Getting closer: discovering Alan Carter

Another glowing book review, I'm afraid. Or rather, the preview review. I found The Politics of Nature -- Explorations in Green Political Theory, edited by Andrew Dobson and Paul Lucardie in a secondhand bookshop in Brighton. The book is still in print for £29 but Amazon has several secondhand copies. I would have bought the book anyway, simply on the strength of the editors and the blurb on the back, but what caught my eye was an essay by Alan Carter, then lecturer in philosophy at Heythrop College in London.

I say "then" because he is now the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. The Politics of Nature was published in 1993 and Carter has subsequently expanded his ideas on green politics into A Radical Green Political Theory, which I will read, whether I buy it for £80 or borrow it from the library. I will read it because I think his model of how damaging governmental, economic and security structures embed themselves is close to the critique I've been trying to build, and because I think his counter argument that localised action to de-power damaging institutions matches my instinct for a green anarchist ideology.

Before I try to explain Carter's model, it's worth mentioning other essays in The Politics of Nature. They are all worth reading and include contributions by some of the biggest names in green political thinking such as Ted Benton and Wouter Achterberg, but one other stands out--that by Andrew Dobson. Dobson's primary role in green politics has been to chart the development of green ideas, which he did Green Political Thought in 1990. His essay in The Politics of Nature, brings the tools of critical theory to green politics, particularly those of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, to bear on green ideology.

Part of the problem with such an exercise is that much of the literature on green politics is written in terms of what a green society should look like, rather than how such a society might be achieved. Critical theory was built on a mainly Marxian foundation, which is anti-Utopian. Dobson finds enough common ground to make the analysis useful, but it highlights a weakness in much of how green politics is sold. Which is also a weakness in the coherence of green ideology. A common-sense response to green politicians is that what they propose is impractical--based on wishful thinking.

I would add that the dominant method for building a green manifesto--starting with a list of principles--does not necessarily help. It declares that one must buy into a our list of priorities or sod off. If a green ideology is to be practicable, if it is to effect substantial change, then it must give a message that chimes with most people. Our list of principles might be very logical, but it won't necessarily chime with everyone else's.

Which is where Carter's analysis and proposal for action is strongest. One does not have to declare allegiance to four, five or ten principles. One does not even have to accept the criticism of the status quo. One simply has to see the benefits or the right of a community to take control of its own resources.

In explaining the model of how politics, economics and security currently reinforce each other, Carter uses the following diagram. I like diagrams. What it shows is that growth economics is embodied in the system as a whole by funding the security system (forces of defence) that protect the nation state, political elite and institutional bodies. The cycle is completed by the bodies politic and elements of the security system protecting and enhancing economic control systems that nourish economic growth. I like that it avoids too much specificity, and as such I think it captures the ecological relationship between its element. That is to say, if one particular body within one element (for example, the financial regulator) is changed due to popular pressure, then its role in the cycle may be taken up by others parliamentary committee, the police, or voluntary self-regulation).
This model also encapsulates the way in which scale is so corrosive to democracy and sustainability, which Carter illustrates with a second version of the same diagram. And it is by taking the reversed cycle below as a necessary part of achieving sustainability (or as Carter puts it, an environmentally benign dynamic) that he produces a second model, this time with a loop of decentralisation, self-sufficiency, egalitarianism, appropriate use of technology, and non-violent means of achieving security.
Again, this is an ecological relationship. And unlike most other green political theories, this doesn't have to be implemented by government or by blocks of legislation. Instead, we can work towards it by piecemeal commitment to local communities, refusing to accept the demands of outside business and government, and by eschewing violence. If these strategies work, we don't have to sell them on principled grounds--they should sell themselves.

A clearer view of Darfur

How often do you read a book that confirms long-held suspicions, lucidly spells out and expands upon ideas you have not heard expressed by others, is deeply informative about a subject in you were previously satisfied with passing knowledge but it turns out is fundamentally important, and shatters some little-considered assumptions? I would guess that any of these benefits are rare, but you might never see the combination.

Of course, anyone who aspires to write about "big ideas" hopes that their book will have this effect on a few readers, but I'm not claiming that I have such a book in progress. But I have just finished one that had this combined effect on me: Saviors and Survivors -- Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror by Mahmood Mamdani. I might have to write a fan letter.

Before gushing some more, also have to thank my cousin, Angus Clarkson, who recommended the book. He works for the UN in Sudan and cites Mamdani as the most authoritative writer on the topic of Darfur. I thought I was going to learn a little about the complexities of the situation, but Mamdani's analysis is much deeper and the truth much different than I expected.

The truth that has been in short supply in media reports on the conflict in Darfur. It isn't simply a case of over-simplification. The number of casulaties has been greatly inflated. The ethnic divisions have been portrayed as much more strongly polarised than in reality, and worse the portrayal of the conflict as being between good Christians and bad Muslims is partial and over-simplified to the extent that it is simply wrong. The label of "genocide" is definitely misplaced.

I stongly recommend you read the book, obviously, but in summary: the factors that led to the conflict of the early 2000s in Darfur were the artificial ethnic division created by British colonialism and entrenched in post-colonial law giving land-ownership to some but not all, a drought across the Sahel deeper and longer lasting than ever recorded before, changes in land use from subsistence to commerce, and the use of the region for proxy wars between global powers that made machine guns and other weapons commonplace. The result is inevitable conflict over access to resources--conflict that could not be resolved by traditional methods of local mediation, mainly because the causes and consequences were not restricted to the local.

It has long been my suspicion that cultural changes are rarely the result of mass migration, which Mamdani confirms with respect to Sudan. Migration back and forth, up and down the continent has been a constant throughout recorded history, but not in overwhelming numbers. The most obvious cultural influence is Arab, which was adopted through admiration, to aid commerce or through coertion rather than by the spread of ethnic Arabs. At the same time, it is important to realise that cultural influences have come from south, east and west as well as the north, creating the richness of Sudanese cultures. Racist colonialism could not accept that advanced agrarian and civilised culure could have evolved without the influence of lighter-skinned people, but it did.

The counter-examples, where mass migration has led to overwhelming change, share certain characteristics. Subjugated minorities become a constant source of rebellion and have to be isolated or wiped out, which is what native reservations in North America and Australia, or the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, or the townships of apartheid South Africa are perfect examples of.

Possibly the most important question Mamdani attempts to answer is why the facts about Darfur have been so distorted by Western media and the influential pressure group, Save Darfur. The answer is that there is a mixture of sophisticated colonialism and an unsophisticated vision of the world as polarised by the "war on terror". The rhetoric of the "new generation draws the line" is of people that have to be saved from their own "failed states", which contradicts itself because the intervention to protect the survivors does not nurture the grass-roots political structures needed to strengthen or resuscitate the alledgedly crumbling or absent democracy.

Similarly, the protagonists in a given conflict are portrayed as good Christians, our allies and/or victims, under attack from bad Muslims, our enemies and/or the bad guys. This distorted picture allows any conflict to be added to the catalogue of crimes perpetrated by Muslim terrorists against the free Christian world. This helps justify military intervention, directly or by proxy.

The resolution of conflicts in Darfur, which Mamadani points out already fell to sub-emergency levels in 2005, lies in de-militarisation, improvement of the rights of the landless, and a revival of traditional methods of local mediation, at the very least. The people of the Sahel are capable of resolving their issues themselves despite the pressures of climate change.

As John F Kennedy said, in a very different context: "We choose to [do] things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." If an ideology is to prove its functionality, it is by working in the most difficult situations: World War II and the rise of Nazism being the most obvious test. I feel that Mamdani's analysis does fit with a Ghandist perspective, although I appreciate that there are elements of self-determination that he is uncomfortable with. My guess is that we could agree that local determinism has to be without isolationism.

Something I had never appreciated was that the International Criminal Court has been established with aims that appear to be apolitical but under the control of the UN Security Council. The result is that all of the prosecutions so far have been of men who oppose, or are seen to oppose, US/Western interests. The conflict in Darfur has been portrayed in the UN as a one-sided genocide, so it is no surprise that it is President al-Bashir that has been indicted by the ICC. We will never see George W Bush or Jacques Chirac in the dock although their proxies in the Darfur conflict have also committed war crimes.

It is impossible to compress the wealth of information and insight in Saviors and Survivors into a single blog post. I can only urge you to read it yourself. If nothing else, you will learn the meaning of the Sudanese saying: "Only a turtle knows how to bite another turtle."

Amoral to the story

Having grasped the nettle of morality as an integral part of sustainable development (see http://pictograph.blogspot.com/2010/01/want-sustainability-need-more.html), I find that it raises as many questions as it answers. How, for example, does a community undergoing sustainable development deal with the amoral? Should we impose our own moral code? Are some morals a pre-requisite for sustainable development?

A goal of a sustainable society does not undermine the thinking of John Stewart Mill and his successors. If anything, attempts to legislate for sexuality and hedonism in the last two decades have shown that Mill was right: it is simply wrong to restrict freedoms on a moral basis.

That said, there are large parts of our society where it appears that morality has broken down. Individuals with nothing left to lose, taking and destroying without any apparent qualms. Vandalism, theft, intimidation, rape, assault and murder seem to be less the result of desperation and more the effect of devaluation.

To say these things is a hair's breadth from the Daily Mail view of sink estates filled with feral children, their feckless teenage single mothers and drug-fuelled gangster fathers. An extreme characterisation with a sliver of truth behind it.

All this obsession with sustainability, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly middle-class. There are great examples of green activism in the inner cities, but most activists and agitators come from more comfortable backgrounds, and apply their thinking to the comfortable communities that they already inhabit.

In my own mind, the hypothetical community-in-sustainable-development looks more like a village than a council estate. I think the ideas can apply to any self-identifying community, but it must be easier for places with more room for crops and with people with a broader education.
Development, in other words, isn't going to happen uniformly. In Hackney, where I live now, it is Stoke Newington and Dalston that have most of the community activity, and Stoke Newington that has an active Transition Town group. But these things can't happen in isolation because a sustainable community can't survive when its neighbours are not sympathetic.

A sustainable community should act as an attractive model for others, whether the original ideas were appealing or not. Who wouldn't want to live in a more peaceable place with lots going on? And similarly, a sustainable community should be one that shares with its neighbours, helping those in need.

This is one concept that works at any scale. Certainly, the North has become wealthy partly by exploiting the South and that imbalance cannot last for ever. I don't believe there is a significant risk of the UK being overrun by immigrants for the UK, but the wealth divide we have created does lead to increased migration. Injustice is not sustainable.

Many things create a community, including history, natural and artificial boundaries, transport hubs and routes, common cultures, and market centres. The result, in Hackney as in many other places, is that some communities thrive and dominate as Stoke Newington is doing now, while others like Homerton wither and have little to identify themselves.

This ecology of communities means that some will be subsumed into others although the physical geography remains the same, and some places will find a new identity if not a new name and follow the lead of more successful neighbours. If there is successful and meaningful sustainable development in one area, its development will affect surrounding areas, absorbing some and influencing others.
The moral element of sustainable development should be as contagious as the ideas behind and results of the development itself. If anything, the principled and generous behaviour of a more sustainable community should be more infectious than simply being seen to have a better life.

This entire argument presupposes that there is a moral vacuum, when the reality is more one of moral relativism. Spend any time in a poor community and you will find that most people have a strong moral code: respect for ones parents and a general sense of fairness are particularly important. Many sanctify the home. Many will not tolerate discourteous or profane language. Most young people form strong bonds with their peers and demonstrate great moral strength in preserving those bonds.

Aside from the fact that everyone is different, it is simply wrong to say that amorality is rife because some people do not share all your values. Levels of crime are higher in poorer neighbourhoods but that does not mean that there is no humanity for sustainable development to build upon.

Some myths destroyed

Another election looms for those that care. In the next two months, party activists and political journalists will try to enthuse everyone else about voting for local councilors and members of parliament. Everyone else will likely wonder what all the fuss is about.

I will follow the General Election in the way I follow the football World Cup or a drama series on television. I will invest my emotions in the arguments and take sides with those I feel some connection to or empathy with, but I know that ultimately it is insignificant. Insignificant although, like Hunter S Thompson, I have an addiction to political contests and I am the sort of amateur wonk that sits up waiting for European Parliament election results.

One thing the professional wonks will certainly debate will be the low voter turnout, which will mostly be attributed to apathy. Apathy in an election that is seen as a foregone conclusion, which will bring an uninspiring, insipid Tory to Number Ten, is only to be expected, but it misses a growing constituency of deliberate non-voters. My constituency.

I have given my reasons for not voting above the local level before, but there are some counter-arguments that also need to be identified as myths. Like myths of good English usage, once identified, they can be appreciated and then put aside.

Myth 1: people fought and died for universal suffrage, so not voting dishonours their struggle.

Obviously, the first part of this is true. Reformists and suffragettes devoted, and sometimes lost, their lives getting the vote for almost every adult citizen. And whatever the causes and motivations, the Second World War stopped the growth of fascism in Europe.

The question that remains is how to honour that legacy. It would be non-sensical to think that our form of democracy should neither be stagnant nor evolve without popular examination. It is a common fallacy among US conservatives that the founding fathers created and/or revealed true democracy, and that it has not and should not be altered again. The US Constitution was almost immediately amended by the Bill of Rights, and has been amended another seventeen times. Not every amendment was progressive or successful, but the rules for running the federation include rules for changing the rules.

If you believe that democracy can and should evolve beyond nations and federations, and that not voting is one suitable method of effecting that change, then you do more honour to past reformers by following your beliefs than by devaluing your suffrage by giving it to the least-worst candidate for Member of Parliament.

Myth 2: significant localisation can be achieved through election to a higher parliament.

Also covered in previous posts. Power is what drives change, so it is a rare politician that will give power away.

Myth 3: it is better to vote for something with somewhat positive intentions (e.g. Labour) than not vote and allow the election of something worse (e.g. the BNP).

It is easy to think that we have to use every resource to oppose extremism, and it is not obvious that voting in national elections is a negative act. But if our aim is to deligitimise national government then we will have demonstrably succeeded when an MP is elected by only 5% of the eligible voters, whether the winning candidate is Green, Labour or BNP.

It would, I admit, give me great pain if I could contribute to the election of a Green MP but did not. I never said it was easy to stick to your principles.

Myth 4: we are working towards a unified world with one government, which equates to world peace.

If positive political change is driven by utopian vision then it can also be driven by visions that are unhelpful. Utopia by definition is nowhere and therefore unachievable, but some are more unachievable than others.

In science fiction, one-world government is not unusual, possibly so that inter-planetary politics can act as a substitute for international politics, but also because many writers think societies will evolve towards global harmony. In Star Wars and The Fifth Element, advanced planetary civilisations are mostly ordered and peaceful, truly post-modern and technocratic.

This assumes a homogeneity that cannot be desirable, surely? Our cultures have more to distinguish and differentiate themselves than colourful languages, clothes and customs. And that is within a single species. Self-determination preserves the differences in value hierarchy, moral code and cultural history, and self-determination cannot be achieved under a one-world government.

More practically, bigger government simply means greater alienation of the electorate. Opinions are formed and elections won and lost by popular media. As the political race gets bigger, the differentiators between candidates are reduced to the soundbite, the smile and the wave.

Want sustainability: need more

I've avoided it before, but I have to dish the same old quote from Bruntland: "sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." There are many other definitions that are just as good, but this one famously talks about "needs" rather than activities. Perhaps, after four years of debate on the bleak future for humanity, the Commission felt that we could only plan for necessity rather than desire.

Others have made the connection between Bruntland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brundtland_Commission) and Maslow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs) since both use the same frame of reference. It only seems right that we should aspire to meet all our needs, including self-actualisation, so any sustainable development has to leave room for or nurture individuals' whole being.

Among our higher needs is an appreciation of the balance between the individual's desires and the effect that acting on those desires will have on others and society as a whole: an appreciation and formation of a personal moral code that interfaces effectively with others'. The exact method by which such a code is developed and adopted cannot be immaterial: codes handed down by religious order will be different from those developed in conservative societies, which will be different again from those developed in more liberal communities.

Although the differences might be critical, it would be hypocritical to say that one methodology should be preferred over another if we value self-determination. Which is one reason why it would be wrong to add transcendence or spirituality to the top of Maslow's hierarchy as some have done. One may believe that morality is handed down from God, but one cannot impose that belief on others.

Similarly, although several religions (notably Buddhism) see transcendence as the ultimate goal in personal development, that does not make it a need that has to be facilitated through sustainable development. Further, it cannot facilitate transcendence. One can be achieved in exclusion of the other.

What can be argued is that in facilitating moral development, an organisation has to be moral itself. Codes of conduct are not unusual, but are usually part of corporate or political image building. A social organisation with a moral code would behave somewhat differently, and the recent snow highlighted one particular way how.

Like many companies in the UK, my employer either believed that clearing the snow from outside the building was not its responsibility, or that clearing snow would leave it liable for injuries suffered subsequently. In the latter case, behaviour is decided by straightforward risk assessment. But what would the "right" thing be to do? Surely, for the good of the community that my company is part of, we should have cleared the snow and taken the risk?

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Another thing that Bruntland's definition brings attention to is that the Commission was clearly talking about development and not sustainability. Committed effort by motivated individuals has moved the mainstream focus to the point that surely we should be talking about "sustainability development"?

A kick in the teeth for optimism

There has been a recent smattering of blog posts and discussions out there about the need for optimism in the sustainability movement. The gist being that the only alternative is pessimism, and that is neither practicable nor appealing. Certainly, if we are pessimistic about our chances of success then we will be demotivated and will essentially be admitting that our project is not likely to succeed.



I might seem like a matter of semantics, but I think the only thing we can allow ourselves is hope. The difference between hope and optimism is the difference between a thoughtful human and an open-mouthed labrador. I know which one I would prefer to be.



Having said all this before, I succumbed to optimism recently. I thought that the dangers of climate change and the action necessary were so clear that our national leaders and negotiators would do the right thing. Just this once.



I'm not going to lay particular blame or analyse the Copenhagen process in detail: others have done that to death. But I do have to admit that I was wrong. The process of international negotiation is inherently unsustainable, which is what I had always said before: undemocratic, untransparent and subject to disproporionate vested interests. There is a possibility that an agreement with half-decent, binding targets will be made in Mexico this year, but we can't count on it. Besides which, time is running out.



Somewhere between luck, the effects of campaigns like 10:10 (http://www.1010uk.org/) and movements like Transition Towns (http://transitiontowns.org/), we might get through this crisis. But there is no place for optimism. 10:10 might demonstrate that ordinary people are aware of what has to happen and are willing to make the changes needed, even if it involves expense or changes in lifestyle.



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Another dose of cold reality came from reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle). The book is seen as the predecessor of modern exposes of the food industry and working life at the bottom of the social ladder such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Food_Nation) and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed). It would be wrong to leave it in the footnotes however.



Towards the end of The Jungle, Sinclair spells out the alternative vision he sees for America and the world. It is a hardcore socialist vision, where the proletariat takes control of all industries and runs them for the benefit of all people, sharing the profits and making safe and fulfilling workplaces. Interestingly, he also catalogues the counter-arguments given by working-class voters: that it is unreasonable to believe that power could be rested away from the barons of meat, steel and coal, that a free-market capitalist system is more efficient than any alternative, and that people's place in society is somehow predestined and immutible.



A century later and many of those arguments against the practicability of socialism, which are also directed against green anarchism, do hold some weight. Capitalism itself has evolved to entrench the interests of big business, with oil now the dominant force. Corporations have have also evolved so that there are no longer industry barons such as John D Rockefeller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller) that can become permanent hate figures; for comparison, even if he had not gone to jail and died, Kenneth Lay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Lay) was an entirely removable figurehead at Enron. What's more, corporate activity has become globalised and global corporations have negotiated themselves into operating conditions that cannot be rationally justified.



State organisations have also managed to build a reputation for terrible inefficiency, usually bound to bureaucracy apparently for the sake of bureaucracy. Anyone who has suffered at the hands of one of the United States' Departments of Motor Vehicles might find it hard to believe that a state-owned industry could avoid a decline into nincompoopery.



Why should a green anarchist vision succeed where the rabble-rousing might of socialism has had few successes? The same vested interests and arguments of potential inefficiencies stand against it. Worse, capitalism has evolved to be more pernicious rather than less.



On behalf of socialism, I would point out that the same old inequities still remain to be opposed. This is a matter of principle rather than pragmatism. It is still wrong that wealth is accumulated at the expense of the most vulnerable. And that is also one of the principles of green anarchism. Ecology simply adds the evidence that wealth is finite and cannot sustain indefinite growth, which means that this is not simply a short-term limitation.



Further, anarchism may be spelled out as an ideology, or family of ideologies, but it does not have to be espoused in the way that state socialism does. A movement that wants to change state-level organisation has to build consensus amongst the population of each nation. A majority is needed in elections or enough revolutionaries are needed to overthrow the government. Anarchist ideas and initiatives can be taken up by any community group, whether they are labelled as such or not.



There are enough of these ideas and initiatives in action today to give me hope.

The hero in all of us

One of the reasons that I studied (if that's the right word for going to a few lectures) physics at university is that it has a very simple view of creation. General relativity, quantum electrodynamics and statistical mechanics might get quite complicated, but they never try to address the question: "Why?"

The question is probably unanswerable, but it is part of our nature to ask it. Having wondered why, we also seem to find it impossible to accept that things might just be the way they are for no reason at all, so we attach meaning where none already existed.

This is part of the premise for The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces). And since we share the same psyche, the meanings we tend to attach to our reality share similar themes, conforming to what Campbell labelled the "monomyth".

The Hero was first published in 1949, but gained noteriety when cited by George Lucas as an influence in writing Star Wars. Ever since, Hollywood producers have sought scripts with similar elements and structure.

The hero, the quest, the journey through the underworld, the tests, etc., have become de riguer and, as a result, movies have become depressingly predictable. You can see the pattern in everything from Dodgeball to Die Hard, but The Matrix is its ultimate update. Or should that be upgrade?

What Hollywood missed, or discarded, are Cambell's final thoughts on what the monomyth did for the ordinary individual when the myths were developed, and what they tell the modern individual. It's all very well knowing why the deeds of Beowulf and Odysseus appeal to the human brain, but how did that help the ploughman and what can it do for the telesales operator, other than provide a distraction from drudgery?

Cambell's view is that historically myths provided an analogy for everyone's life. We are all the hero on a quest. The quest is probably not what we think it is but we will learn and grow as a result. What we learn is to accept our changing role within family and community.

These lessons are still relevant in the modern world, although the rise of nations and corporate globalisation make it even more difficult to feel connected to community. Contentment can still come fom being the ordinary hero.

If nothing else, Campbell's words amused me when they came back to mind in John Lewis, while buying a vacuum cleaner. I reluctantly answered the hero's call, journeyed far (on the Overground and Underground), was assisted in my quest (by my wife), faced my ordeal (finding the toilets), passed through the underworld (the Waitrose food hall) to the reward (a Dyson, waiting to be picked up from Customer Orders) before returning home to share my treasure (with an unappreciative cat).

Myths are full of the extra-ordinary, so we know what is expected when we hear the call. And the call to extra-ordinary or difficult tasks is more common than you might think. There is always a need to speak up for the voiceless, stand up to bullies, take up the minority cause. Myths reassure us that there is something magical in simply doing the thing we believe is right.

Further, the line between ordinary and extra-ordinary is impossible to draw. Disease and disability, childbirth and child rearing, devotion to parents and siblings, are ordinary challenges that often require extra-ordinary character.

What is usually lost in the Hollywood version of the monomyth is the analogy to the everyday. As a result, we are allowed to long for a life like Luke Skywalker or Neo without any hope of fulfilment.

But the Jedi Order and the Matrix are both real and unreal, now that they have become rooted in our psyche. They provide us with another set of analogies and sometimes a touchstone for modern life.