I’ve been thinking as hard as I can about two things over the past couple of days: Firstly, the idea that it can actually be a good thing to share uncertainties and problems with other people; and Secondly, the role that activism does play, and should play, in my life. I’m going to jumble them together here by writing about the second, in the spirit of the first. (Wherever it says ‘you’, that’s just me disguising my uncertainties and problems in a pseudo-second-person-anonymity, it really means ‘me’.) Indulge me please, friends and e-friends: read and advise.
So… the role of activism… in life… Understanding and action have to go together, oui? Obviously there’s no point acting on something if you don’t understand it. But less obviously you also can’t really understand things if you aren’t acting on them. In more sweeping and prescriptive terms: the way to work towards a better world is to identify really specific problems as accurately as possible and then to fight them. This doesn’t mean that a systematic analysis can’t be useful, or that ideals like ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ aren’t rather good, motivating catchphrases. But any system of thought can trap you in endless theoretical debates with people who almost agree with you, no matter how fascinating or nearly true it is. You can feel as if you’re making headway if you get a Marxist or an anarchist to admit some inconsistency in their own systematic analysis where yours holds up. In fact, of course, you should be standing side-by-side with both of them in front of Parliament, or EDO, targeting specific problems. That’s the way to really get a proper idea of what’s going on and how it might be changed. You can do nothing political for months, other than read the odd book, or watch the odd film, and feel as if the little sparks of insight that you gain have made something slightly righter in the world. And then of course it all rushes at you at once on a Sunday afternoon: the mass of injustices that you’re complicit in, the impossibility of extracting yourself from that system, in short, the whole huge horrible world. And doing as little harm as possible while reading books suddenly seems very pointless. And at the same time there is no one Solution, no Single Best Course, no one Ideal that you can adhere to in order to improve it, all in one go, on that particular afternoon.
But if you’re working on one little aspect of one big problem then I don’t think it can get you quite like that. Because it is all connected, it’s just that it would take a lifetime, and be rather a pointless use of a lifetime, to diagram all those connections. The harm inflicted by transnational corporations is directly linked to the invasion of sovereign countries which is directly linked to the erosion of civil liberties, to endless privatisation, environmental destruction, the disproportionate poverty of women, everything everything, linked directly to everything else. Of course it is. But, as interesting as books on Liberation Ecology are (and oh they are), it really doesn’t help to just sit back and join all the dots, while there’s people scribbling away the whole time making it endlessly messier and more complicated, the bastards. You just have to furiously work at rubbing out one or two of the dots, with other people, and maybe make slow progress. It can be fun to rub out one dot! It is a human-sized task. And you can make friends while you’re working and stop for tea breaks, like with any other human-sized task. Then when the whole huge system hits you in an over-whelmingly bleak rush of insight, I think it’s easier to stay happy. You can just sort of roll your eyes and look over at some of the people at the next dot and realise that you’re doing the same sort of thing and exchange nods and feel a nice warm rush of solidarity and companionship. Or if you do start to get bored of your dot you can bumble off along one of the tangled lines, rubbing as you go, and find other groups of people to work with, on a different dot. It doesn’t matter that you can’t just tippex out the whole mess in one afternoon.
Really, this is a long-winded, stream-of-consciousness, compound-wordy way of saying that I’m not entirely satisfied with my full-time do-no-harm job, part-time study and sporadic demonstrating. Has anyone an opinion, comment, passing irrelevant thought or salaried activist job for me? Do share! It will make us all happier and better people.
