gazan panspectron, much?), but the smart money is on  boots stamping on a human face forever, while the biosphere screams and then goes into Cheynes-Stokes respirations.

This, this my friend(s), is why I had that vasectomy in 2004, and haven’t regretted it since. It was never about what a hypothetical child would do to the planet, and always about what the planet would do to my child.  People used to laugh, openly or inwardly at that line of thinking. Not so much any more.  

It’s such a warm feeling, knowing I was right about the collapse of the Enlightenment and the planetary biome. Oh yes.

We will hit two degrees at some point in the next ten years, I think, and keep going (all the way to Venus? Probably not, but that’s not the point).

As a particularly tedious high-production-values podcast series kept saying,  two degrees is not a magic fucked point after which the Zombie Apocalypse instantly happens. But also, shit spirals.  We are about to get a hard lesson in non-linearity and exponential trouble. Not Donna Haraway’s good trouble, either – this is grim meathook trouble trouble.

Why do I care?

It’s the Sarah Connor problem, isn’t it? Knowing what is coming, but being unable to do anything about it. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.

It will be what it will be. The particularly terrible subset  of hairless murder apes who are running the show are too blinded by their fear, hate, greed, contempt to know what the short-term consequences will be, even to themselves. They think their God or their tech (the two are interchangeable, no?) will save them. They should read that Cory Doctorow plague novella. We all should.

Footnotes

1. “I’ve seen the best and middling minds of my generation – and other generations because I am an old coot – deranged by…”
2. To be clear, many of these are in fact the Bad Guys
3. Disvisioned –… we were discussing the increasing feeling of despair that we are all suffering from: over and over again we were all using the word ‘disillusioned.’ Then someone pointed out that if what one had held in the past was an ‘illusion’ then it was very healthy, even important, to be ‘disillusioned,’ relieved of illusion- or delusion. If on the other hand what one had held before was ‘vision’- ‘silent upon a peak in Darien’- then what the present political climate was doing was ‘disvisioning’: and it was important that we realise that there was no word- at least within this culture and language- for ‘disvisioning’. No word to describe the experience of having had a real vision, a true vision of possibility and then having that taken away from you. That word, that event, is one that necessarily must be denied by bourgeois culture. I was brought up with a wicked myth- that you cannot put the Truth down, that it will win in the end; I think we have to fight that very carefully; alas, indeed it is highly possible to put the truth down, to destroy even the dream of it, and in fact the truth has been put down. Can it be that all visions, or prophesies, or whatever, that are not in the process of being realised are thereby proven as illusions/delusions? We have to face the real possibility that through social circumstance we may now be in the process not of being disillusioned, but of being disvisioned: an act of violence, not therapy.
4. Sara Maitland Futures in Feminist Fiction in From My Guy to Sci-FI: Genre and Women’s Writing in the Postmodern World ed. Helen Carr (1989) Pandora page 194
5. All those people who cite Jo Freeman could try fucking reading the essay. It’s not that long).
6. I have come to loathe the word “movements” as much as I hate the words “natural” and “resilient.” It is the progressives’ equivalent of the techbros favourite “innovation” – an incantation we invoke to explain how we are going to escape all the traps.