Here's what I've been wondering: can campaigning for something give you power where campaigning against something doesn't?
One site I've taken a bit of a shine to, in the last year, is the RSA's lectures. Specifically, I like the RSAnimate series of illustrated lectures. It's a hell of a lot better than digging for decent TV among the surprisingly homogeneous or cross-correlated schedules.
Probably through conditioning, Sunday is when I catch up on what's happening in the world. So when I woke up this morning, I made my way to the RSA to see what cartoon characters could coax me into the day, and browsing after I'd watched a couple of animated lectures on the recent (and not-so-recent) failures of the Holy Market, I found a piece on an optimistic view of the future of humanity, called
Reasons to be Cheerful. It's hardly a secret that I have an upbeat view of humans, especially their
creative capacity for expression and thinking. So of course, I warmed to it instantly (and will probably get the book/e-book and be very enthusiastic about its contents). And there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic – this is the starting point of the article, in fact. It's up to each of us, whether we believe that foreboding news stories about these are part of a co-ordinated effort to keep us all busy while the current system trundles along unbothered by democracy towards insert-name-of-collapse. But regardless of whether you do, it strikes me that there's something else we should concern ourselves with: positive activism.
One thing that bothers me a great deal is the perception (right or wrong) that democracy isn't very effective in these islands. Perception that democracy is failing is usually self-fulfilling once people lose hope. So I'm not going to bother with the consequences of that. But if it genuinely is ineffective, then we have to sit up and take rapid notice. No matter your politics, the co-ordinated efforts of
UK Uncut should be bringing results, but on the day of their largest co-ordinated national protest against the coalition's spending cut tactics, BBC News was praising the success of democracy in Egypt. The large-scale national protests, on their doorstep, didn't even make the evening news. What the fundamental difference was, other than geography, I really don't know. But the editorial hypocrisy in the BBC that day was heart-breaking.
If day-to-day democracy in the UK isn't working, then we have to work out how we can reboot it. This isn't just a "wouldn't it be nice if we had proper local democracy" issue; it's fundamental to having a say over any kind of debate over the reforms that a national cabinet is currently able to whisk through into law. That, by the way, is not representative democracy.
Two things that strike me as interlinked are day-to-day democracy and optimistic thinking. Reasons to Be Cheerful got me thinking that although there are all these great ideas out there, who's campaigning for them? They might be successful to some extent commercially, but if they're really important for the safe-guarding of our future on a national or international level, What do we do? Do we sit on our asses and wait for the Green Party to adopt a fuel solution (by default, and while no one else does), then watch as they fail to suddenly sweep to power because they don't have popular policies in other domains we care about? Back to Square One: people with the money to afford a conscience can do their bit while the rest have to use coal and oil until the point of disaster? FAIL.
I wonder whether protests against (let's say government) policies are inherently less likely to succeed than calls for something to happen. Given the system centred on key personnel in Downing Street, rather than a government in parliament, running the country now looks far more like management. And as more than one manager has told me in the past, "managers don't want to hear the problem, they want to hear the solution". Rightly or wrongly. So perhaps government will respond better to campaigns for ideas than protests against something.
I have to be clear at this point that I'm not against protesting. It's fundamental to securing the fear by government of its people, and that's a very healthy thing for democracy. I also have to say that this is not expert opinion. But what I think I'm advocating is that with protest should come equally vociferous ideas for alternatives. The human tendency to fear change will unite people in protesting against something new and bad, but it'll take worthwhile effort to get people behind something new and fundamentally critical. Otherwise, we slip back into perpetuating the problems we've been saying we want to solve all along.
So here's what my premise boils down to: if you campaign for something – let's say that deep down you want strawberries – you take the initiative, you campaign for strawberries for all, and in the end, if you're successful, you get strawberries. We all do. If you don't do anything, the best case you can hope for is to be reactive. In the end you might end up voting for the idea generated by someone else, along their political lines, which could be orders of magnitude weaker than what you might really have liked. When it comes to the choices offered, once, at that rare general election, you'll be offered poo. One of the parties will be offering mildly strawberry-scented poo, and since that's closest to what you really wanted, you'll vote for it. If you're lucky then, enough other people will vote for it. And you'll get strawberry-scented poo. With enough expectation management on the part of these parties, you might even be happy that the poo was strawberry-smelling.
But you what you really wanted were strawberries. So go out and ask for them. As a very kind veteran scientist once told me at breakfast, "the secret of life is to ask".
