Derrick Jensen: Forget Shorter Showers -- why personal change does not equal political change

[GliderGuider]

As I've said before, I blow hot and cold on Derrick Jensen. However, he is a provocative thinker and every article is intended to make us think as well. Here's a recent one that struck a chord with me.

Forget Shorter Showers -- Why personal change does not equal political change

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

Like Jensen, I saw very early on the utter powerlessness of personal consumption reduction as a response to a crisis if the magnitude we are facing. Of course, I still felt the need to empower myself somehow. I tried a bit of activism, but discovered that I'm not good at it. In large measure this is because I don't believe it can be very effective -- I think the playing field is so uneven that most activism is futile. In my darker moments I wonder if the reason that the activism meme is so broadly accepted is that TPTB are deliberately making room for it, as a way to flush out the rebels and make sure they stay where they can be out-maneuvered. The occasional win serves to keep people from noticing that the vast majority of activist initiatives founder on the rocks of the guardian institutions' entrenched power. I'm not saying I think activism is utterly futile, of course. Our side does win the occasional fight, and others are much better at it and more committed to that fight than I, so more power to them.

I chose a different road. I definitely fall into the "personal enlightenment" camp that Jensen dismisses. I've outlined the reason for this in several articles, but the 10 cent version is this: I believe that our civilization is in this mess because for all our cleverness we lack wisdom. Since wisdom is a very personal quality, the shortest route to acquiring it will be personal as well, and IMO that route leads through the classical experience of enlightenment. I harbour a hope that the spread of individual enlightenment will be self-reinforcing, and that the presence of a critical mass of wise people in our civilization will change its course more effectively than all the compact fluorescent lightbulbs in the world.