Chump Change

February 23rd, 2008 Posted in Invention, Mass Movements

“Some work must be done,” said the King, “but who is to do it?”

“Everyone,” said the Queen.

“The Royals as well?” asked Alice.

“Only if they are paid double,” answered the Queen, “and get everyday off.”

“And you?” persisted Alice.

“You have gone beyond your question quota, you nasty child,” the Queen twittered. “Off with her head.”

^^^^^

The people rarely get a chance to act for the whole, to occupy stage center. Projects, especially the high impact society-wide ones, are assigned to specialists. Everyone else remains in private life with at most the spectator’s rooting interest. The fame-time most of us are allocated is our few anonymous seconds in the voting booth. Otherwise we are the fantasy shadow the cadres like to presume they represent and control.

The most recent all-of-us-together moments are (1) the crisis involving tobacco usage and health and (2) the weather threat involving well-being and quality of life and, in the near future, survival. In both there is a challenge to each individual and group to act and change course. The sum of the similar new acts of one person at a time is a shift in social organization and culture. Ionesco, the playwright who saw the mass acting together as a catastrophic denial of the individual life, stands on his head–the new way taken by the mass, we are saying, can sometimes be experienced as, and actually be, a liberation.

To the extent that we have a society-wide unity of understanding and purpose followed with informed actions by the members we have a mass movement–an effort, all together, in the same direction.

For cigarettes and tobacco we, in a large majority, accepted the link of smoking with a significant probability of ill health and early death, and one at a time we turned against the habit. There has been a resistance to the change powered by the commercial self-interest of the tobacco industry. Over the decades it took a variety of forms (mainly in advertising and legislative lobbying and legal restraints) that limited the reform and permitted the continuation of premature death that struck just about every family and community in our nation. But gradually we have reached a new unifying norm that redefines the significance of the human consumption of tobacco products. What had been the act of sophisticated elegance and robust youth has been recognized as self-destructive, the act of a dupe and a dope.

This is the sociological model: the innovation in idea and action in response to a fact or a presumption is resisted by contrary interests. A conflict front is set that can continue on for centuries or reach some near-time resolution that defines a new equilibrium, a new normal way. The outcome for each distinctive front is always problematic. To the extent that individual decisions and actions are relevant the new way can be pushed by a mass movement. The acts of cadres are not always decisive.

With the global hots a society-wide struggle has been under way over the use of fossil fuels to generate energy, both mechanical and electrical. A heavy majority of us accept the warnings of our scientists as valid but the next step, the necessary action, has not been simply resolved. The thing that must be given up, the use of fossil fuels in processes that generate excessive amounts of carbon dioxide, has to be replaced by something else. It is as though cigarettes had to be replaced by another habit. To give up mechanical and electrical energy without a new way would return us to a simpler technology that could not sustain our current population numbers. It would be, in its own way, as destructive to our civilization as continuing the folly of fossil fuel. So we have the complexity of giving up one way for the best alternative or alternative mix.

Ironically in the USA at this moment of crisis our political and governmental leadership at the center has been assumed by bona fide members of the fossil fuel industry. It is the comic paranoid nightmare considered by Gide in his novel, “Les Caves du Vatican.” The dialectical other, the one who negates what we affirm, is represented by our leader. And down the garden path we have gone. No Kyoto Treaty, no Global Warming, no worry. Alarms and excursions in all directions except the one we must take.

The wonder is that in the middle of this fossil fuel counter-attack the gathering of the mass movement has persisted. The Global Cool way is a part of the larger, more general Green project–concerned with ecology and maximizing the benevolent relationship of natural environment to man and his society. The actions so far have been necessarily dispersed–(1) attempts to reduce energy use and demand with green housing, plug-in hybrid cars, a start toward converting automobiles in the existing world-wide fleet to electric motors and so on; (2) introduction and use of alternate energies like solar, wind, water, natural heat; (3) attempts to reduce or capture the CO2 emissions of fossil fuels (4) planting of trees and plants, reforestation campaigns–these life forms give us oxygen and absorb our CO2. (5) politically there is some attention to the actions of our representatives–to catch and dismiss (vote against) those under the control of the fossil fuel gang.

But you know all of this. You are part of it. The false cadre at the center has not fooled us. We are all primed for the change. Even turning off the light in an empty room is an act for self as well as for the larger social solidarity. We are ready, the mountain is beginning to move.

 

^^^^^

Notes.

(1) The opening story is not an “Alice in Wonderland” quote.

(2) Latest N.Y. Times article on wind energy as of Feb. 23, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/business/23wind.html?hp

(3) On the meaning of chump change. Residual coins in one’s pocket. An amount so small that only a fool would count it. Resonates with change as in social or psychological change–a hardly perceptible change. A similar small step by each member of a society (chump change) might eventually be perceived as a giant leap.

(4) I realize that Gide’s novel is more complex than the image of the true versus false leader. See http://www.andregide.org/studies/vatican.htm… for four critical studies.

A few odds and ends still dangling so a little more on this topic in the next post.

Switch off.