I gave a talk on Friday night to a local community group. Small group (usually the case for my talks). The topic was Canadian foreign policy (I’ll be publishing the talk soon). It was a smart crowd, engaged, awake, I think activist in inclination. It was actually a biweekly discussion group, and they brought in guest speakers after which they discussed things among themselves, some retiring to a local coffee shop to continue the chat.
For me a talk is mostly an excuse to get to the Question and Answer period. During the talk, you have an obligation to give something to the audience, some preparation or research that you have done, but how can you know what you can offer unless you can hear some questions, and know where the audience is at?
Anyway as I said, during question period, there were very interesting questions. Some were relating to the content of the talk itself, so I won’t go into them yet. But one of them was really very good. The talk was very informational in nature: presenting various facts, historical and contemporary, about Canada’s role in the world that very few people know. So one audience member asked: “Do you really think if people knew this, they would do something about it?”
Rather gets to the point, doesn’t it? This is actually a constant debate among Z types. I gave a rather long answer, more or less as below.
At the Z Media Institute, for example, people like Chip Berlet from Political Research Associates and Amy Goodman from Democracy Now come and give talks about the mainstream media, the political culture, etc.. These journalists, being genuine journalists, have a belief that if people knew what their government was doing they would act. The problem, to them, is that the media doesn’t keep people informed, and so they can’t make informed decisions.
Michael Albert disagrees. He doesn’t think the problem is information. In his blog, he asks:
Doesn’t sufficient evidence of deceit and destruction now exist for everyone to see it? Can the average American – much less the average citizen of England given their far better media — be unaware of the vile nature of our government’s pursuits, other than by adopting an ostrich approach that actively denies reality? There is a parade of images and rhetoric blasting into everyone’s line of sight. The spin campaign to obscure its meaning is utterly absurd, yet we know it will largely work. Why?
His answer:
I contend that at least one important factor at work is that people feel there is no alternative to the injustices that surround us and, at any rate, that they are helpless regarding altering those injustices. To become irate will buck social norms and make their lives harder, not easier. No gains, in their view, will accrue to themselves or to others either. People thus reject the uncomfortable, alienating, and in their view unproductive world of social judgments to instead focus their energies on the relatively comfortable, acceptable, and productive worlds of sports, tv, lawn care, shopping, dating, business as usual, survival, and other daily interaction with friends and family.
There is also a third. Ward Churchill expresses it in his new book, “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” Talking about the sanctions on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands, Ward says:
As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns..
There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting “Jeremy” and “Ellington” to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little “Tiffany” an “Ashley” had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays – for “our kids,” no less – as an all-absorbing point of political focus.
So there is one position (that of the journalists):
We don’t know. If we knew, we would care.
And another (Michael’s):
We know. We feel helpless. So we pretend we don’t know.
And a third (Ward’s):
We know. We don’t care.
Each has different implications. If the journalists like Amy are right, then providing the information will eventually work, contribute to making some change. If Michael is right, piling on knowledge of atrocities and analysis of the systemic nature of it all will only make people more helpless unless there is some accompanying strategy for how people can act to change it all. Strategy, examples, experiences, ideas about alternatives. If Ward is right, people don’t wake up unless there is some cost to them, and the main problem is that the cost to us has been too low: “More bluntly, the hope was – and maybe still is – that Americans, stripped of their presumed immunity from incurring any real consequences for their behavior, would comprehend and act upon a formulation as uncomplicated as “stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe.”
But it didn’t work: “Unfortunately, noble as they may have been, such humanitarian aspirations were always doomed to remain unfulfilled. For it to have been otherwise, a far higher quality of character and intellect would have to prevail among average Americans than is actually the case… Perhaps the strategists underestimated the impact a couple of generations-worth of media indoctrination can produce in terms of demolishing the capacity of human beings to form coherent thoughts. Maybe they forgot to factor in the mind-numbing effects of the indoctrination passed off as education in the US.”
Robert Jensen once said something similar in a talk he gave in Canada about a year ago. He said when he saw the planes hit the buildings on 9/11, he thought there are two ways for this empire to come to an end. One way is historically unprecedented, that the citizens of the empire could dismantle it from within. The other way was what he was watching on TV.
Of the three, Michael’s is the most optimistic, and probably neglected. Certainly movements pay more attention to analyzing the power structure than even to finding weaknesses within it, to say nothing of strategies to make change and alternative ideas. If Amy is right, then it’s just a matter of working away and doing more of what we’re doing. If Ward is right, we’re pretty much doomed, so we’ll have to proceed on the assumption that he’s wrong — as he is doing, since he is a rather tireless activist who is constantly trying to fight for change.