immanence

Like many, I’ve been finding it difficult not to feel an upwelling of anxiety as the scope and scale of the climate emergency has become more and more obvious, as Trump-style political (non-)responses — precisely the kinds of responses that will only make things much worse — have scaled themselves up around the world, and as new forms of political manipulation have been enabled via social media and other technologies, all of which inscribe the most serious cause of the problems — wealth inequality and the interest vested in maintaining it — ever deeper into the matrix of human options. To the extent that there is so much to be gained from maintaining the status quo (or lost from challenging it), to that extent will things continue to get worse. And if keeping up with all these developments seems so difficult, responding to them adequately has seemed almost impossible.

Movements and initiatives like Extinction Rebellion provide glimmers of hope on the possibility of mobilization — the next week and a half (Earth Week) is a particularly active time for them (see here on how you can join a local initiative).

At the same time, the sense of imminent crisis and urgency in all such activism carries an affective thrust that doesn’t necessarily model a healthy and “sustainable” mode of activity. (Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland deal with this to some extent in their recent book, Urgency in the Anthropocene.) The sense that there is so much to do right now — that we should be out in the streets rioting, waving our flags, poking our cameras into politicians’ faces, and constantly delivering monologues (so as to break into the 24-hour news cycle, to keep our opponents on their toes, and to keep ourselves from losing momentum) — all of that can contribute to the sense of heightened anxiety.

I’m wondering if instead we need a move toward slowness — the slowing down, even to a stand-still, of all the rush — for instance, by focusing simply on a single clear task as an alternative to business-as-usual, and by doing it with a gentle yet obstinate sense of focus, rigor, deliberation, and presence.

I see this in Greta Thunberg’s activism. “When your house is on fire,” she says in the video below, “and you want to keep your house from burning to the ground, then that does require some level of panic.” Acknowledging the reasons for panic, however, and doing so consistently and resolutely, is not the same as panicking. A simple act — students walking out of school to strike for the climate — repeated regularly (every Friday) can be more effective than the constant effort to do something, sign something, join something, yell something, always in order to (and with the fear of failing to) have some effect on someone in the halls of power. The flurry of activism builds up a momentum around it, which is useful for its own maintenance, but it can also make others feel they are on the outside of it — that it’s a merry-go-round revolving too fast for them to join.

In contrast, the simple stopping of activity might turn out to be more welcoming.

Let’s all walk out. Let’s sit there (wherever it may be in our cities, our towns, our villages) until the crisis is taken seriously, and until those with responses adequate to the scale of the crisis are heard. Let’s stop and not respond to those jeering and heckling on the sidelines. Let’s welcome others to stop with us, to acknowledge our predicament, and that business-as-usual cannot continue. Kids, parents, grandparents. Let’s bring it all to a halt.

Happy Earth Day next Monday. Happy Earth Week.