Getting the Hell out of Paradise
Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible. Perfectionists can find fault with anything, and no one has higher standards in this regard than leftists. In January of 2003, when Republican governor George Ryan of Illinois overturned 167 death sentences, reprieving everyone on death row in that state, there were radical commentators who found fault with the details, carped when we should have been pouring champagne over our heads like football champs. But there’s an increasing gap between this new movement, with its capacity for joy and carnival, and the old figureheads. Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be destruction. There is tremendous devastation now. In the time it takes you to read this book, acres of rainforest will vanish, a species will go extinct, people will be raped, killed, dispossessed, die of easily preventable causes. We cannot eliminate all devastation for all time, but we can reduce it, outlaw it, undermine its sources and foundations: these are victories. A better world, yes; a perfect world, never.
A million years ago I wrote a few features for the punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll. One of them was about women’s rights, and a cranky guy wrote in that women used to make sixty-six cents to the male dollar and now we made seventy-seven cents, so what were we complaining about? It doesn’t seem like it should be so complicated to acknowledge that seventy-seven cents is better than sixty-six cents and that seventy-seven cents isn’t good enough, but the politics we have is so pathetically bipolar that we only tell this story two ways: either seventy-seven cents is a victory, and victories are points where you shut up and stop fighting; or seventy-seven cents is ugly, so activism accomplishes nothing and what’s the point of fighting? Both versions are defeatist because they are static. What’s missing from these two ways of telling is an ability to recognize a situation in which you are traveling and have not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and fight, in which the world is always being made and is never finished. What’s missing, you could say, is a sense of Coyote’s world instead of Yahweh’s.
In South Africa, the apartheid system was overthrown after decades of heroic struggle of every kind, but economic justice has yet to arrive; it was a seventy-seven-cent victory. Vaclav Havel was a gorgeous gadfly to the Communists, but as president of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic, he was just a seventy-seven-cent politician. “We are winning,” said the graffiti in Seattle, not “We have won.” It’s a way of telling in which you can feel successful without feeling smug, in which you can feel challenged without feeling defeated. Most victories will be temporary, or incomplete, or compromised in some way, and we might as well celebrate them as well as the stunning victories that come from time to time. Without stopping. Even if someday we get to dollar-for-dollar parity, that will just free us up to attend to something else (just as US women’s wages have advanced compared to men’s, but most working people’s wages and economic security have diminished overall since the 1970s). “Utopia is on the horizon,” declares Eduardo Galeano. “When I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking.”
Judeo-Christian culture’s central story is of Paradise and the Fall. It is a story of perfection and of loss, and perhaps a deep sense of loss is contingent upon the belief in perfection. Conservatives rear-project narratives about how everyone used to be straight, god-fearing, decently clad and content with the nuclear family, narratives that any good reading of history undoes. Activists, even those who decry Judeo-Christian heritage as our own fall from grace, are as prone to tell the story of paradise, though their paradise might be matriarchal or vegan or the flip side of the technological utopia of classical socialism. And they compare the possible to perfection, again and again, finding fault with the former because of the latter. Paradise is imagined as a static place, as a place before or after history, after strife and eventfulness and change: the premise is that once perfection has arrived change is no longer necessary. This idea of perfection is also why people believe in saving, in going home, and in activism as crisis response rather than everyday practice.
Moths and other nocturnal insects navigate by the moon and stars. Those heavenly bodies are useful for them to find their way, even though they never get far from the surface of the earth. But lightbulbs and candles send them astray; they fly into the heat or the flame and die. For these creatures, to arrive is a calamity. When activists mistake heaven for some goal at which they must arrive, rather than an idea to navigate Earth by, they burn themselves out, or they set up a totalitarian utopia in which others are burned in the flames. Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it. After all those millennia of poetry about the moon, nothing was more prosaic than the guys in space suits stomping around on the moon with their flags and golf clubs thirty-something years ago. The moon is profound except when we land on it.
Paradise is not the place in which you arrive but the journey toward it. Sometimes I think victories must be temporary or incomplete; what kind of humanity would survive paradise? The industrialized world has tried to approximate paradise in its suburbs, with luxe, calme, volupté, cul-de-sacs, cable television and two-car garages, and it has produced a soft ennui that shades over into despair and a decay of the soul suggesting that Paradise is already a gulag. Countless desperate teenagers will tell you so. For paradise does not require of us courage, selflessness, creativity, passion: paradise in all accounts is passive, is sedative, and if you read carefully, soulless.
That’s why John Keats called the world with all its suffering “this vale of soul-making,” why crisis often brings out the best in us. Some imaginative Christian heretics worshipped Eve for having liberated us from paradise—the myth of the fortunate fall. The heretics recognized that before the fall we were not yet fully human—in Paradise, Adam and Eve need not wrestle with morality, with creation, with society, with mortality; they only realize their own humanity in the struggle an imperfect world invites. When the Iraq War broke out, we in San Francisco shut down downtown, shut down streets, bridges, highways, corporations that first day and kept coming back for weeks. Out of all that conviction, all that passion, one thing stood out for me: Gopal Dayaneni, one of the key organizers for the antiwar actions, was asked by the daily newspaper why he was getting arrested. “I have a soul,” he replied.
Recent strains of activism proceed on the realization that victory is not some absolute state far away but the achieving of it, not the moon landing but the flight. A number of ideas and practices have emerged that live this out. The term “politics of prefiguration” has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it’s a temporary and local place, this paradise of participating, this vale where souls get made.
This has been an important belief for activists who recognize that change happens as much by inspiration and catalyst as by imposition. You could describe activism as having two primary strains: the attempt to change something problematic outside itself and the attempt to build something better, though the two strains are irrevocably and necessarily intertangled, which is exactly the point of the politics of prefiguration. The idea was itself prefigured by Walter Benjamin, who wrote, “The class struggle . . . is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the forms of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude.” They are present all along the journey; arrival is at best irrelevant, at worst undermining, at least to the goods of the spirit. Reclaim the Streets (RTS), the rowdy British movement of the later 1990s, lived this out beautifully. The premise behind RTS’s street parties seemed to be that if what they were protesting against was isolation, privatization, and alienation, then a free-for-all party out in public was not just a protest but a solution, if a solution in the mode that Hakim Bey called “Temporary Autonomous Zones.” (Bey contrasted these moments of liberation with revolutions proper, which “lead to the expected curve, the consensus-approved trajectory: revolution, reaction, betrayal, the founding of a stronger and even more oppressive State . . . By failing to follow this curve, the up-rising suggests the possibility of a movement outside and beyond the Hegelian spiral of that ‘progress’ which is secretly nothing more than a vicious circle.”) RTS and the antiroads movement took on what could be called the postindustrialization of Britain, the privatization of everyday life and the imposition of monster roads and freeways on still-vital landscapes and communities.
There were some beautiful moments: people taking up residence in trees, in which they established legal residence by receiving mail there, a tactic to keep the tree from being cut; an RTS party in which they surged onto a freeway overpass and, muffled by rave music, smuggled jackhammers onto the concrete under the giant bell-skirt of a stilt-walking grande dame, then jackhammered openings in which trees were planted; huge street parties in downtown London that linked up with activists around the world to become global anticapitalist demonstrations. Humor, creativity, outrageousness, and exuberance were among the group’s hallmarks. That RTS didn’t outlive its moment was also a kind of victory, a recognition that time had moved on and the focus was elsewhere. Instead, RTS’s incendiary carnival spirit, global Internet communications, and tactics of temporary victory became part of the vocabulary of what came next, the global justice movement. RTS decomposed itself into the soil from which new flowers sprung.
One day in California, I hear a Zen Buddhist abbot from Ireland quote the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, “There is no day without its moments of paradise.” And then the day continues.