Political correctness isn’t for today’s youth

Activism needs the commitment to get in your face

Did you see the rain? Don’t worry, it was just a shower, like we normally get at this time of year. April showers. I know, it’s the end of May, but magnetic north shifts, so why not the weather?

Screenshot from the vid at the foot.

Forty years ago, Tom Buchanan, a fellow legal intern at the Scottish law firm of Bishop & Co. and a paid-up member of the Green Party, regaled us with warnings about things like these. He’d attended talks by Jonathan Porritt and quickly earned a reputation in the office as a climate doomsayer. St George’s Place had just been renamed after the freed liberation terrorist Nelson Mandela by some wags in City Chambers (it’s where the Republic of South Africa had its Glasgow consulate), and opposite our office was the South African Airlines agency, where idiot protesters would occasionally block the buses trying to trundle up Hope Street.

Who were these idiots, blocking city roads, to plead for a change of government in a country 6,000 miles away? Warning us that climate disaster was just around the corner? As for communism, well, it was here to stay and no joke. We definitely need nuclear weapons.

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Of course, protesting about something doesn’t mean you’ll actually do anything about it. In fact, at an individual level, the likelihood of one activist achieving the goals of their activism is virtually zero. And, even if there were a hundred activists, it’s pretty far-fetched to imagine they could make a difference with that number. I mean, why even bother? How about a thousand? There have been protests in which a thousand activists took part, and their voices may well have been heard. I can’t remember. Protests come and protests go. Like Coca-Cola ads. The thing with Coke ads, though: they come, and they go, but, even so, at some point, they’re there all the time. Everywhere.

I doubt whether advertisers really expect you to watch every last second of their publicity spots. They probably know that, like me, most people on YouTube wait the obligatory five seconds and then skip; if you can’t skip, you turn the volume off. The ads are an intrusion on your viewing enjoyment, and they are an irritation. But, you can’t help but notice them. I now know that if I want to sell my car, I can do so at wijkopenautos.be. And that’s all the advertiser ever wanted of me. To know that URL. To achieve that, they put me through half a minute of cheesy smiles and “I can’t believe I didn’t get ripped off” expressions of surprise five times every evening. Not for now, and not for tomorrow, but for some far-off day when I want to maybe sell my second-hand car.

That’s why activists protest. And while you get riled at their blocking your path and impeding your thoroughfare, preventing you from going about your lawful business, passing along the King’s highway as you have every statutory right to do, and, what’s more, with an escort of dutiful police officers appointed by the Home Secretary to guarantee your human rights of passage, to arrest those who would impede your way, and ensure that His Majesty’s wayleaves remain unhindered, the pesky activists are getting your attention. You can turn the volume down, and you can skip, but you will, whether you like it or not, at some point, sooner or later, know their URL. It’s that important.

For forty years, climate activists have been harping on about saving the planet. My planet. They are tenacious and resolute. You would almost think they have a pecuniary interest to engage in all this activism. After all, all the big corporations to whose business activities so much of what the activists are protesting about is directly linked entail pecuniary interests. So, why would an activist devote his entire adult life to a protest that seems inexorable, against a problem that seems never-ending, against people who are steel-plated in their resilience against the arguments, without also having a driven, pecuniary interest? And, if they don’t, why don’t they just pack it in and let everyone go about their business? Don’t they know that people need to get places? That the timing’s all wrong?

Perhaps they do have a pecuniary interest: maybe they’re all green power salespeople, or they install photovoltaic cells or heat pumps. Some of them probably do, but in most cases that’ll be more effect than cause: they sell solar panels because they’re committed, not the other way around.

The thing is, activism does actually work, though it’s the line between an individual’s vain protest on a street in Glasgow and the fall of a regime in a city in South Africa that can be hard to trace. What makes activism succeed is not activism itself. Activism on its own will never achieve anything, just as a wedding never achieves anything (not if the purpose of marriage is procreation instead of having a piss-up). Quite honestly, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had the right idea: better to spend a week bonking in the Amsterdam Hilton than blow hard-earned cash on a big party. So, if the aim is to prevent climate change, and activism itself won’t achieve that, what will?

Commitment will. Not an individual protest or an individual march or an individual stunt, but commitment. And commitment is something that’s not here today, gone tomorrow. After all, who would get married and then realise before long they’re not as keen on their spouse as they thought? Fancy. What’d be the point in that? Where’s the commitment? Where’s the belief? Where’s the decision that, whatever the commitment is on the other side, I cannot simply enter into every last relationship and every last exchange with my fellow man on the assumption that they are less committed to our common goal than I am. As Thomas More might have paraphrased, it’s not that I’m committed; it’s that I’m committed.

When you retire to bed at night and ponder in the darkness before dropping off whether the mark you made on the world over the day that is just ending was a product of your commitment, to the place you have been honoured and privileged to occupy for that tiny fraction of your life, do your thoughts turn to the devotion that you invested in that day, or do you dwell upon the futility of your day’s acts, on the basis that, in your commitment, you are alone? I doubt it. Your dreamy thoughts will pass in review of the things you did that day in the company of others, company that you relished and enjoyed in the belief that they, too, relished and enjoyed it. And, if that is so, then reflect on whether you believe the world and all its glories are a better place for what you did that day than they would have been had you not done it.

The protests that brought Glasgow Corporation buses to a standstill in Hope Street forty years ago eventually ceased, because what they had set out to achieve was, whether by them, or by them with others, or simply by others, achieved, out of all expectations despite it being precisely the expected result. And it was not buses standing still in Glasgow that did it. It was commitment.

Commitment is always in for the long haul, whether it’s a marriage, or changing a regime, or stopping climate change; and, no surprise, commitment takes its time, time that is now sadly in short supply for so many things. Because the April, and now May, showers are getting heavier: I never believed when Tom Buchanan bored me with his tales of Green Party meetings that we would now be so far. What’s needed now more than ever is commitment, and, from me, your planet has it; but not from us all, alas. Some, who can do nothing on their own, recognise the problems and have come to embrace them as a cause over a lifetime; but we need more from those who can do much, and in truth would do much, were they on their own but, out of political expediency and self-interest, shun the action that is so easily in their grasp. There, the irony: so many of the populace have commitment, but cannot execute; so many of the leadership eschew commitment to what is well within their reach. And, thus, it is the commitment of the latter that the commitment of the former seeks to attain.

Most of our leaders will be out of office in four years and will then congratulate themselves on their climate achievements, after which climate change will be a matter within someone else’s portfolio, and they will move on to wherever leaders move on to. Despite holding prominent positions, they can’t hold to a simple commitment. I know: the timing’s all wrong.