Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [33]
To realize the so-far inchoate movement that all of our good projects have not become, we can configure them, each of us, in such a way that they resonate with and enhance this basic goal of looking for fulfillment in people rather than things, service rather than domination. I like David Solnit’s language (I usually like his language): “If we, as a movement of movements, adopt a people-power strategic framework … we will have a viable … strategy. It’s clear that we’re not all going to agree on any one (or two or three) campaigns, but it is possible for us to consciously adopt … a strategy that makes our various efforts complementary and cumulative.”*
It is not yet clear how we will, for starters, convince people to change their desires from things to relationships with others, but we do know that human beings imitate one another intensely, and that someone who is perceived to be happy is often, though unconsciously, imitated by someone who secretly knows he or she is not. It may not take persuasion so much as demonstration. After all, that’s how advertising works. We can use that psychological vulnerability, for once, to our advantage.
As Solnit points out, this core “revolution of values” (again King’s term) is the foundation, but it is one on which we have to build. We need some strategic overview, and coherence in our behavior and our message. It’s not at all clear—to me, at least—how to make this happen, but it’s very clear that it can happen, and probably with or without a single prominent leader. In these times, it may have to be without such a person: so be it. But we know enough about “tipping points” and “paradigm shifts” today to know that a compelling idea can pull millions of people together, though their participation in carrying it forward may be very diverse.
No matter where you start in thinking about this huge challenge, you realize that we are not alone: Gandhi has been there. He is the one person in the modern world who worked this all out on every level, strategic and principled, from the minutest detail to the grandest overview. Without his inspiration and his guidance I do not believe we can carry off this revolution at all. Let me close with an example.
Gandhi’s campaign for India’s freedom (and the downfall of colonialism as we knew it) was a balance of constructive program, where you go ahead and build the future without waiting for permission from your oppressors, and the complementary effort I call obstructive program, civil disobedience, or Satyagraha, to resist oppression at key points and propitious times. Ideally the constructive part would do its work so well that the confrontational part would be minimal. (A similar balance is proposed today by Joanna Macy). Gandhi found that constructive program needed a single project that symbolized and gave coherence to the whole, something everyone could take part in, and for his situation the ideal candidate was khadi: the spinning, weaving, and distribution of homespun cloth. There were many reasons for the choice, which I go into in my book, The Search for a Nonviolent Future, but what gave khadi so much power was that it was non-confrontational but subversive: spinning your own cloth was your own perfectly legal business, but it put British manufactures, and the exploitive system built on them, out of business. Khadi also dealt with a basic need, the second item in “food, clothing, and shelter.” And of course it could be locally, indeed individually organized. What would be the equivalent today? After talking this over for years with many audiences, I believe we have come up with a darn good candidate: local food. It’s basic, legal (which you sometimes want), local, healthy—and would put one of the most damaging forms of industrialization, agribusiness, out of business.
What, in the end, should every one of us do, along with getting involved in growing or at least consuming local foodstuffs? Here’s the list I propose:
–Study Gandhi.
–Opt out of the commercial system. Just don’t buy it, either the products or—more importantly