"When you get older, you'll understand." So speaks the purported voice of "realism" when cautioning on the pitfalls of youthful idealism. The underlying message is that once one has "bought in" or "sold out" or however one wants wants to spin it, logic dictates that hungry radicalism must give way to a defensive stance. Lock the doors, man the barricades, and beware the ravenous hordes that covet your treasures.
The rousing, yet polite debate in the comments of the Crass post from the other day got me to thinking about politics, specifically where I stand on the ideological spectrum these days. I've dabbled with the various -isms on the left side of the dial over the years -- flirtations both tempestuous and mild with anarchist, socialist, and communist schools of thought. I'm a registered Democrat, but voted SWP and Green in a couple of elections, and have a lasting mistrust of self-labeled "liberals" and "progressives" over the recurring lack of conviction and undercurrents of paternalism on their part.
In the end, doctrinal semantics or theories built on wishful thinking matter less to me than a core principle, namely that everyone deserves a fair shake and equal access to essential goods and services. Egalitarianism is the cornerstone, and the rest is just trivia to be endlessly debated in closed, self-defeating circles.
Dogma and abstract theory have no purpose towards this end. My idealism is rooted in pragmatism forged by years of empirical evidence. Alliances and associations are made and broken depending on how well they serve the greater objectives, and if that means participating a electoral system that is fundamentally broken for the sake of seeing that rights are extended to those who deserve them or defended from those who would subvert them, then so be it. I would rather play a short term game for tangible benefits than a dubious long term strategy that hurts many in the meantime.
I'm with the Enlightenment thinkers on this: People will be people, no matter how educated they are, and the the best we can really strive for is to encourage the better angels of our nature and mitigate the impact of the worse ones.
No revolution, no shift in the political paradigm, no amount of education will eradicate the intrinsic pettiness of the human animal. Trust in socialist revolution and you end up with Year Zero. Trust in free-market self-interest and you end up with...well, take a look around at the mess we're mired in. Trust in mutual co-operation based on shared interests, and it's likely that you've never had to sit through the collective paralysis and bickering of a union gathering or town meeting.
Education and faith mean less than a modicum of awareness and a functioning sense of empathy. The framework of modern civilization has gotten so elaborate and the threads of interdependence so convoluted that it is too easy to fall into a false sense of moral hazard, so that even when the consequences of one's actions manifest themselves it is an easy enough matter to deny, shift, or ignore the blame.
Barring some massive depopulation of the species and a return to scattered tribes of hunter-gatherers, a shift from psuedo-free market capitalism to autonomous soviets or nationalized industries will not address the real problem. Indoctrination of the abolition of currency will not prevent the emergence of would-be Dick Cheneys looking for angles to exploit.
It's a classic Catch-22: Revolutionary change without a mass awakening in civic vigilance is pointless, but if the masses possessed such a sense of vigilance, a revolution would be redundant.
Ten Years After - I'd Love to Change the World (from A Space in Time, 1971) - The sound of the 1960s counterculture collapsing in on itself.
Comsat Angels - Waiting for a Miracle (from Waiting for a Miracle, 1980) - What's the difference between a miracle and the 134 bus? The 134 bus does show up on rare occasions. The only historical inevitability is that people will do foolish things for foolish reasons.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
tell me where there's sanity
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9 comments:
I would rather play a short term game for tangible benefits than a dubious long term strategy that hurts many in the meantime.
Indeed. Whenever anyone counters this with some variation of the "greater good" malarkey, all that tells me is they have an insufficient grasp of how the fault lines of "short-term" damage actually extend quite far and wide.
People will be people, no matter how educated they are
The way I tend to put this is "our collective knowledge may grow, but every single person is born with the same bad wiring we've had for tens of thousands of years." Essentially, every newborn baby is a big fat RESET button on civilization.
You may get a generation that lives in utopian bliss, but you still have all their kids who have to learn (often the hard way) how things "should" be -- and good luck on getting them all to agree.
"...everyone deserves a fair shake and equal access to essential goods and services. Egalitarianism is the cornerstone..." - agreed.
"awareness and a functioning sense of empathy" - also good.
You haven't really written anything I would disagree with bitterandrew so don't let the one 'Dick Cheney' cloud your view over the thousands who aren't him and aren't like him.
And a mass awakening in civic vigilance, and the actions resulting therefrom, constitute the revolution.
I think those attitudes are more widespread, if mild, than that. Little peevish episodes, the kind that happen between the best of friends or closest of partners, happen and on a macro scale could crash the entire venture.
Communes and utopian communities have had very short lifespans historically for that very reason. Disagreements breed atomization breeds entropy breeds dissolution...or worse, aquiescence to an authoritarian "quick fix."
But, yes, getting folks to open their eyes and quit allowing themselves to be stepped on is the real objective.
I agree: no matter how much one talks about educating the people,eventually convicing them to rebel, everyone's too comfortable to co-operate and gaining wealrg for an actual workers run socialist or communist community. It would have to be an authoritarian system. That said, you could probably have some sort of socialist government like the one run in sweden, but communism and anarcho communism could probably only work in close knit communities.
An international project of equality and freedom from exploitation for all classes, genders, etc., often begins with lessons in how to understand "human nature" as a social construct. Seeing howour view of "human nature," (as it is directly connected to our specific and local history of oppression, to our own system of capital relations), differs from other cultures' view of "human nature" often makes many of these questions moot.
Is it really true that people being people automatically means living in a society where we must protect individual rights to ownership? And, do we need to be constrained by Christian, Western understandings of selfhood in order to form satisfying relationships and family structures? I'm not just talking about property rights, but also our feelings of ownership in regards to marriage and love and sexuality. Questioning core values such as these creates room for questioning larger economic relations as well and we begin to see changes that accommodate persons who make unpopular choices. A prime example is in the debate today over gay marriage. It has extreme ramifications for the economic sector and yet began as a simple question of interpersonal relations.
So... no, I don't see the need to rely on a "revolution" as we typically understand it. Nor do I see the need for an authoritarian regime of power to create an Utopian community. Revolutions from below, the small re-orienting of our ways of thinking sometimes cause enough cracks in the system wide enough for a path of total restructuring of social relations.
I do truly believe we will see a form of universal healthcare in the next 10 years in the U.S. and in part, that is due to the fissures that gay marriage activists and gay families have caused. That, in my mind, is social education. And that, in my mind, is very effective. Rant over, thank you for listening xoxo
You need to move to Australia. Or Canada, it's closer.
I might just add, that we did get society, in terms of the US and many other nations, to agree that rights should be granted to an individual regardless of perceived race. While not perfect, we have achieved a state wherein institutions uphold laws that protect the right to vote, to marry, to work, etc. and those institutions serve as a constant reminder of what is socially tolerable even in the face of individual transgressions. So yes, I've been on those committees too, and it is maddening to try and get people to come to consensus, but we can't get lost in the local details and forget the larger picture, can we? Apologies for taking up so much of your comments space here, you obviously hit a nerve with your honesty and insight! xoxoxo
Alvin Lee was the quintessential conservative rock star. A rarity amidst the 60s sea of hippidoms loveniks and peaceniks. The lyrics of "I'd Love to Change the World" (Alvin was no sage or poet) from the get go beg the question "do we really want to reach out to the undesirables of the world?" The modern agenda--which I hesitate to oversimply by calling "Republican" because it seems to have considerable mainstream support--is that to help undesirables only breeds more undesirables. This has been the prevailing policy towards welfare, immigration, foreign assistance, et al through Rep and Dem administrations. I'd argue that it's not a policy that truly agrees with our mainstream values, but most of us are convinced that it does. I blame an unskeptical and cowed media and an impotent Democratic party.
Yep, Samuel Huntington's "excess of democracy" as applied to pop music...coming on the cusp of rawk's transformation from rebellion into religion.
I don't see it as a solely Republican phenomenon, either. It's typical human short-sighted self-interest (real of falsely perceived) running in tandem with the handy distraction of "values" politics.
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