Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [88]
While living modestly, these peoples’ lives were filled with sumptuous dreams they worked to transform into reality. While they certainly suffered from bouts of frustration and dismay over the years, none of these greats surrendered to what we call today “political burn-out”—or worse, just plain jadedness.
“How do you do it?” I used to hear myself ask my own teacher, Murray Bookchin, who taught and inspired me during my formative years. “How do you stay so furiously engaged?” I’d ask Murray, whose eyes refracted the light of the fires raging during the Parisian Sections—a righteous historical struggle where everyday people fought for the right to live in a decentralized directly democratic society.
The fact that they lost was immaterial. The fact that they imagined such a world and fought for it: now that was something.
“How do I do it?” Murray would ask, roosting deep into an old overstuffed chair in Bea Bookchin’s living room where Murray used to lead study groups on social ecology during the 1980s. “Once you’ve tasted the flavor of freedom on your tongue, how can you not yearn for another taste?” Murray said, chuckling.
Even back then, I knew it wasn’t that simple. As I matured a bit, I learned that this level of commitment had to do with the “motor” if you will, that drives the political theory and activism of the “long-time doers.”
“It’s about ethical versus instrumental reason,” Murray said to me, so many times over the years. This discussion buoyed me up as I tried to cultivate my own revolutionary focus and morale. “If you are driven by instrumental reason alone,” Murray said, “you will be guided by logic of efficiency and pragmatism. You will be forever running toward the lesser of two evils rather than pursuing our own dreams. If you are driven instead by ethical reason, then you will be guided by logic of what ought to be, what is just and humanistic—as well as simply “doable.”
During my life, I have noticed that environmental activists remain active only when driven by ethical reason. The long-rangers have a gleaming golden carrot of justice dangling before them. This carrot is palpable and irresistible; they cannot ignore it as they go about their lives.
However, if they yield to logic of instrumentalism—pervasive in an age of bureaucracy and neo-liberalism—then our eyes will be locked forever on the grim and dank “bottom line,” calculating the “feasibility” or “productivity” of our efforts.
If environmental activists evaluate their work in terms of immediate efficacy and pragmatic “do-ableness,” they often collapse after five to ten years (sometimes far fewer) under the weight of abject disappointment. They resent themselves, their movements, and the world, for not changing fast enough.
The old timers I used to know—the kind of person I pray to become—were driven by ethical reason. They believed that what is utopian is just as real as the world in which we live. To be a little fancy, I’ll refer to Hegel’s truism about the worlds of the real and the actual. For Hegel, the actual world is the world now, as it is. It represents all of the “actualities” that swirl around us like the dizzying rings of Saturn. The world of the real, on the other hand, is one sculpted by justice and ethics. The idea of small-scaled, confederated, ecological, and directly democratic societies is a reality worth fighting for.
It’s real to me.
Murray Bookchin was the kind of visionary who saw the “shining city” of freedom. He had the rare ability to articulate it, making it real for those around him. This shining city stands just at the glittering edge of a pink silvery sunrise. Sometimes I see its phosphorescence in a puddle