This is not a drill, p.13
This Is Not a Drill, page 13
In Porto Alegre, a large city in Brazil, budget priorities (which are in fact the most important political decisions, aside from war) were debated by tens of thousands. Over ten years, this ‘participatory’ process resulted in a much more even distribution of public services like schools, health clinics and sanitation. Although this outcome was reported by the World Bank, it’s obvious: if everyone has a fair crack in the decision-making, it’s likely that the resulting decisions will be fair. Notably, party politics fizzled out in Porto Alegre. When the people took decisions for themselves, the need for parties disappeared. Corruption dramatically declined because no longer could the political elites demand bribes and pay-offs for city contracts now decided transparently.
And right now, in north-east Syria, a system of ‘bottom up’ democracy has been put into place, and it’s working. Thanks to the collapse of the Assad regime in that region, the chance was opened up to set up a new way of self-governing. Decisions are taken at the communal or village level. If the decisions are about larger things than the village, representatives are appointed to regional assemblies. But, crucially, they can only confirm policies that are agreed by the communal assemblies. The representatives are recallable. And very deliberate processes are in place to ensure that women are co-chairs of all assemblies and that religious or ethnic minorities (the region is majority Kurdish) are given an equal voice. I’ve seen this new democracy – which in fact reflects more ancient and enduring principles – in practice. People like it, and it works. As the war in Syria winds down, there will be a chance to assess it more rigorously and, I hope, for others to learn from it. There, people support the government because it is theirs. It’s a long time since I’ve heard anyone in the West applaud their democratic system.
In Syria it was war that opened the opportunity for radical change. In the West, with deeply entrenched hierarchies and institutions that embody inequality and injustice (and a rapaciously damaging form of economics), the necessary revolution is harder. But you don’t get revolutionary change by asking for it or by demanding it from the current political system. You have to practise it. We need to change our way of politics, and the culture and habits of how we relate to one another. This isn’t about a fancy diagram of new institutions but about changing how we do politics, how we deal with others (and disagreements) and indeed how we live as individuals and as a collective. And we can only learn by getting on with it.
So it’s a local approach, at least at first. In the city of Barcelona a new political force is putting these kinds of ideas into everyday practice: assemblies of residents who debate and decide the stuff that matters to them, including how to deal with the excessive tourism that is ruining their city, producing direction for policies that the council and the mayor try to implement. Anyone can set up an assembly, for instance for a local school or hospital. The crucial requirement is that everyone with a stake is present and given an equal voice: parents, teachers and, yes, students; patients, staff and families. If it’s done right – and it isn’t easy – then the resulting decisions will carry far more legitimacy than a sweeping top-down, one-size-fits-all government policy, or the views of the local MP. Indeed, that MP will have to pay attention. If these assemblies spread, a new kind of politics will come into life. Regional and, indeed, national assemblies composed of local representatives could then be established to sort out larger-scale decisions. But, remember, these assemblies are not there to tell the ‘lower’ – in fact, higher – level local bodies what to do, they are there to implement what they’ve already decided: it’s the very opposite of the system we have to today, where the top decides and everyone else has to implement. What’s needed is a system where everyone decides and the national or regional level then administers those decisions.
You can call this ‘self-government’ or ‘bottom-up’ democracy. I prefer to call it, simply, democracy – real democracy. This is doable. Act, don’t ask. Learn by doing. Get on with it. Time is short.
AFTERWORD
ROWAN WILLIAMS
It just might work. It is just possible that sustained pressure will bring about a modest change of heart among decision-makers and ‘wealth creators’ and some serious adjustments might be made.
I can hear the sound of people not holding their breath. It isn’t only inertia that we have to contend with, unfortunately. It’s vested interests, passionate commitment to the goods and privileges we enjoy because of the way in which we – the collectively wealthy of the world – have chosen to use the material that lies around us.
That ‘lies around us’? In a way, there’s the problem. We have completely and successfully internalized the belief that the world is made up of dead stuff plus active minds and acquisitive wills. We have lost or suppressed any memory of what it is to live in alignment with the rest of the world, to understand how our bodies themselves ‘think’, how we are fed and sustained by the flow of life and information through matter. Our technological skills, instead of reminding us of our deep involvement in all this, produce ever more seductive ideas of how we could distance ourselves still further from the bodily structure that simply is what and where we are.
We both fantasize and worry about artificial intelligence, that ultimate technological triumph which we like to imagine will cut the umbilical cord uniting us with the complex, beautiful, alarming vortex of material energy we’re part of. We dream of liberation through AI when we have never learned or have forgotten the natural intelligence that belongs to living in the world as it is, the intelligence that we should be able to see all around us in the interaction of living and non-living existence, the pervasive energy that circulates in the universe, what one modern scientific writer (Kitty Ferguson; thank you, Kitty) wonderfully called ‘the fire in the equations’.
So it might not work. Many of the contributions to this book face this possibility (probability?) squarely, which is why it is such an uncomfortable book to read. But what makes it more than a jeremiad or an apocalypse is the sheer energy of conviction here, the conviction that change is worthwhile, whether or not it ‘succeeds’. This is because the writers of this book have done some joined-up thinking. The climate crisis is not some unfortunate accident but a reality that has been at the very least accelerated and measurably worsened by a set of habits and assumptions that have poisoned us as a human race. We may or may not escape a breakdown. But we can escape the toxicity of the mindset that has brought us here. And in so doing we can recover a humanity that is capable of real resilience.
To put it very directly: it is worth changing our habits of consumption, the default settings for our lifestyle, the various kinds of denial and evasion of bodily reality that suit us, the fantasies of limitless growth and control, simply because there are healthy and unhealthy ways of living in this universe. To go on determinedly playing the trumpet in a string quartet is a recipe for frustration and collapse and conflict. There are ways of learning to live better, to make peace with the world. Learn them anyway: they will limit the disease and destruction; they may even be seeds for a future we can’t imagine.
One of the essays here notes that addictive behaviour doesn’t alter overnight. The priority has to be the plain reduction of harm and risk, the fostering of better habits and (I’d want to add) the creation of strategies to salvage relationships, self-respect, even the possibility of joy. Extinction Rebellion recognizes that the climate crisis is a symptom of far wider kinds of malaise and corruption in the human imagination. That’s why the creation of panic, with its inevitable accompaniment of self-protection and withdrawal, is useless in addressing the challenge. We need a fresh sense of the delight to be found in human and non-human creation alike, a fresh sense of the importance of living in attunement with who we are and what the world is.
In the Book of Proverbs, in the Hebrew Scriptures, the divine wisdom is described as ‘filled with delight’ at the entire world which flows from that wisdom. For me as a religious believer, the denial or corruption of that delight is like spitting in the face of the life-giving Word who is to be met in all things and all people. I long for and pray for change, not just because I want to see my children and their children having a planet to live on, a future that will not be marked by a rising spiral of violent conflict over what is left of the world’s goods and a downward spiral of disadvantage and deprivation for the most vulnerable. I long and pray for it because here and now we need to recover our health, our balance – the skill of living with and in the neighbourhood that is this world.
‘Neighbourhood’ is not a bad word to think about in this connection. We’re told on the highest authority to love our neighbours as ourselves; and when Jesus Christ was invited to define who counted as a neighbour, he gave a rather surprising answer. The neighbour is the one who gives you life; and you never know where the next gift of life is coming from, so be alert and ready to love the stranger and the one you think is the enemy. But if the neighbour gives life, then the material world we are part of is obviously a ‘neighbour’ in the most dramatic way, the life-giving cradle of human existence, the source of air, water, food, not to mention beauty and challenge. ‘Neighbourhood’, ‘neighbourliness’ – we all understand pretty much what such words mean, and their homely and prosaic character is itself a reminder that finding a new and fuller way of being human is not at all finding a way of being superhuman (or post-human). It is about settling to inhabit where we are and who we are.
A revolution is a turn of the wheel, and the paradox of true revolution is that it takes us back from insanely dangerous places to having our feet on the ground again – coming back to where we started and knowing the place for the first time, as T. S. Eliot puts it in his greatest poem. In this time of massive public denial and displacement – so miserably evident in the ego-boosting dramas of the Brexit debates and the resurgence of surly, self-protective localism across the world’s political landscape, Extinction Rebellion urges on us the revolution of coming to ourselves, coming to truthfulness, healing the broken connection with what we are.
It might just work. It might allow a new space and a new imagination to flower in the face of incipient tragedy, a new hope and dignity for human agents, not least among the young, who can so easily feel completely ignored and unvalued in a world apparently indifferent to their future. Change the narrative, and who knows what is possible? Accept the diseased imagination of the culture we have created and the death count begins now. Anger, love and joy may sound like odd bedfellows, but these are the seeds of a future that will offer life – not success, but life.
WHAT IS YOUR PLACE IN THESE TIMES?
GAIL BRADBROOK
Standing above the crowds in Oxford Circus, in the pink Extinction Rebellion boat, Daiara Tukano spoke of existence as resistance. Coming from the Tukano indigenous nation of Brazil’s Upper Rio Negro, a community enduring severe human rights abuses and under sustained environmental attack, she told us that indigenous nations protect 82 per cent of the Earth’s biodiversity. Her message to us was that if you are alive at this moment in history, it is because you are here to do a job.
So what is your place in these times? Have you felt the call to join Extinction Rebellion? Which of your gifts are needed right now? Maybe you feel ill equipped. Bring your uncertainty, together with a willingness to learn. You may feel your gifts are simple. Simple offers, made with true love, are the stuff of life. Do you feel the call to be with us on the streets? Come along and remember the power of togetherness, when the people are determined and strong. Join us in our home communities, let us grow as we are needed. You are so very welcome.
These are times of unravelling, dissolving, transformation. Don’t expect to be the same person as before you took part in this journey. For each of us there is an individual challenge, there are waves of difficulties, obstacles, challenges that can be hard to anticipate and hard to name. It’s time to trust what is happening and to be willing to be changed.
We have shown in the UK something of what we are made of – which is perhaps fitting for the nation that unleashed this incredible and destructive industrial society on the world. Our challenge now is to look beyond our island nation and see with fresh eyes the rest of our family, spread across the world. To open our hearts. When we are able to fully feel the losses among us, then we will be able to do what these times truly require from us. All the children are our children. We can protect those closest to us only when we remember our love for those furthest away. This is an international rebellion, aligned with all peoples living with struggles to protect life on Earth. This is sacred.
BLOCK A
ROAD
WHAT YOU’LL NEED
– A banner long enough for the width of the road
– Rebels to hold it
– Literature to explain your action (and XR’s values)
– A Rebel timekeeper (seven minutes blocking, three minutes off the road, and repeat)
– Cakes for pissed-off drivers (and Rebels to talk to them)
– Flags, badges, stickers and placards
– Music (it’s hard for drivers to go ballistic if you’re having a disco)
– Wellbeing and legal-observer Rebels
SHUT
A BRIDGE
After the last vehicle has passed, the Affinity Group will enter the road first – followed by everyone else, as guided by the Stewards.
Please ensure no cars are trapped on the bridge
Acknowledgements
Cover and page design/artwork: This Ain’t Rock’n’Roll – Clive Russell & Charlie Waterhouse.
Artwork: woodblock prints, back cover and pages 3, 15, 18, 48, 49, 50, 89, 103, 120, 123, 124, 133, 148, 150, 151, 178, 187 and 193, Miles Glyn; 52 and 53, Nan Goldin; handcuffs, page 133, Arthur Stovell; ‘What are you going to do with the World’, p. 195, David Shrigley.
Photos: title page and p. 140, Dee Ramadan; page 39, Adam Hinton for Project Pressure; page 118, Lauren Marina; other photography by This Ain’t Rock’n’Roll.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
An agreement on: [INSERT DATE]
BETWEEN 1/ The State
AND 2/ You, the Citizen
This is a Social Contract between You, the Citizen, and The State. It binds you. It binds The State. As long as we both keep up our ends of the deal.
PREAMBLE
There are billions of us now. We need, somehow, to live together. Let’s cut the grand words and legalese and speak plainly about our duties towards each other. It’s too important for anyone to misunderstand.
DURATION OF THE CONTRACT
This will last forever, or until one or both sides breaks the terms.
THE STATE AGREES:
1/ I am The State. I agree to look after you. That’s the whole point of me.
2/ I agree to protect you. I’ll make laws so that everyone knows the rules. I’ll need courts, a police force and army to enforce the rules. But I’ll only use them for that purpose.
3/ I’ll make sure the laws apply to everyone – even to me and the people who work for me. That’s called the rule of law.
4/ I’m going to defend your human rights. So you have freedom from threats of violence, torture, slavery, unnecessary imprisonment; even death – if I can prevent it. And you’ll have freedom to live your best life, in privacy, with your family, in a home, in health and welfare, choosing your religion, saying what you want to and protesting when you must. You get all these rights whoever you are - I’m not going to change them depending on what group you’re from.
5/ There’s no point having rights if you can’t breathe. So I’m going to make sure you have clean air and uncontaminated water. I’ll stop your home being flooded if I can avoid it. I’ll make sure the temperature stays at a safe level. And if things get really bad, I’ll take urgent action. After all, I exist to look after you.
YOU, THE CITIZEN, AGREES:
6/ You are the citizen. You don’t get 1/ to 5/ for free. You have responsibilities too. The main one is to follow the laws which The State sets for you and your fellow citizens. As long as they are understandable and fair.
7/ The State needs resources for all the stuff it gives you. So you’ll chip in with a bit of what you earn – that’s tax.
8/ You have a responsibility towards your fellow citizens. The State can’t do everything for you. So if something is going wrong, you are going to have to stand up and be counted.
That’s it. In summary – The State will hold up its end if You, The Citizen hold up yours.
SIGNATURES
The State
You, The Citizen
..........................................
THE BEGINNING
Let the conversation begin …
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