Are the mass movements of the past for gender equality, civil rights, environmental sustainability and economic justice still the way ahead, given the global polycrisis of our time?
With a certainty and confidence that belies the world as it is, which ignores the hopelessness that millions of people are experiencing, a prominent San Francisco activist intones:
“We’re living through a political revolution, but it’s not the fast-paced hurtle towards fascist necropolitics we wake up to every day, with atrocities constantly exploding, always demanding our attention. Instead, it’s the slow revolution that’s been happening since the 50s, seismic changes in our attitudes to everything, from gender to race to sexuality to science to the climate. Every battle we wage builds on one that was won before.”
To my mind, this view of recent history is not simply wrong; it’s wrongheaded. It assumes an upward “arc of the moral universe” even as humanity is staring into the abyss. And it minimizes the despair so many people are feeling, without understanding the roots of it.
Why is the activism of the past inadequate to the challenges of the present?
Because the social advances of the last six or seven decades aren’t providing a bulwark, much less a template to address the overlapping crises of this decade.
And because the choice is not between angry resignation or a mindset that echoes the positive thinking of Norman Vincent Peale: “If you don’t simultaneously remember the creativity in politics, the victories, you’ll give in to a sense that things can only get worse.”
Straw men litter the field. “Pervasive climate pessimism assumes we know the future, and therefore nothing is required from us.” How does that follow?
The intensifying ecological crisis actually requires much more of us. But a boilerplate narrative gives greater weight to “a stealth authoritarian interest in instilling despair because it makes everyone more pliant” than to the fact of catastrophic climate/oceanic warming and mass extinction at human hands.
Liberal-minded people need to come from a deeper place than offering the competing narrative that “the future is radically uncertain, and therefore much is required of us.” Such thinking is the antithesis of acknowledging and addressing the momentum of man’s destructiveness.
The future is not “radically uncertain.” It will be like the present (only more so) without a radical change in so-called human nature. But even if the future were “radically uncertain,” it would not require more of us than a future that’s a darker version of the present without radical change. And there cannot be radical change by anchoring ourselves in the past.
It’s deeply misleading to insist we find solace in the receding memories of past “heroic struggles.” “Hope arises from memory,” we’re told, “and you can turn that inside out to say that despair arises from forgetting.”
That’s painfully false. The Israelis aren’t committing genocide in Gaza because Jews forgot the genocide that was perpetrated on them, but because they’re using the memory of the Holocaust to justify doing unto Palestinians what was done to them, in the name of security.
Current global realities are destroying past national advances. Yet the unprecedented nature of the polycrisis is met with an unprecedented level of blindness.
“The whole idea of the ascent of man, his separation from nature, his inevitable progress towards the supremacy of industrialized capitalism, towards this supreme version of himself, is a weird detour from how most people, throughout most of time, have thought about nature and our place in it.”
It’s true that people lived for tens of thousands of years in rough balance with nature, though that didn’t stop Stone Age hunters from driving the megafauna to extinction on several continents. But are we to believe that the climate and extinction crisis, as well as the gross disparity of wealth, the AI threat, and a world on the verge of another world war are just a “weird detour”?
There’s no point in setting competing narratives and vested worldviews against an understandably pervasive pessimism arising from an emotional reaction to the way things are going. We need to seriously address within us the roots of the intensifying and intertwined crises that the human mind has wrought.
Thinking and feeling people must distinguish between the unparalleled global crisis of the present and the partial advances of the past. The mindset that refuses to do so becomes another impediment to meeting the enormous challenges we face as human beings.
The antidote to despair is not to fill our minds and soothe our spirits with what the movements of the past achieved, and futilely try to build on them. It is to spontaneously step out of the polluted stream of content-consciousness every day by attending to the movement of thought and emotion within us.
Humankind’s downward spiral is demanding, and our social and technological interconnection is permitting radical change like never before in human history. Whether it happens now or not, that means a new human being and a global civilization.
Gradual, incremental change—the so-called “slow revolution”—has become a woefully inadequate response to the polycrisis. There isn’t a multiplicity of human crises any more than there is a multiplicity of ongoing catastrophes of the Trump Administration. They condense into one thing—the crisis of human consciousness itself.
I cannot tell you not to despair, since I often see no light at the end of man’s interminably dark tunnel myself. But true minds and hearts are doing the work, and you can do the same by questioning and attending to what is, within and without.
That may have little resemblance to the “heroic struggles” of the past, but it has everything to do with taking responsibility for oneself as a microcosm of man (to use the word pejoratively).
The human condition, which is the cumulative past culminating in the excruciating present, is inseparable from us. Therefore the work is to awaken insight within us toward changing the disastrous course of man, rather than organize ineffectual mass marches and movements.
March on No Kings Day if you want, but see that the movements of the 1960’s can’t save us from the miasma of the 2020’s.
