Heirs to the Wreckage

I find myself agonizing over just how inaccessible the concept of activism seems from the perspective of a 22 year old in today’s world. If your immediate first reaction is to say: “ah but Lucas, the only people who say that are the people who haven’t really tried”, you’d be right to some extent. I don’t volunteer on the weekends, I haven’t been to many protests, and I’m not chronically online sparring the far-Right in comments sections. But activism isn’t entirely foreign to me, I’ve studied it and been in its presence. At many points in my life I’ve aspired to some measure of it. But despite all that, I dubiously wonder if a life that allows for true activism can actually be manifested. Activism isn’t a job after all, it can’t be planned or pursued as a professional end. The battle was compromised the minute we asked “how can I build a career in environmental protection” instead of “how do I protect the environment”.

On my worst days, I can’t help but feel life of activism is difficult to define and caught up in all sorts of cultural inconsistencies. We like to save one child, use them to validate Western benevolence, and then simultaneously frame them as a cautionary tale about the peripheral non-Western world. Not to mention that it’s rather difficult to save the child when we routinely purchase clothing from the factory where that child is likely indentured. Activism doesn’t do well in this unreliable grey area: for 70% of our waking lives it feels we are inevitably pitted against the very interests we fight for. 

Power corrupts, this is an undeniable fact of human existence. Based on my observations and personal experiences I’ve developed 4 distinct impressions of activism and their responses to Power.

1. The Shelter

It’s rare to find any social order without pain or some form of oppression (particularly upon a specific social group). This activist project is primarily designed to make the experience of power more bearable. This can include literal shelters for the homeless, mobile health clinics, NGOs that offer stable employment, soup kitchens, and other initiatives. It roots itself within the system, offering as much reprieve as it can for its most deprived. This is perhaps the most common type of activism seen today, and perhaps the most achievable compared to the others.

2. The Parallel Society

The Parallel Society is where the activist attempts to construct something autonomous that exists beyond the reach of power or alongside it. This is basically the premise of Yukimura’s Vinland Saga. I’ve observed this parallel society activism particularly groups attempting to preserve indigeneity– affirming their right to exist by practicing autochthonous traditions. Certain autonomous communities in Europe might serve as additional examples. I most commonly saw this in the groups who chafe with “mainstream” economic development.

3. Critique/Satire

Critique is closely related to Satire. It’s no accident that the best comedians often have the most worthwhile political takes, and that some of them unironically make excellent activists. It is in this sphere that you find academics, intellectuals, artists, and anyone willing to duly remind us that the Emperor Has No Clothes. The drawback is that a position of critique is limiting. People like Judith Butler are forged through the Academy, the engine of elitist social reproduction. For every Judith Butler produced, academia exports 100 Lawrence Summers’s. Shows like Bojack Horseman or The Boyscome out of corporations such as Amazon which seek to monopolize mass-media. Never discount the importance of critique and satire, flawed as they are. Sometimes the easiest way to defy Power is to mock it.

4. Challenge

And the fourth seems the hardest to achieve, and yet perhaps it is the most important to grasp: the Challenge of Power itself. It’s a clusterfuck of a political problem, isn’t it? The Gaza Freedom Flotilla challenged power when they sailed directly towards the Gaza blockade, and that had mixed results. The IDF was condemned but not truly contested when they intercepted the flotilla and even tortured some of the activists aboard. 

During my time as a student and afterwards, I had the privilege of traveling the world, and meeting many such people who classified themselves as activists. And I looked to them for guidance on how to construct my own life, even as my own material and social conditions were vastly different from theirs. And I encountered wonderful projects: projects aimed at changing the very perception of the environment in an anthropocentric cultural sphere, projects determinedly protecting traditional farming practices from the encroach of technology and pollution, projects aimed at creating and redefining value where the neoliberal world recognized none. There was no doubt that these projects were important, and the most compelling evidence of that were the changes I observed within myself. Not that I pivoted 180 degrees into an enlightened environmentalist, but I found myself simply more aware. A knowledge that beyond the veil of informatics and workplace-oriented society there was another world; not one that could be fully defined, nor one that could necessarily overcome that first obscuring layer, but a world that existed nonetheless despite the narrative and cultural power arrayed against it. It existed here and there, reminding me that other forms of value existed beyond the instrumental, that perhaps not everything needed to be quantified but simply appreciated, that faceless and nameless entities could be just as culturally influential as (Institutionalized) God. The Mekong, the Atrato River, Extinction Rebellion, Syndicalism, all nipping at the edges of the hegemonic narrative and its material processes. 

But despite this, I found myself faced with a cynical conclusion, one which some activists may deride me for: that none of these projects were sufficient. And perhaps this is the result of possessing an overly western mindset, of clinging to the belief that overarching phallic power must be opposed in equal measure with phallic power. Nevertheless, I came to the thought that no matter how many riverfronts saved or cultures preserved, it still wouldn’t pull the toxins from our crops or the carbon dioxide from the sky; and it certainly wouldn’t resonate in the corporate board rooms or legislative chambers that generate all this decay to begin with. It is generally true that the change activists aspire towards takes place in increments, usually over long (multi-generational) periods of time and with gradual cultural change. It is also true that soup kitchens in concentrated American cities and philanthropy for the starving children of Africa have not done much to improve conditions in either setting. The paradox for me is that I don’t believe scintillas are enough (especially when society repositions scintillas as ceremonial ethical laundry), yet it’s really most of what we can do as fallible beings of flesh and blood. 

Mamdani presents a compelling possibility in this regard. He ran purely on grassroots, anti-millionaire backers, no glitzing at the Met Gala; he was a challenger that upended not only the Republicans but the center-left Democrats and their chokehold on popular liberalism. If such a person were able to ascend all the way to the presidency with that kind of platform, would that be enough to turn the tide? Would they survive without having their agenda whittled away by compromise and their moral standing corrupted by the realities of public office? The problem is now we’re delving into the world of remote probabilities, the one-in-a-million chance of success. If only we get that candidate with that platform, if only as a lawyer I get that court case in front of the Supreme Court and it sets that precedent, if only these countries came together for a new climate accords. The challenge is endlessly complex, perhaps the simply persistence in attempting it with uncertain odds of success is the nature of activism. But again, how does one stay intact when they keep throwing themselves at a brick wall?

Perhaps the truth is simply that activism should not be done with “success” as the condition for engagement. There’s no defined paths that will reverse climate change (we know this with scientific certainty), and there are certainly no paths that guarantee a stable post-climate society short of violent eco-dictatorial measures– which for me can only exist in hyper-masculine fantasy. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to engage in activism if you actively hinge it on reaching Utopia. The statistics are clearly not in our favor, but also for the more existential reason that Utopia is but a holding state for the next wave of crises. Power corrupts, this is an inevitable fact of human society: even if we were able to construct a system that weathers the impacts of climate change and sets a sustainable egalitarian precedent, it’s certain that we’ll be presented with a new crop of social problems. Activism does not end; even Paradise must have its inegalitarian traits, hierarchy, subservience, exclusivity; just as Hell must have its own cruel form of enjoyment. The battle was compromised the minute we asked, “how do I save the world” instead of “how do I keep possibility alive”. 

In short, activist hope needs to take an ineffable faith-like form. Us leftist-atheists reject God for political reasons as much as theological, because God and his institutions have agendas, and those agendas have historically been corrosive to human freedom. If the existential motivation for devout Christians is the idea that they’ll find Paradise in the afterlife, then perhaps for atheists it is the impossible but undying hope that Paradise can be constructed on this earth. Perhaps we should conduct activism not because we expect Paradise, but because it’s something natural, because it’s speaks to some innate drive in all of us to pursue a better existence even when it’s not remotely guaranteed. It’s human to thrash and squirm when we realize we’re drowning, or to dive in when someone else is drowning. It’s terrifying when we bury ourselves in our screens and sink to the bottom, and further entrenchment into the screen only holds the fear at a distance. Every so often, our faith might even be rewarded, when someone like Mamdani breaks the glass ceiling and is empowered with enough grassroots power to rally more of his kind to office. To paraphrase Berserk, “every so often a fish is able to breach the river’s surface and create ripples”.

Perhaps (even if by my own writing I don’t fully believe this yet) any form of activism is a meaningful challenge to Power. 

Of course I say all of this as if it’s only one person who has to clear those hurdles to challenge power or effect systemic change, but it is in fact all of us. The illusion of activists is that they’ve somehow figured out how to master, challenge, or escape the system. Most of the time, they haven’t, but the strength of their continued attempt is what moves us. Men and women are not gods, there’s little we can do on our own to shake off the structural. I myself have not learned to live without ejecting egregious amounts of waste from my trash bins every week. I haven’t learned to reject the commercialized cycle of desire that binds us to capitalism. Despite deconstructing them, I haven’t fully rejected the signifiers of prestige and meaning associated with this unsustainable world. But even as the life I find myself building appears suspiciously close to ordinary, far from the radical axis I idealized, I do what perhaps any of us can (and at a minimum must) do– keep possibility alive.

(Terry Eagleton’s Hope without Optimism inspired this post)