A History of Shadows
Imagine the world as a theater. The acts of the powerful and the official occupy center stage. The traditional versions of history, the conventional sources of news encourage us to fix our gaze on that stage. The limelights there are so bright that they blind you to the shadowy spaces around you, make it hard to meet the gaze of the other people in the seats, to see the way out of the audience, into the aisles, backstage, outside, in the dark, where other powers are at work. A lot of the fate of the world is decided onstage, in the limelight, and the actors there will tell you that all of it is, that there is no other place.
No matter the details or the outcome, what is onstage is a tragedy, the tragedy of the inequitable distribution of power, the tragedy of the too common silence of those who settle for being audience and who pay the price of the drama. The idea behind representative democracy is that the audience is supposed to choose the actors, and the actors are quite literally supposed to speak for us. In practice, various reasons keep many from participating in the choice, other forces—like money—subvert that choice, and onstage too many of the actors find other reasons—lobbyists, self-interest, conformity—to fail to represent their constituents.
Pay attention to the inventive arenas that exert political power outside that stage or change the contents of the drama onstage. From the places that you have been instructed to ignore or rendered unable to see come the stories that change the world, and it is here that culture has the power to shape politics and ordinary people have the power to change the world. You can see the baffled, upset faces of the actors on stage when the streets become a stage or the unofficial appear among them to disrupt the planned program.
A month or two before the Bush and Blair administrations began bombing Baghdad, Jonathan Schell published The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. The book eloquently argues for a new idea of change and of power. One of its key recognitions is that the change that counts in revolution takes place first in the imagination. Histories usually pick up when the action begins, but Schell quotes John Adams saying that the American Revolution “was in the minds of the people and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before hostilities commenced.” And Thomas Jefferson concluded, “This was effected from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.”
This means, of course, that the most foundational change of all, the one from which all else issues, is hardest to track. It means that politics arises out of the spread of ideas and the shaping of imaginations. It means that symbolic and cultural acts have real political power. And it means that the changes that count take place not merely onstage as action but in the minds of those who are again and again pictured only as audience or bystanders. The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden—which is to say that revolution doesn’t necessarily look like revolution.
Schell describes how the United States lost the war in Vietnam because, despite extraordinary military superiority, it could not win over the people of that country and finally lost the confidence and support of its own citizens: “In the new world of politically committed and active people, it was not force per se but the collective wills of those peoples that were decisive.” In other words, belief can be more effective than violence. Violence is the power of the state; imagination and nonviolence the power of civil society.
Nonviolence, Schell argues, has in the last century become an increasingly powerful force in the world, a counterforce to war and to violence, and with that more and more power has come to belong to the ordinary citizenry. His claim was mocked during the opening salvos of the Iraq War but that quagmire of a war and the opposition to it around the world have strengthened his case. It’s an immensely hopeful position, identifying the rise of nonviolence and the importance of its role not just in Gandhi’s India or King’s South but in places where few noticed. (Among other recent successes of nonviolent direct action, Belgrade students toppled Milosevic with patient direct action in the streets of their city, achieving what international powers had failed to do; mostly indigenous Bolivian peasants ousted their president; Puerto Ricans kicked the US Navy out of Vieques; and giant street demonstrations in Mexico undermined privatization of pensions and energy.) It is a reminder of our power to make the world. Schell continues,
Individual hearts and minds change; those who have been changed become aware of one another; still others are emboldened, in a contagion of boldness; the “impossible” becomes possible; immediately it is done, surprising the actors almost as much as their opponents; and suddenly, almost with the swiftness of thought—whose transformation has in fact set the whole process in motion—the old regime, a moment ago so impressive, vanishes like a mirage.
A literature of hope is gathering these days. In 1785, no one in Britain was thinking about slavery, except slaves, ex-slaves, and a few Quakers and soft-hearted evangelicals. In his 2005 book Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild tells the story of how the dozen or so original activists gathered at a London printer’s shop at 2 George Yard, near what is now the Bank tube stop. From that point onward this handful of hopefuls created a movement that in half a century abolished slavery in the British Empire and helped spark the abolition movement that ended slavery in the United States a quarter century or so later. Part of the story is about the imagination and determination of a few key figures. But part of it is about a change of heart whereby enough people came to believe that slavery was an intolerable cruelty to bring its day to an end, despite the profitability of the institution to the powerful who defended it. It was arguments, sermons, editorials, pamphlets, conversations that changed the mind of the public: stories, for the decisions were mostly made in London (encouraged by witnesses and slave revolts abroad). The atrocities were mostly out of sight of the audience. It required imagination, empathy, and information to make abolition a cause and then a victory. In those five decades antislavery sentiments went from being radical to being the status quo.
Stories move faster in our own time. It has taken less than forty years for homosexuality to go from being classified as a crime and a mental disorder to being widely accepted as part of the variety of ordinary, everyday life—and though there is a backlash, backlashes for all their viciousness cannot turn back the clock or put the genie back in his lamp. Polls suggest that homophobia is more a property of the old than the young, that society will gradually shed it, is shedding it, as the generations pass. Like views of slavery, the change comes so incrementally it can only be measured in court decisions and opinion polls, but it did not come as naturally as a change in the weather. It was made, by activists, but also by artists, writers, comedians, and filmmakers who asserted other versions of sexuality, other kinds of family, by all those parade organizers and marchers, by millions of ordinary individuals living openly as gay or lesbian, out to their families and communities, by people leaving behind their fears and animosities. Along similar lines, shifts in thought that led to activism and then shifts in law have radically revised the life and rights of the disabled.
You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center. (There was one member of Parliament who steadfastly introduced antislavery legislation in the late eighteenth century; there were parliamentarians and a few congresspeople who opposed the current war, but the opposition was far stronger outside.) You could say that the figures onstage are the actors—or puppets, since much of the script is written elsewhere, out of sight, by corporations and elites, but also by popular movements that tug the conscience and change the status quo, and it is in these neglected places that radical power lies. There and in the circuitous routes to the center, where these new ideas cease to be new as they become the script for the actors onstage, who believe they wrote them. (Stalin reputedly once said, “Ideas are far more dangerous than guns. We don’t allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?”)
How did these stories and beliefs migrate from the margins to the center? Is there a kind of story food chain or dispersal pattern? Can stories be imagined as spreading like viruses or evolving like species to other habitats and other forms? You could even argue that stories spread like fire, except that fire is perhaps the ultimate drama, and stories sneak in while no one is watching. Just as fashions are more likely to originate in the street with poor nonwhite kids, so are new stories likely to start in the marginal zones, with visionaries, radicals, obscure researchers, the young, the poor—the discounted, who count anyway. The routes to the center are seldom discussed or even explored, in part because so much attention is focused on that central stage.
To be pushed to the edges is to be marginalized; to push your way back to the center is often to be defamed and criminalized. The edges are literally marginal—the margins—but they are also portrayed as dangerous and unsavory. One of the great shocks of recent years came to me in a police station in Scotland, where in the course of reporting a lost wallet I found myself contemplating a poster of wanted criminals: not rapists and murderers but kids with peculiar hairstyles and piercings who had been active in demonstrations such as the Carnival Against Capital and other frolics in which business as usual had been disrupted but no one had been harmed. So these were the criminals who most threatened the state? Then the state was fragile and we were powerful.
These days I find myself using the term “safe dangers” for the easy targets onto which people displace their fears, since the true content of their fears may be unsavory or unsettling. In the United States, the Bush administration, the mainstream media, and many mayors and chiefs of police have portrayed as terrorists—as bomb planters, acid-throwers, police assailants—activists employing the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right to speak and assemble and the nonviolent tactics of Gandhi and King. Other governments—notably Britain’s with those wanted posters and the 1994 Criminal Justice Act—have done the same. They willfully, if not consciously, mistake what kind of danger these street activists pose, as they have before, when civil rights advocates, suffragists, abolitionists were being persecuted. To admit that these people pose a threat to the status quo is to admit first that there is a status quo, secondly that it may be an unjust and unjustifiable thing, and thirdly that it can indeed be changed by passionate people and nonviolent means. To admit this is to admit the limits of state power and its legitimacy. Better to marginalize activists—to portray them as rabble on the fringe who are dangerous the way violent criminals are dangerous. Thus is the true danger to the status quo made into another “safe fear.” Thus are both the power and the legitimacy of the margins denied. Denied by those in the limelight, but you don’t have to believe them.
I used to. Thinking about how things that once seemed impossibly distant came to pass, I am embarrassed to remember how dismissive of the margins I once was, fifteen or so years ago, when I secretly scoffed at the shantytowns built on college campuses as part of the antiapartheid movement. That people were protesting something so remote and entrenched seemed futile. But then the divestment of college funds from corporations doing business with South Africa became a big part of the sanctions movement, and the sanctions movement prodded along the end of apartheid. What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable. In 1900, the idea that women should have the vote was revolutionary; now, the idea that we should not have it would seem cracked. But no one went back to apologize to the suffragists who chained themselves to the gates of power, smashed all the windows on Bond Street, spent long months in jail, suffered forced feedings and demonization in the press.
I thought about this again when I was reading a superb story on the Pennsylvania townships seeking to abolish corporate personhood— the legal status that gives corporations a dangerous and undemocratic range of rights in the United States. It seemed like one of those ideas that might be migrating toward the center, but in ten years if Time magazine is questioning the shift from democracy to a sort of monarchy of corporations or the New York Times is reporting the overturning of the legal principles on which corporate hegemony rests, they won’t thank a bunch of radical professors or scruffy anticapitalist street activists who were being tear-gassed for arguing the point prematurely. There will never be a moment when someone in the Senate or on national TV news will say, “Those freaks in the underbrush saw the future when we on high were blind.” Instead, the perils of corporate personhood will become common sense, become what everyone always knew. Which is to say, stories migrate secretly. The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It’s also a way to forget the power of a story and of a storyteller, the power in the margins, and the potential for change.
Thirty years ago, Edward Abbey wrote a novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which his hero blows up Glen Canyon Dam, the huge desert dam strangling the Colorado River upstream from the Grand Canyon. Getting rid of the dam was an outrageous idea then, though the novel helped spark the birth of the radical environmental organization Earth First! In 1981, the group announced its existence by running a three-hundred-foot sheet of plastic, bearing the image of a mighty crack, down the dam, which never seemed quite so eternal and immutable again.
Recently, the idea of taking down the dam, built amid controversy from 1956 to 1963, has come to seem more and more reasonable, more and more likely (the fact that global warming or long-term drought has dropped the reservoir water level to 37 percent capacity doesn’t hurt either). More than 145 smaller US dams have already been dismantled, and dams have come down across Europe; the new era has already begun to slip in quietly. The behemoth new dams in China and India are bureaucrats’ attempts to catch up to an era already going or gone.
One of the stories my friend Chip Ward follows in his book Hope’s Horizon is how the idea of dismantling Glen Canyon Dam is gaining support. If it happens, it will come to look like it always was a good idea, and the first people to have espoused it will be forgotten, since they were kooks, extremists, and impractical dreamers. No one in the center will remember when they supported what now looks like bad science and bad engineering, just as few remember when they supported racial segregation or bans on mixed-race marriages. Their amnesia is necessary to their sense of legitimacy in a society they would rather not acknowledge is in constant change.
Chip wrote me the other day,
As an activist, I have observed that if a story is controversial in nature and threatens the powerful I may have to “inoculate” it first by giving it to a young journalist who has more tolerance for risk from some alternative weekly that is also more edgy. The next step up the food chain may be a public radio station. After the story appears and the homework is done, if nobody is sued, then I can get a reporter from an established newspaper to write about it or get a television reporter on it. This is partly because newspaper reporters have to convince editors who are a skittish bunch who answer to suits who have their eyes on advertisers and the corporate guys over them who play golf with the people who may be criticized in the story.
This certainly does seem like a food chain, though a food chain in reverse, perhaps, since the television networks are, in Chip’s view, eating the alternative media’s excretions.
Chip, incidentally, moved to Utah and eventually became one of that state’s most powerful environmental activists because his brother-in-law read another Ed Abbey book, Desert Solitaire, moved there himself, and sent back reports of how glorious were the red-rock canyons. And so Abbey, who was never much of an activist himself (and was pretty stupid about race and immigration), played a huge role in prompting some of the fiercest activists of our time.
And the group whose creation Abbey helped to inspire spawned a British branch of Earth First! that metamorphosed into the powerful antiroads movement of the mid-1990s, perhaps the most successful direct-action campaign in recent British history. More than five hundred road-building schemes were canceled. And from the antiroads movement came Reclaim the Streets, which sparked many of the creative tactics and attitudes that gave the Northern Hemisphere something to contribute to the movement against corporate globalization at the end of the 1990s and changed the face of activism. Abbey’s books weren’t the only seeds for these transformations, and it’s only because they aren’t so deep in the shadows that their influence can be traced; beyond them are countless other sources for change.
Stories move in from the shadows to the limelight. And though the stage presents the drama of our powerlessness, the shadows offer the secret of our power. This book is a history of the shadows, of the darkness in which hope lies. I want to start the history of this present moment over again, not with the election or the war but with a series of surprises from the shadows that ushered in this millennium.