Why I'm not a Something Something Rights Activist

It's raining, at the moment, but (vide supra) probably not for long. We may get another week and then that's yer lot until next winter. So I'm trying to do what I can with this rain, but find my thoughts turning increasingly to England, and the wise thrush, and all of that.

England. I left the place in '85, and haven't been back except for flying visits (holidays when my mother was alive). I watch enough YT and read enough Guardian to know that the place has become unrecognisable since, and that I would be a foreigner, of the comical stuck in a timewarp sort, like Rees Mogg only loucher and more disgusting. I wouldn't fit in any better there than I do anywhere else. I'm a statistical anomaly on any scale you can invent. Even my vowels are behind the times.

But none of this stops me fantasising about, what was it, old ladies cycling to church through a morning johnmajor, or in my version, lining up at the National Gallery or plonking down in a Turkish tea-shop somewhere off the Strand, and adenoidal junior bankers on buses reading Dick Francis or Neville Shute, or ... hang on, let me get the book - "Grown men pretending to be battleships at Peasholm Park". In other words, I still imagine England as a place where you can be as peculiar as you like, and other peculiar people will eventually stick to your duffel coat like burrs, and you'll have friends or at least be tolerated (being tolerated being the English version of having friends). A place where you can form a Hoole and District Catholic River-Widening Club (which is Python but only just) and expect members, three at least. Of course I'm wrong, and the Guardian proves it to me daily.

This quiet annihilation of civil society seen in the disappearance of what used to be a proliferation of a thousand earnest, enthusiastic wrongnesses does not bode well for the country's future, but to be honest, I'm past caring about the country's future. I don't live there, you see.

Still, it's relevant to what I want to do now, which is correct and expand on one or two points I stumbled into in the last few posts and didn't deal with too well.

I mentioned the "govt versus civil society" dichotomy without explaining it, noting only that I was opposed to morality being imposed by the first, but not so much by the second. Let's clarify this. Government here refers to the usual: a legislature, police, prisons, humdrum institutionalised pilfering, a locus for power and privilege. We assume there's some sort of transmission mechanism, some sort of "democracy", that makes it at least minimally responsive to the torpid, punch-drunk stirrings of monstrous collectives, but don't set too much store by that. We ask only that it keep out of our way as much as possible. We demand this because we know, more or less instinctively, that governments are not bound by responsibility, which is the foundation for any workable ethic. One schmuck takes a decision knowing that some other schmuck, in four years' time or a multiple thereof, will have to field any blame accruing to the consequences. What can we reasonably expect of such an arrangement? (Er... one of Shaw's, your majesty.) The smirking face of Tony Blair, the genocidal criminal who will never see the inside of a prison cell, should serve as sufficient Q.E.D. to this entire wretched theorem.

Civil society is different. By civil society I mean all those groups and channels of communication which permit people to associate freely outside of the coercive structures imposed by government. In a healthy society, you get to join a group, and are accepted, on the basis of taking responsibility, even if it is only the responsibility of contributing to it in some way, with ideas, with cupcakes, with your esteemed presence at meetings. And to rise within a group you need to take on more responsibility, and people will hold you to that. Each group will find its own mechanisms to prevent buck-passing: some of them aren't pretty, but if they last, they can be presumed to work.

In civil society, you are expected to lead from the front, and if you want someone's chips pissed on, you have to piss on them yourself. Nothing like government, I'm sure you'll agree.

Being held responsible doesn't magically prevent people being wrong, as experience daily proves. But it does raise the stakes enough so that being wrong is something you will take thoughtful steps to avoid.

Which is why (returning to a previous point) I don't think Governments should be telling us what pronouns to use, or even which bizarrely trivial attribute of a person makes them belong to a "protected category". Nor, needless to say, should they be telling sporting federations what gender is unacceptable for part-time symbolic prizes or marketing ploys to belong to. Nor, for that matter, should they be telling us what we should or shouldn't eat or smoke. Saying this does not mean or imply that I think these questions are unimportant or that there are no ethical or moral questions worth exploring around these topics. It doesn't mean, either, that I think social pressure is bad. No human society could function without mechanisms of social pressure, or without shared notions and conventions regarding what is and isn't acceptable behaviour towards others. The problem is, to start with, that attempting to exert this pressure or impose these morals via government is an abdication of personal responsibility, and will remain so as long as votes are secret. You get the government to do something stupid, the consequences are catastrophic, and you, the culpable instigator, are nowhere to be seen. That kind of irresponsible. For me, cowardly seems like a good description of that whole process.

As I always say, I will never ask the government, with my vote, to do something that I wouldn't be prepared to do personally, given the necessary means and tools, in front of a TV camera if asked.

Which brings me to why I'm not an "activist", or rather, I don't identify as one. Quite simply: inasmuch as we participate in civil society, we are all activists: we assume our chosen responsibilities and then act to fulfil them, and if this society maintains some measure of health, those actions will have consequences, will bring about some change (even though if we want that change to be macroscopic, we had better act in concert to some degree, and/or find leadership qualities within ourselves: count me out).  Against this idea, current society proposes a different model, according to which the only real or significant "actor" is government: if you want government to do something, you form a lobby, a pressure group, you "campaign" to force or persuade the government to bring about the change you want, and the people who participate in this, and only they, are the "activists". Which makes everyone else what? "Passivists"?

I'm not saying that pressure should not be put on governments. I'm not proposing to rewrite the rules of Western democracy. I'm merely describing two conceptual models of the political process, and recommending one of the two as healthier than the other. How a widespread adoption of this conceptual model would impact society remains to be seen, but naturally I believe it would be positive, in ways that can be easily enumerated. I'm a linguist, so the only thing I'm really qualified to pronounce on is how we use words, and what our use of language reveals about what we think, and perhaps in a few cases how we might think about things a little better or more clearly. No great matter.

I don't think a society will be very healthy if the only significant actor is government, and the only people who are in a position to influence government are lobbies, whose power derives either from commercial/industrial might, or from the fact that the pressure groups reflect the interests of the leisured classes (the people with enough time on their hands to become "activists"), or from the unexamined sociobiological prejudices that underpin effective rhetoric (in the case of, e.g. feminism and its dependence on an evolutionary gynocentric bias), where everyone else is merely "the masses", "the governed", the sheeple, whose only participation is of the sort that carries no responsibility.

And, parenthetically, I think the causal phenomenon I've just described is one reason (among many) why Marxism always seems to produce oligarchies and genocides. It's often been observed that, while Marx insisted that the revolution should be led by "the proletariat", assumed to constitute the majority of the population, in practice (enter: Vlad Lenin) it was always down to a "vanguard" of people from upper-middle-class backgrounds, for the simple reason that working people, save the odd sleepless energumen, do not have the time to go to meetings and demonstrations - to be "activists" - nor the specialised education needed to navigate linguistically the concentric barb-wire rings of doctrinal purity and rightspeak without inadvertently excluding themselves (if you want details of how this works, I can provide anecdotes). Obvious when you think about it.

You might say that the system we have, while imperfect, is as good as it gets, but I think history tells a different story, and if I had my lifetime again, I'd want to go into this a lot more than I am now able to. Way I see it, we are currently recreating absolutist regimes along pre-Enlightenment lines, with only a veneer of stage-managed, technocratic "democracy" maintained in order to gain the assent of the governed - this is especially obvious here in South America, where developments tend to be less subtle and more in-your-face than in countries with more sophisticated media propaganda networks. The process can be tracked by simply observing the creeping spread of government regulation of what once were personal freedoms and responsibilities. This corrosion of individual freedom is invariably justified by appealing to a false dichotomy: either something is regulated by government or there is a Hobbesian free-for-all, with people at the bottom of the scrum getting hurt. No allowance is made for the possibility that in the absence of government regulation, people and groups might learn (painfully, slowly, but learn) to regulate themselves: on the contrary, anything that smacks of self-regulation is cynically derided as privilege or special pleading. Thus, we get Orwellian monstrosities like Ofcom, and the European Union, among other sticky, gelatinous horrors.

Against this: well, if you're lucky enough to be talking to a software engineer, you can appeal to their modular, object-oriented instincts to explain why making all your variables global and all your functions public is a really bad idea; if you're talking to a biologist, you could do worse than slip them a copy of Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine, wherein holons, and by extension, subsidiarity. If you're talking to someone who's tried to assemble an IKEA wardrobe, well, bad luck. (An IKEA instruction sheet, the ultimate statist propaganda, as befits a Swedish conglomerate: you are not worthy, you are too dumb, you need the experts, you need central planning and pre-assembly, else your wife will wake up one morning with her left ear bolted to her right knee.)

So to return to the point, I'm not an "activist" not just because I have neither time nor influence to bring to bear, but also because if I called myself that, I'd be implicitly subscribing to the view that "what matters" is government, is influencing government, is changing laws or getting new ones passed, is regulating everything from the top down, from a central palpitating starfish hub of glorious, suicidal irresponsibility: I'd be conceding, by default, the point at issue. And while there are plenty of laws I'd like to see changed, or even better repealed, and I admire the people who go after that, I think what needs to happen much more urgently is a renaissance of individual responsibility, incarnated or reflected in forms of non-governmental social organisation dedicated to solving specific problems without recourse to boot or truncheon. And the people who populate such organisations are not, traditionally, "activists", but enthusiasts (or here, in Ecuador, where the minga is still a tradition, they are just "people").

Obviously, if people are accustomed to relying on government for certain things, then when responsibility for those things is devolved to the stakeholders, various pigs' ears will inevitably be made of trying to run them. People need time to learn. This is not an argument against letting them learn.

I'll leave it there for now: haven't even got on to rights, so I expect there'll need to be a Part Two.