There are certain advantages to writing out the ideas
central to this blog in weekly bursts. Back in the days before the internet,
when a galaxy of weekly magazines provided the same free mix of ideas and
opinions that fills the blogosphere today, plenty of writers kept themselves
occupied turning out articles and essays for the weeklies, and the benefits
weren’t just financial: feedback from readers, on the one hand, and the
contributions of other writers in related fields, on the other, really do make
it easier to keep slogging ahead at the writer’s lonely trade.
This week’s essay has benefited from that latter effect, in
a somewhat unexpected way. In recent weeks, here and there in the corners of
the internet I frequent, there’s been another round of essays and forum
comments insisting that it’s time for the middle-class intellectuals who
frequent the environmental and climate change movements to take up violence
against the industrial system. That may not seem to have much to do with the
theme of the current sequence of posts—the vacuum that currently occupies the
place in our collective imagination where meaningful visions of the future used
to be found—but there’s a connection, and following it out will help explain one
of the core themes I want to discuss.
The science fiction author Isaac Asimov used to say that
violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. That’s a half-truth at best,
for there are situations in which effective violence is the only tool that will
do what needs to be done—we’ll get to that in a moment. It so happens, though,
that a particular kind of incompetence does indeed tend to turn to violence
when every other option has fallen flat, and goes down in a final outburst of
pointless bloodshed. It’s unpleasantly likely at this point that the climate
change movement, or some parts of it, may end up taking that route into
history’s dumpster; here again, we’ll get to that a little further on in this
post.
It’s probably necessary to say at the outset that the
arguments I propose to make here have nothing to do with the ethics of
violence, and everything to do with its pragmatics as a means of bringing about
social change. Ethics in general are a complete quagmire in today’s society. Nietzsche’s sly description of moral
philosophy as the art of propping up inherited prejudices with bad logic has
lost none of its force since he wrote it, and since his time we’ve also
witnessed the rise of professional ethicists, whose jobs consist of coming up
with plausible excuses for whatever their corporate masters want to do this
week. The ethical issues surrounding violence are at least as confused as those
around any of the other messy realities of human life, and in some ways, more
so than most.
Myself, I consider violence enitrely appropriate in some
situations. Many of my readers may have heard, for example, of an event that
took place a little while back in Kentucky, where a sex worker was attacked by
a serial killer. While he was strangling
her, she managed to get hold of his handgun, and proceeded to shoot him dead.
To my mind, her action was morally justified. Once he attacked her, no matter
what she did, somebody was going to die, and killing him not only turned the
violence back on its originator, it also saved the lives of however many other
women the guy might have killed before the police got to him—if they ever did;
crimes against sex workers, and for that matter crimes against women, are
tacitly ignored by a fairly large number of US police departments these days.
Along the same lines, a case can be made that revolutionary
violence against a political and economic system is morally justified if the
harm being done by that system is extreme enough. That’s not a debate I’m
interested in exploring here, though.
Again, it’s not ethics but pragmatics that I want to discuss, because
whether or not revolutionary violence is justified in some abstract moral sense
is far less important right now than whether it’s an effective response to the
situation we’re in. That’s not a question being asked, much less answered, by
the people who are encouraging environmental and climate change activists to
consider violence against the system.
Violence is not a panacea. It’s a tool, and like any other
tool, it’s well suited to certain tasks and utterly useless for others.
Political violence in particular is a surprisingly brittle and limited tool.
Even when it has the support of a government’s resource base, it routinely
flops or backfires, and a group that goes in for political violence without the
resources and technical assistance of some government somewhere has to play its
hand exceedingly well, or it’s going to fail. Furthermore, there are many cases
in which violence isn’t useful as a means of social change, as other tools can
do the job more effectively.
Pay attention to the history of successful revolutions and
it’s not hard to figure out how to carry out political violence—and far more
importantly, how not to do so. The most important point to learn from history
is that successful violence in a political context doesn’t take place in a
vacuum. It’s the final act of a long process, and the more thoroughly that
process is carried out, the less violence is needed when crunch time comes.
Let’s take a few paragraphs to walk through the process and see how it’s done.
The first and most essential step in the transformation of
any society is the delegitimization of the existing order. That doesn’t involve
violence, and in fact violence at this first stage of the process is
catastrophically counterproductive—a lesson, by the way, that the US military
has never been able to learn, which is why its attempts to delegitimize its
enemies (usually phrased in such language as “winning minds and hearts”) have
always been so embarrassingly inept and ineffective. The struggle to
delegitimize the existing order has to be fought on cultural, intellectual, and
ideological battlefields, not physical ones, and its targets are not people or
institutions but the aura of legitimacy and inevitability that surrounds any
established political and economic order.
Those of my readers who want to know how that’s done might
want to read up on the cultural and intellectual life of France in the decades
before the Revolution. It’s a useful example, not least because the people who
wanted to bring down the French monarchy came from almost exactly the same
social background as today’s green radicals: disaffected middle-class
intellectuals with few resources other than raw wit and erudition. That turned
out to be enough, as they subjected the monarchy—and even more critically, the
institutions and values that supported it—to sustained and precise attack from
constantly shifting positions, engaging in savage mockery one day and earnest
pleas for reform the next, exploiting every weakness and scandal for maximum
effect. By the time the crisis finally arrived in 1789, the monarchy had been
so completely defeated on the battlefield of public opinion that next to nobody
rallied to its defense until after the Revolution was a fait accompli.
The delegitimization of the existing order is only the first
step in the process. The second step is political, and consists of building a
network of alliances with existing and potential power centers and pressure
groups that might be willing to support revolutionary change. Every political
system, whatever its official institutional form might be, consists in practice
of just such a network of power centers—that is, groups of people who have
significant political, economic, or social influence—and pressure groups—that
is, other groups of people who lack such influence but can give or withhold
their support in ways that can sometimes extract favors from the power centers.
In today’s America, for example, the main power centers are
found in what we may as well call the bureaucratic-industrial complex, the
system of revolving-door relationships that connect big corporations,
especially the major investment banks, with the major Federal bureaucracies,
especially the Treasury and the Pentagon. There are other power centers as
well—for example, the petroleum complex, which has its own ties to the
Pentagon—which cooperate and compete by turns with the New York-DC axis of
influence—and then there are pressure groups of many kinds, some more
influential, some less, some reduced to the status of captive constituencies
whose only role in the political process is to rally the vote every four years
and have their agenda ignored by their supposed friends in office in between
elections. The network of power centers, pressure groups, and captive
constituencies that support the existing order of things is the real heart of
political power, and it’s what has to be supplanted in order to bring systemic
change.
Effective revolutionaries know that in order to overthrow
the existing order of society, they have to put together a comparable network
that will back them against the existing order, and grow it to the point that
it starts attracting key power centers away from the network of the existing
order. That’s a challenge, but not an impossible one. In any troubled society,
there are always plenty of potential power centers that have been excluded from
the existing order and its feeding trough, and are thus interested in backing a
change that will give them the power they want and don’t have. In France before
the Revolution, for example, there were plenty of wealthy middle-class people
who were shut out of the political system by the aristocracy and the royal
court, and the philosophes went out of their way to appeal to them and
get their support—an easy job, since the philosophes and the nouveaux-riches
shared similar backgrounds. That paid off handsomely once the crisis came.
In any society, troubled or not, there are also always
pressure groups, plenty of them, that are interested in getting more access to
the various goodies that power centers can dole out, and can be drawn into
alliance with a rising protorevolutionary faction. The more completely the
existing order of things has been delegitimized, the easier it is to build such
alliances, and the alliances can in turn be used to feed the continuing process
of delegitimization. Here again, as in the first stage of the process, violence
is a hindrance rather than a help, and it’s best if the subject never even
comes up for discussion; assembling the necessary network of alliances is much
easier when nobody has yet had to face up to the tremendous risks involved in
revolutionary violence.
By the time the endgame arrives, therefore, you’ve got an
existing order that no longer commands the respect and loyalty of most of the
population, and a substantial network of pressure groups and potential power
centers supporting a revolutionary agenda. Once the situation reaches that
stage, the question of how to arrange the transfer of power from the old regime
to the new one is a matter of tactics, not strategy. Violence is only one of
the available options, and again, it’s by no means always the most useful one.
There are many ways to break the existing order’s last fingernail grip on the
institutions of power, once that grip has been loosened by the steps already
mentioned.
What happens, on the other hand, to groups that don’t do the
necessary work first, and turn to violence anyway? Here again, history has
plenty to say about that, and the short form is that they lose. Without the
delegitimization of the existing order of society and the creation of networks
of support among pressure groups and potential power centers, turning to
political violence guarantees total failure.
For some reason, for most of the last century, the left has
been unable or unwilling to learn that lesson. What’s happened instead, over
and over again, is that a movement pursuing radical change starts out convinced
that the existing order of society already lacks popular legitimacy, and so
fails to make a case that appeals to anybody outside its own ranks. Having
failed at the first step, it tries to pressure existing power centers and
pressure groups into supporting its agenda, rather than building a competing
network around its own agenda, and gets nowhere. Finally, having failed at both
preliminary steps, it either crumples completely or engages in pointless
outbursts of violence against the system, which are promptly and brutally
crushed. Any of my readers who remember the dismal history of the New Left in
the US during the 1960s and early 1970s already know this story, right down to
the fine details.
With this in mind, let’s look at the ways in which the
climate change movement has followed this same trajectory of abject failure
over the last fifteen years or so.
The task of the climate change movement at the dawn of the
twenty-first century was difficult but by no means impossible. Their ostensible
goal was to create a consensus in the world’s industrial nations that would
support the abandonment of fossil fuels and a transition to the less
energy-intensive ways of living that renewable resources can provide. That
would have required a good many well-off people to accept a decline in their
standards of living, but that’s far from the insuperable obstacle so many
people seem to think it must be. When Winston Churchill told the British people
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” his listeners
roared their approval. For reasons that probably reach far into our
evolutionary past, a call to shared sacrifice usually gets a rousing response,
so long as the people who are being asked to sacrifice have reason to believe
something worthwhile will come of it.
That, however, was precisely what the climate change
movement was unable to provide. It’s harsh but not, I think, unfair to describe
the real agenda of the movement as the attempt to create a future in which the
industrial world’s middle classes could keep on enjoying the benefits of their
privileged lifestyle without wrecking the atmosphere in the process. Of course
it’s not exactly easy to convince everyone else in the world to put aside all
their own aspirations for the sake of the already privileged, and so the
spokespeople of the climate change movement generally didn’t talk about what
they hoped to achieve. Instead, they fell into the most enduring bad habit of
the left, and ranted instead about how awful the future would be if the rest of
the world didn’t fall into line behind them.
On the off chance that any of my readers harbor
revolutionary ambitions, may I offer a piece of helpful advice? If you want
people to follow your lead, you have to tell them where you intend to take
them. Talking exclusively about what’s going to happen if they don’t follow you
will not cut it. Rehashing the same set of talking points about how everyone’s
going to die if the whole world doesn’t rally around you emphatically will not
cut it. The place where you’re leading them can be difficult and dangerous, the
way there can be full of struggle, sacrifice and suffering, and they’ll still
flock to your banner—in fact, young men will respond to that kind of future
more enthusiastically than to any other, especially if you can lighten the
journey with beer and the occasional barbecue—but you have to be willing to
talk about your destination. You also have to remember that the phrase “shared
sacrifice” includes the word “shared,” and not expect everyone else to give up
something so that you don’t have to.
So the climate change movement entered the arena with one
hand tied behind its back and the other hand hauling a heavy suitcase stuffed
to the bursting point with middle class privilege. Its subsequent behavior did
nothing to overcome that initial disadvantage. When the defenders of the
existing order counterattacked, as of course they did, the climate change
movement did nothing to retake the initiative and undermine its adversaries;
preaching to the green choir took the place of any attempt to address the
concerns of the wider public; over and over again, climate change activists
allowed the other side to define the terms of the debate and then whined about
the resulting defeat rather than learning anything from it. Of course the other
side used every trick in the book, and then some; so? That’s how the game is
played. Successful movements for change realize that, and plan accordingly.
We don’t even have to get into the abysmal failure of the
climate change movement to seek out allies among the many pressure groups and
potential power centers that might have backed it, if it had been able to win
the first and most essential struggle in the arena of public opinion. The point
I want to make is that at this point in the curve of failure, violence really
is the last refuge of the incompetent. What, after all, would be the result if
some of the middle class intellectuals who make up the core of the climate
change movement were to pick up some guns, assemble the raw materials for a few
bombs, and try to use violence to make their point? They might well kill some
people before the FBI guns them down or hauls them off to life-plus terms in
Leavenworth; they would very likely finish off climate change activism
altogether, by making most Americans fear and distrust anyone who talks about
it—but would their actions do the smallest thing to slow the dumping of
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the resulting climate chaos? Of course
not.
What makes the failure of the climate change movement so
telling is that during the same years that it peaked and crashed, another
movement has successfully conducted a prerevolutionary campaign of the classic
sort here in the US. While the green Left has been spinning its wheels and
setting itself up for failure, the populist Right has carried out an extremely
effective program of delegitimization aimed at the federal government and, even
more critically, the institutions and values that support it. Over the last
fifteen years or so, very largely as a result of that program, a great many Americans have gone from an ordinary, healthy distrust of politicians
to a complete loss of faith in the entire American project. To a remarkable
extent, the sort of rock-ribbed middle Americans who used to insist that of
course the American political system is the best in the world are now convinced
that the American political system is their enemy, and the enemy of everything
they value.
The second stage of the prerevolutionary process, the
weaving of a network of alliances with pressure groups and potential power
centers, is also well under way. Watch which groups are making common cause
with one another on the rightward fringes of society these days and you can see
a competent revolutionary strategy at work. This isn’t something I find
reassuring—quite the contrary, in fact; aside from my own admittedly
unfashionable feelings of patriotism, one consistent feature of revolutions is
that the government that comes into power after the shouting and the shooting
stop is always more repressive than the one that was in power beforehand.
Still, the way things are going, it seems likely to me that the US will see the
collapse of its current system of government, probably accompanied with violent
revolution or civil war, within a decade or two.
Meanwhile, as far as I can see, the climate change movement
is effectively dead in its tracks, and we no longer have time to make something
happen before the rising spiral of climate catastrophe begins—as my readers may
have noticed, that’s already well under way. From here on in, it’s probably a
safe bet that anthropogenic climate change will accelerate until it fulfills
the prophecy of The Limits to Growth and forces the global industrial
economy to its knees. Any attempt to bring human society back into some kind of
balance with ecological reality will have to get going during and after that
tremendous crisis. That requires playing a long game, but then that’s going to
be required anyway, to do the things that the climate change movement failed to
do, and do them right this time.
