My What You Can Do (to Save the World) list
How
do I put this delicately? Most of the activists I know just don't have
much of a personal life. Just as work/life balance is such a big deal
in the corporate workplace, so is the challenge for the attention of
activists between their public causes and private passions. And the
greater these private passions, one might expect, the less time left
for activism.
To the extent activism is Let-Self-Change
activity, and is a family affair, it might actually be enhanced by
love. But if that love manifests itself in indulgence of someone who is
complacent or acquisitive, it can be exhausting and leave no time for
progressive pursuits. There are only so many hours in a day.
Once
again it comes down, I think, to doing what we must, then what's easy,
and then what's fun. Finding and pursuing love is an imperative for the
vast majority of us. It's hard to make love last, and when we find it
we dedicate an inordinate amount of time and energy to nurturing it.
When we lose it, we become preoccupied with its absence and
rediscovering it. It is a lifelong imperative.
How can
philosophical or political passion compete with that? If we have to
spend much of our waking hours as wage slaves, in a job unrelated to
our real passion, and then we dedicate an additional block of time to
those we love, how much time can be left? My guess would be that for
many, the cost of putting activism first is putting both job and family
second, and sometimes losing both in the process. And for even more,
the risk of that happening is too great, so activism gets relegated to
the back burner, and becomes one of those 'do when I have have time'
tasks that never get done.
My observations about love:
- Most
people are capable of loving a lot of different people in their lives,
and would if it were socially acceptable to do so. We are not by nature
monogamous, IMO.
- Most people have great difficulty making love
last, perhaps for the same reason. It's great while it lasts, but it
often doesn't.
- Most people don't have any real conscious choice about whom they fall in love with. It's chemistry.
All
of this would seem to mitigate against us having many cycles left over
to make the world a better place, beyond Let-Self-Change and our own
small circles of loved ones. That's just the way we are, obsessed with
the personal needs of the moment.
And this is, perhaps, the
Achilles' heel in my idea to create a world of self-sufficient
intentional communities of people of like minds that we love. In
pre-civilization times we were limited in our choice of who to love to
those in our tribe. But now we have such vast choice, and so many
perfect, idealized, larger-than-life models to dream about, that (in
every sense of the word) we are no longer willing to settle. So even a
polyamory community of self-selected people is likely to leave us
unsatisfied, restless to know what we're missing. We've let the genie
out of the bottle and s/he won't go back in.
In his book, The Upside of Down,
Thomas Homer-Dixon says the determinant of whether we will rise to the
occasion and overcome panarchy (the cascading crises that result when a
whole series of related systems become overextended and collapse)
through catagenesis (building resilience and healthy renewal following
collapse) is whether we have the moral and existential values needed to care enough,
to transcend our utilitarian preoccupations. Homer-Dixon sees the
majority of the world sliding into automatic behaviours, becoming less
than human, mere consumers. He may have a point, though I think the
growing anomie of our society is more complex (a consequence of learned
helplessness etc.) than this. But in any case our moral and existential
values cannot compete for our time with the needs of the moment.
We are who we are.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
