Review : Radials Chasing Utopia

The collapse of Arecibo, the imminent arrival of Christmas, and a splurge on VR games have all kept me from blogging or checking any kind of social media much of late. But I will break radio silence to complete my review of Jamie Bartlett's "Radicals Chasing Utopia".

I've already covered his downright weird and wrong-headed chapter on blaming anti-racist activists for the prevalence of racism. Still, I thought there might be enough in the rest to warrant a separate post or two before doing a longer write-up, but there really isn't. It's a tremendously shallow book : lots of breadth, virtually no depth, few attempts at generalisation, little clarity about what the author actually thinks  - and plenty of hypocrisy when he does. Honestly, what's the point of spending so much time and research actually being immersed in so many radical cultures (an undeniably arduous and time-consuming task) only to reduce it to a pathetically thin scraping in a book like this ? Sigh. I give it 6/10 overall, mostly because it's extremely readable.

The Activists Paradox

There is one chapter I liked very much though : "The Activists Paradox", which has some flashes of brilliance. Here he focuses mainly on environmental activism, but - for once - ventures to describe some more general conditions. For example, he nicely distinguishes between (let's call them) career activists and nimbyists (Not In My Backyard) :

Activists are the pros : they roam the country, joining causes and taking risks. They are the people for whom being an activist is part of their identity and social life. It's like being 'a hacker' or 'a foodie' : not just something you do but something that you are. Nimbys are different : they are the ordinaries who are upset about something in their own backyard. They don't have a subculture. They're just angry.

This goes some way to explaining why both are, for quite different reasons, often unpopular and  unsuccessful. A career activist makes an entire lifestyle out of being against things rather than in favour of anything in particular. In that sense they are similar to some of the things they most vitriolically oppose : they define themselves only by things they're opposed to. Their outrage is, to some degree, manufactured and not taken seriously. And their subculture is highly developed and - albeit quite unintentionally - inclusive only of a very particular sort of person :

No other group I spent time with invested the same amount of time or effort trying to get people involved in decision-making or being more diverse. The problem is that activists confuse the ends with the means : they have elevated the procedure and language to the level of a religious sacrament... the result is usually an obsession with language and procedure rather than results. Everyone here very carefully, very deliberately, used the correct hand gestures and appropriate words. And yet nearly everyone was still a white graduate type.

Traditionally right-wing voters worried about the environment would, in theory, share much in common with activists. But they might not see past the obsession with intersectionality or anti-capitalist tropes about open borders and corporatism. This is why direct-action environmentalists seem to elicit such disdain from their opponents. It's not the ideas or the arguments they object to, so much as the type of people they are. It's a visceral dislike rather than an intellectual one.

He provides a very nice first-hand example of this when taking part in an "action" against a coal mine. Both the protestors and the miners got along amicably, with the miners worried for the activists safety. The protestors don't come across as crazed lunatics and the miners aren't shown as capitalist pigs. Indeed, the miners actually support clean energy, but, as one put it, "this lot are against everything". It's not that they don't want renewable energy, it's that they don't see it as currently practical (of course we can debate to what extent this is accurate, but this is a very different prospect to being fundamentally opposed to renewables in principle). There are no heroes and villains here, just ordinary, flawed people.

The tragic thing about activism is that it feels almost inevitable. It's inevitable that only activists get sufficiently motivated by abstract global problems to risk arrest; inevitable that they create a tight subculture; inevitable that this subculture keeps the movement motivated but smaller than it could be.

 Nimbys, however, have an extremely powerful secret weapon : scones.

The anti-fracking movement is not inclusive because its supporters use the word 'cis' instead of male or female; it's because they happen to be naturally welcoming. Consensus decision-making is very attractive at the theoretical level, but at the subconscious level cups of tea and home-made scones will beat it every time.

I suspect one could here go on an extended rant about angry "woke" people on Twitter, but let's leave that for now. More to the point : why are some protest movements successful, at least in terms of numbers, while others remain confined to the hardcore ? Bartlett uses the example of the coal mining incident :

Contrary to popular belief, people don't commit to a cause based solely on a rational or objective consideration of statistics and facts. If they did, there would have been 10,000 people at Ffos-y-fran, not 3,00. People also sign up because they think it will be fulfilling or because their friends are in it or it looks like their sort of thing... they include things that on first sight appear frivolous - language, dress sense, accents, social background, class, skin colour and a thousand small things - but which help people find self-realisation, belonging and fulfilment.

This is partly why the activists at Ffos-y-fran were so homogenous and limited in numbers. The cultural framing created a ceiling. Even their attempts to mitigate the problem through micro-procedure was itself part of the frame. By contrast, the cultural framing of the name Bette or Tina or Maureen [from the "Nanas" group of anti-fracking protestors] is an ordinary and concerned grandmother, not a university-educated professional activist.

He goes to point out that while the Nanas are every bit as informed as the professionals, no-one feels excluded by a worried grandmother. But nimbys in general have a different problem than career activists : their cause is often (by definition) very much local and of no concern to anyone outside their particular area. And as an indirect result they're not taken very seriously. After all, new housing or power plants do have to be built somewhere, so nimbys have to work extremely hard to show why their particular backyard is indeed a special case.

But sometimes, the interests of nimbyists and career activists are closely aligned. And that can potentially lead to real success, as in the case of the anti-fracking movement. Here, then, is at least a partial formula for successful action. You need the training an commitment of the professionals, but you also need the everyday mass appeal of the nimbys. And you want focus. You don't want a movement against carbon emissions to broaden into one against capitalism - no, not even if capitalism really is itself the root cause. The more things you oppose, the more you make the movement about activism itself, the more people you'll alienate and the less successful you'll be.

Overall

Unfortunately the activism section is the only one I really got anything much out of. The others are somewhat educational and generally fairly interesting in terms of specific topics (transhumanism, psychedelics, libertarianism, the far right, commune dwellers) but Bartlett makes no effort to draw any more generalised conclusions. He rarely ventures his own opinion on the different groups, ironically to an extent I found distracting : I want to know what the author thinks of the people he spent so long with ! It's such an obvious thing to expect that it was notable by its absence.

Worse, most of the radicals come across as low-intelligence nutters. I don't think that was his intent, but by passing no more comments than frequent skepticism and stereotypical platitudes, that's what they become reduced to. It feels less of impartial perspective and more a rudderless, aimless meandering; a fair level of description but pretty nearly zero explanation or analysis.

Personally I would far, far prefer to have someone make a good solid argument for or against a position, otherwise it's a meaningless information dump. Put some spin on it, for god's sake man ! I won't hold you to it ! I just want to have a staring position to explore this issue. And - and I can't begin to stress how much this annoys me - PUT ANY COMMENTARY FOOTNOTES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE. AND IF THEY'RE TOO LONG, WORK THEM IN TO THE MAIN BODY OF THE TEXT. I DON'T WANT TO KEEP FLICKING BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN THE MAIN TEXT AND A SECTION AT THE BACK BECAUSE THAT IS JUST SO FUCKING STUPID. STOP IT.

(Honestly, this is the worst book for footnote-flicking I've ever read. And that's saying something.)

Now that I've got that off my chest, the final thing I have to mention is that the conclusion section feels downright hypocritical. Throughout the book, Bartlett has overwhelmingly adopted a skeptical position - not one of outright denial, but definitely one that's less than enthusiastic for just about any of the people he's been with. Very rarely indeed does he have a good thing to say about the ideas he investigates (even though he's more considerate regarding the people themselves). So when he advocates in favour of having a society that tolerates and to some degree encourages radicals, I find two faults with his logic - not his conclusion at all, just his reasoning. First, the hypocrisy :

Most people will probably go along with this reasonably inoffensive argument... but they will usually find some sophisticated reason as to why this should not apply to ideas with which they strongly disagree. I heard this often : "not those radicals".

Wait, so you mean exactly as you yourself have just spent the entire bloody book disparaging ? If you thought any of the radicals here actually might be right, you certainly fooled me. And the thing is, his choice of radicals does feel extremely odd. Transhumanism doesn't even advocate for any specific course of action, it just believes certain things are going to happen somehow. True, nation-states are not the only way to organise societies, but I think they've existed (at least in a basic form) a lot longer than Bartlett gives them credit for. While his criticism of anti-terrorism measures seems valid, he presentex exactly zero alternatives and so comes across as a complete berk. And sure, sometimes cults do become fully-fledged world religions, but nothing in the commune he investigates persuades me that it has the slightest chance of avoiding the fate of 99.99% of such endeavours and dying a forgotten death. So why choose this one ?

The thing is, there are plenty of other radical ideas he could have pursued that might have stood a better chance. Re-usable rocketry now looks like it has a real shot at drastically slashing the cost of access to space. Movements for a Universal Basic Income are growing. Calls for Open Borders are still fringe, but surely this is far more plausible than actually doing away with the state entirely. And  while I commend him for getting up close and personal with the far right, to avoid examining the far left feels unfair. 

So yes, I agree with the sentiment that radicals might be right, but I see no problem at all in saying "not these particular nutters". Granted it's less extreme than comparing a Flat Earth conspiracy video with an online university course, but the principle is the same. Not every radical is right, and some are a lot more plausible than others.

The second fault I find with his endorsement of the ideas he doesn't believe is altogether worse and weirder.

Tommy Robinson and Pegida-UK are necessary for the existence of its opposite. Their presence forces us to examine our ideas, work out what we believe, why we believe it and mobilise. If Pegida did not exist, the arguments against it - in this case in favour of multiculturalism, or an authentic British Islam - would lose their vitality and strength. Similarly, the existence of radical Islam, and the fundamental threat it poses to liberal democracy, gives life and meaning to the arguments in defence of individual liberty.

I call absolute bullshit. Yes, we need contrary ideas. No, we don't need to have innocent people suffer in order that we ourselves might not. Sure, the voices for liberty and democracy are (logically) loudest in places which don't have them (because who shouts for things they already have ?) but the idea that we need Nazi-level ideologies to remind us of just how good we have it... sorry, no. This basically says, "you innocent people, you lot all the way over there... your suffering is good because it makes us happier and more secure in our own situation". And that's a whole lot of nope.

Next on my reading list : Utopia For Realists. Improving society surely isn't the province only of nutters, so I'm hoping that will be a lot more me.