Some thoughts about communication in the practice of improving the world
I’ve been having a serious conversation with some friends about how to make the world a better place. I have some opinions about that, but I had an observation that I want to explore here.
The way the discussion started was that I made some claims about wanting to do things that actually make a difference, and a friend quite rightly asked me for examples of what I do. I went through a rather detailed laundry list, and didn’t get much reaction on that. But one of the things that I said is that I think that people, myself included, who want to change the world for the better, often engage in behaviors that are what I termed “performative.”
So far the use of the term “performative” has gotten the most discussion, rather than my ideas for how to make the world a better place. This is really frustrating to me—I don’t think discussing “performative'“ is that useful. But with that said, clearly my use of this word struck a nerve, so that’s what I want to dig into here.
There are quite a few approaches to the problem of the world sucking that I could talk about here. Let’s see if I can list some:
Self-care: making sure I am okay even though things aren’t ideal.
Making good choices: identifying what behaviors are okay for everybody to do, and trying to avoid behaviors that wouldn’t be.
Taking power from abusers: it seems sometimes that most of the people who get elected to political office nowadays do so because it gives them an opportunity to create suffering; clearly making it harder for such people to get elected should improve things.
Giving power to people who want to be of service: wouldn’t it be nice if the people we elected to public office took those jobs because they wanted to do them, as opposed to wanting to use them to accomplish other ends?
Making it harder for people to successfully lie about things that affect the public good: we have a huge problem with propaganda in our society being used to divide us and convince us to do things that aren’t in our interests. This is partly because there’s a ton of money in it, and partly because it serves the interests of abusers. I don’t think we can live in a just society that doesn’t do its best to take the profit motive away and come up with strategies to effectively counter propaganda. It’s just too easy to push the stuff.
Making it easier to get clear information on what’s working and what’s not working: right now if I wanted to know what was happening in my town government, I’d have to show up in person or watch televised meetings. It’s really time-consuming. I don’t want to watch the sausage being made, but I do want to know who made it and what they put in it, and for that matter how well it’s working. I use town meetings as an example because they’re important and I wish I was able to pay attention to them, but of course this goes all the way up to Congress and the U.N. The other day I was reading a vtdigger article about Vermont’s $9b budget and got curious about where that money was coming from, since it’s about $12k per Vermonter. Tracking that down took me about ten minutes, which is too long. This isn’t just a freedom of the press problem. We as citizens aren’t trying to get the press we want, as far as I can tell, and maybe we need to take a more active role in that.
I’m sure there are more things to put on that list, but frankly it’s already a pretty exhausting list, so I’m going to avoid trying to make it exhaustive as well. If you look back over my blog historically, I think you can probably see that most of it is about (1) and (2). And if you think in terms of Buddhist or Christian or Jewish ideas of the practice of virtue, 3, 4, 5 and 6 all fit.
So what was I on about with this “performative” stuff? Okay, that leads into another taxonomy. The problem is that “making good choices” sounds like a really good approach to making the world a better place, but most people don’t have the luxury of making good choices. And so that means that if we rely on people making good choices to make the world a better place, it’s not going to work.
Let me give you an example that really breaks my heart. I was doing a course called the altMBA a few years ago, and one of the assignments was to come up with an ad campaign that would seriously address the problem of global warming. The way the altMBA works is that everybody who’s in a particular class, which is on the order of 48 people, I think, is assigned to a cohort of six people, which changes weekly over the six weeks of the course. So you have eight cohorts working on a project. Not all of the projects are group projects but this one was.
So my group started brainstorming about how to do this, and the consensus emerged that we should do an ad campaign to get people to recycle more. I watched this disaster unfolding in realtime and didn’t know what to say about it. I finally just said “look guys, have at it, but I’m out. I can’t be a part of this.”
Now, at this point you’re probably having one of maybe three reactions. One might be “right on, SJWs suck.” Another might be “recycling is good, what’s your problem?” A third might be “right on, recycling is not going to make an iota of difference.”
The correct answer is the third. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but when you consider that the vast majority of packaging that someone might attempt to recycle is plastic, and plastic is almost never actually recycled (here’s a kind of exception). So a lot of recycling is actually performative: it’s being done to make us feel better, not because it’s better for the environment. And, of course, plastic production, while it’s certainly harmful to the environment and contributes to global warming, is not actually a major source of greenhouse gases.
But even that isn’t the problem with this campaign. The problem with this campaign is that it tries to get people to make good behavioral choices. And good behavioral choices aren’t going to make any significant difference, because the underlying problem is that the plastics industry has a chokehold on product packaging, so there is a strong countervailing force preventing people from making actual good choices. Most of the products I am tempted to use aren’t available in packaging that’s compostable or recyclable. In order to stop participating in the production of non-recyclable plastic packaging, I have to take a major hit to my quality of life. Maybe I’m dedicated enough to do that, but most people don’t have the luxury of taking hits like this. Think about reusable diapers, and who the consumer of that product is. What picture forms? Probably an upper-middle-class woman, right? That’s because someone who’s not well above the scrum just doesn’t have the resources to make a choice like that.
Of course, what we need people to do to actually limit global warming is to stop engaging in activities that emit lots of carbon. What activities might these be? The three major ones are driving, home heating, and shipping. So, stop driving. How many people can make that choice? Not many. Even if they have good public transportation where they live, they might not make that choice simply because it’s inconvenient, and their lives don’t have space for avoidable inconvenience. Home heating? How many people are you going to convince to turn the thermostat down enough to matter?
Hopefully I’ve made my point. I will interject one other point. That comment about SJWs above? That person is quite likely in the category of people who won’t tolerate the sacrifices required to “make good choices,” but is feeling social pressure to do so, and resents it. And so they use a rather funny pejorative term to refer to people who make them feel that way. It probably doesn’t really them feel much better—it just creates animosity between them and the people who they see as the source of the social pressure. And it creates division, putting them on “the other side” in the “debate” about what to do about global warming.
I put “debate” in scare quotes because it’s very clear what to do about global warming. There is no serious debate on the topic. What to do about global warming is to limit carbon emissions. Limiting carbon emissions is not something that can be done by “making good choices.” So our SJW-hater is being made to feel bad for behaviors that, if they stopped doing them, would not make much difference. A division is being created needlessly, and a person who might at least be neutral has been efficiently converted into an enemy using a strategy that does no good at all.
So when I use the term “performative,” that’s what I’m talking about. But like SJW, the term “performative” is also pejorative, and people got offended when I described activities that they do as “performative.” Sigh. I guess I could have said “palliative.” They make us feel better as we watch the patient die. If there is nothing to be done, I suppose palliative action is better than no action, but I don’t think there is really nothing to be done.
The reason I used the term “performative” is not that I want my SJW friends (who in the world thinks that being a warrior for justice is in any way a bad thing, anyway?) to feel bad about engaging in behaviors that are “good choices” but don’t solve the larger problem. What I want is for us not to feel satisfied by these behaviors. Palliative action can kill a patient who might otherwise survive, because it stops the pain. The reason we’re advised not to keep taking ibuprofen if the pain and swelling persists is precisely that: it can make us feel “okay” and not get the help we need to take care of an infection, which can be treated, but if left untreated will kill us.
Performative actions are palliative. We mustn’t allow ourselves to be comforted by them. That’s where I was going by labeling recycling “performative.” We need the plastics industry to go away. To stop existing as it currently exists. Plastics have their uses, but if everything I drink comes in a plastic bottle, that’s really bad. Carbon-emitting industries have their uses; we can’t completely eliminate carbon-based fuels. But we can produce them in ways that are at least carbon-neutral, and in cases where there is no need to carry fuel, we can replace them with renewable electric generation.
In order for these things to happen, however, points 3-6 from above come into play. We have to take power away from the people who are being paid to sustain harmful practices. If we don’t, they will continue to do so. That’s probably most of the people in congress right now, including a lot of Democrats (speaking from a U.S.-centric perspective, but I think the same is true in many countries). We have to find people who actually want to serve the public, and give that power to them. We have to be able to know when we are being lied to, and we have to be able to notice what is being done and how well it’s working, so that we can do our civic duty to hire public servants who are good at what they do, not just well-intentioned or worse, corrupt.