Environmental Cultism, the "Endgame," and the "It's just a different strategy" Vocabulary: Why Movements Fail

Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee

In light of some very thoughtful recent remarks on an older piece posted at THE WRENCH, I have returned to thinking about environmental cultism. But--serendipitously--it's not only these remarks that have generated this return. 

http://thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot.com/2010/08/open-letter-to-radical-environmental.html

I have been confronted by a truly disturbing strain of environmental cultism masquerading as "the professional activist" that I find both interesting philosophically--but troubling ethically. This form of cultism personifies a Derrick Jensen-like Endgame willingness to deploy a "by whatever means necessary" manipulation, name-calling, fear-mongering, misrepresentation, and exploitation in the name of the anti-fracking movement--but to ends far more self-interested and prosaic--but self-deluded and arrogant. 

While it's certainly true that we sometimes do appeal to ends we hold to be laudable to justify means with which we have discomfort, and while there are good questions to be asked about what ends justify what means--the committed cultist appears to believe that the ends of preserving the entitlement presumed to accrue to the cult/group/ideology justifies whatever means are necessary to achieve that end.

Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee

The trouble is that it does not--especially when the means involve the violation of values we'd all agree were worth preserving--honesty, forthrightness, humility, compassion, courage, thrift…

These are issues that return me to philosophy--not that I've never left--but with some renewed interest in that fraught connection between thinking and action, ideals and activism. 

Movements can be fertile ground for a kind of cultism in the sense that the sheer urgency of the issues--and fracking certainly provides that--make for many of its elements: a siege mentality, an insistence to conformity to a certain ideology--in this case, an incoherent ideology about how the movement must be willing to include virtually every point of view, even manifestly self-undermining and/or inconsistent ones in order to reflect a commitment to "diversity" or "tolerance." 

I think this is deeply mistaken and misplaced.

Such notions of "diversity" or "tolerance" are at least very shallow. "Let's just all get along," and "we're a rainbow of perspectives" may reflect a diversity of attitude--but they will not achieve any objective other than the status quo. Anti-Apartheid activists did not "just get along" with that regime's violent enforcers. A firestorm ensued on these pages when I insisted--and still insist--that the "responsible drilling" message of the Responsible Drilling Alliance was wholly inconsistent and self-defeating for an anti-fracking movement (THE WRENCH: Of Aristotle and Anadarko: Why “Better Laws” Will Never be Enough). This is not to say that RDA exemplifies the cultism I am exploring here, but only to suggest that one characteristic of a cultist group dynamic is the insistence that whatever are its values--say, diversity and tolerance--that they're beyond critical examination even where their application results in inconsistency--and sometimes actions that may be positively harmful

Such notions are also self-defeating because they prevent that movement from adopting a clear message or objective. They fundamentally fail to make the vital distinction between differences of strategy and difference of objective. We must encourage and sustain the former; we cannot afford to brook the latter and be a movement. 

Let me put this another way: while there are no objectives that we ought to regard as beyond the pale of critical review, there are objectives upon which we can take a firm stand. Banning fracking is one. Prosecuting sex-traffickers is another. Acting to mitigate climate instability is yet another. What makes these objective clear are the moral arguments combined with the compelling scientific evidence that supports them. 

Strategy is another matter altogether. There are often many roads that lead to Mecca--actively encouraging these--in light of the objective that's clear-- is surely the very stuff of a successful movement.

A sure characteristic of cultism is the propensity to demonize those who'd argue for that unifying message as "purists," as "intolerant," or even as the enemy. This is a variety of the fallacy of projection: projecting onto others qualities undesirable or ethically problematic in oneself.

The other very troubling feature of this tendency to cultism is that, having adopted the legitimating narrative of the cult's ideology and thereby acting in the name/interests of that ideology, one is legitimated in assuming that the ends virtually always do justify the means, and that critical self-reflection about whether in any particular case this follows can be conveniently forgone. That, I'd argue, can lead to the rationalizing of very bad behavior--deception, omission, manipulation--all in the interest of reinforcing ideological hygiene.

Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee

So I have also been thinking a good deal about language. This new word--"purist"--seems to have recently entered the anti-fracking activist vocabulary, and it is used to disparage those of us who take a resolute stand that we must be unified on message--even if varied in strategy.

It is not purist, but rather simply coherent, to argue that the claim that fracking must be banned is inconsistent with the claim that it can be regulated and/or mitigated. Fracking cannot both be banned and regulated. Regulated fracking is fracking--hence not banned. Indeed, the concession to regulation and/or mitigation undermines every effort we make to realize that ban. That is not a "purist" position. It is simply true. 

Moreover, a unified message does not preclude the possibility that we could discover that we are wrong. The Ancient Greeks had a marvelously well-articulated view of the universe--and copious evidence to support it mathematically, observationally, and technologically--that was dead-in-the-water wrong: geocentrism. We must always remain open to this possibility. That is called humility before the facts, and while the likelihood that we are wrong about climate instability and the dangers of continued extraction is profoundly unlikely--we must remain vigilant and self-critical. 

This self-reflection includes whether fracking should be banned. The evidence weighs heavily on the side that fracking must not only be banned, and that the notion that it even can be regulated in non-sensical. If we do not become unified--thoughtfully, self-reflectively--about that message, this movement is doomed.

And this leads me full-circle--for now. A movement must be FOR something. The end of fracking is like the end of apartheid or concentration camps or sex-traficking. It is not purist to insist that there is no compromise; it is the only position that, on the current well-established evidence, has moral credibility. 

Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee

To claim that there's room for everyone in the movement is like claiming that the Ku Klux Klansman should be welcomed into the struggle to achieve racial equity, that the God Hates Fags member should be welcomed into PFLAG--that the gas industry CEO should be welcomed onto the board of the grassroots environmental organizations. 


To then be called the "purist" because I reject this "inclusion" as incoherent and paralyzing suggests that there is some other motive for the name-calling, that something else is being protected. And that leads me back to the environmental cultists.

More of this later.

Capitalism, Human Welfare, and the Healthcare Debate: Death--American Style

10.17.09

To the Editor,

Among the most disturbing features of our current political landscape, exemplified by the tea-baggers, the birthers, the secessionists, the H1N1 vaccine-as-mind-control conspiracy-mongers, and other “patriots,” is the extent to which craving short-term gain—Obama-out-of-office-at-any-cost—drives the willingness to adopt beliefs that are not merely wrong-headed, but profoundly self-defeating.

The healthcare debate could not illustrate this any more clearly: we’re not merely willing to sell out our un/underinsured fellows to disease and death, we’re apparently willing to take the risk that we could end up among them just for the sake of opposing a public option.

The same “patriots” who condemn Obama for “cutting” their Medicare would apparently let their neighbor’s children die for lack of access to the care these “patriots” take as entitled. This isn’t merely hypocrisy; it’s perversity. Cynically exploiting the rhetoric of “free choice,” the “health” insurance industry has so successfully suckered the tea-partiers that they can be counted on to attend fake grassroots events and rally against their own interests—even their interest in living. Every placard heralding “freedom” may as well be heralding suffering and death, every endorsement of the “free market” a pitch for rationing-healthcare-by-the-mega-profits-of-Cigna-and-company. Why? Because the defeat of the public option is a win for an industry whose profits have increased by 416% over the last decade by denying coverage, refusing to pay claims, and by dropping sick people from their roles—after raping them of their hard-earned dollars.

What the tea-partiers don’t get is that the same tactics they’ve so effectively deployed against those who’d resist their ideological swill is now—through ignorance-exploiting-stealth—being deployed to insure that they, many of whom are among the most economically vulnerable, stand on the side of the super-wealthy. Quite the coup. All the “health” insurance promotion arms had to do was use the magic words “socialism,” “communism,” or “government controlled,” through their Republican Party propaganda channel—FOX—and the paranoid “patriot”-sheeple fall in lock-step—behind their pied pipers, Beck, Hannity, Malkin, O’Reilly, right off the cliff. Death is apparently OK with them so long as we get rid of a black democratic president.

Unconvinced? Offended? Think the “free market” is on your side? Check out Rendell’s Republican budget. He cuts funding for the Department of Public Welfare, discards a possible severance tax on natural gas drilling, cuts the Department of Environmental Protection 27%, and opens state park land to drilling. Who benefits? The “health” insurance analogues in the energy industry, corporations like Cabot whose suspension for environmental violations has been lifted, and White Pines who has “the state’s go-ahead to accept radioactive sludge” from natural gas drilling.

However willfully blind we are to the connection between environmental destruction and human health, the writing’s on the wall: capitalist enterprise cares nothing whatever for human welfare. Indeed, the very corporations who exercise the most power over life and death—HEALTH insurance—actively work to deny the services PAID FOR by the people who hold their policies. This IS insurance—an insurance of death. Corporations like Cabot, Cigna, Aetna, Humana, White Pines, Exxon, AIG, Citibank, and on and on have so effectively exploited the fear of “socialism” and the racist hatred of Obama that we’re willing to sacrifice our health and the environment it depends on in order to realize what? The freedom to die from untreated disease? The freedom to watch others reap the profits of environmental obliteration?

So long as Obama’s not reelected, and we get to go down waving the flag, I guess so.

Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
580 words.

Five Critical Issues

I am very excited to be able to report that I'll have a new book coming out in the Fall of 2009 (Broadview):

Five Critical Issues for Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism:

Sexual Identity and Politics,
Reproductive Technology,
Economic Inequality and the Culture Industry,
Religious Fundamentalism,
and The Status of Nonhuman Others

The new book includes many of the themes that have characterized my work throughout my career as a philosopher, writer, and university professor. But it also includes some new themes, for example, the emergence of religious fundamentalism - Christian and Islamic- and its place within the global capitalism responsible for the ongoing exploitation of women, children, and indigenous peoples. Broadly socialist feminist in perspective, Five Critical Issues seeks to connect some of the dots between, for example, the effort in Pennsylvania to constitutionalize heterosexuality and its attendant ratification of second class citizen status for gays. lesbians, bisexuals, inter-sexed persons, and transsexuals in that state, and the role that religion, racism, sexism, the commodification of sexuality, and our treatment of nonhuman animals figure into these complex political and moral dynamics. My principle aim, however, is to add one more voice to the 21st century's emergent coalition of movements - feminist, environmental, anti-racist, animal welfare, social and economic justice - in the effort to help us see that, especially in light of global emergencies like climate change, terrorism, the use of torture, sex-trafficking, and the widening gap between the wealthy and the indigent, there is no more important a time than now to work towards progressive change.

Why Drilling in ANWR and off the Coast of Florida is Misguided

Of all the absurd arguments I’ve heard this year, Tom Ciccarelli’s “environmentalism is the mother of socialism” takes the cake. Understanding neither environmentalism nor socialism, his evident aim is to fear monger through the use of language loaded in the direction he apparently knows his “evidence” won’t go (if he had the goods, he wouldn’t need the ballast). Using loaded phrasing like “the lefty plan” Ciccarelli substitutes ridicule for reasoning, accusation (“environmentalists are responsible for the ridiculous energy costs”) for evidence.

Ciccarelli’s only reference, Mineral Management Service (www.mms.gov) is not a source of objective evidence about the benefits or hazards of offshore drilling. MMS’s mission is to promote “energy independence” via drilling and natural gas production. The agency also disburses royalties from this production—evidence of its interested aims. That “copious amounts of oil and natural gas” will materialize is, moreover, fantasy at best. Much like the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR), it amounts to fewer than 30 years of energy production at present rates of consumption. According to the U.S. Department of Energy “[i]f Congress were to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, crude oil prices would probably drop by an average of only 75 cents a barrel...The report, which was requested in December by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, found that oil production in the refuge "is not projected to have a large impact on world oil prices” (www.adn.com/anwr/story/414808.html). Ditto for oil-to-shale in Colorado and Wyoming.

Ciccarelli’s plan rewards the already bloated oil and natural gas industries with additional “huge tax breaks” at the direct expense of future Americans (not to mention the rest of the world). He doesn’t tell you that the dollars corporations like BP (Beyond Petroleum) spend on alternative energy research pales utterly in comparison to their PR campaign to defend their current practice, or that the environmental record of Big Oil is beyond deplorable. Instead he resorts to straw fallacy—distortion of an opponent’s position to make a weaker one look better—with admonitions like “hush up, Greenpeace, there isn’t a tree for 750 miles” ignoring the fact that ecosystems depend on the complex interactions of all their constituent members, especially their predator/prey relationships, and that ANWR’s caribou—and thus everything that depends on their migration—is at risk in drilling. Maybe we think that Alaska’s far away, so what happens there won’t affect the rest of us, but as the scientific evidence for global climate change shows, this thinking is naive in the extreme.

Contrary to Ciccarelli’s cynical effort to dismiss environmentalists as leftists, the future of energy production isn’t about party politics; it’s about how much we care about the future of our children. Without the development of environmentally sustainable alternatives, this future’s in jeopardy. The writing’s been on the wall since at least 1973—the first oil crisis—and our lack of innovation and action is not just Big Oil’s fault (although resistance to alternatives is well-documented for Exxon, Chevron, BP); it’s ours. We are the world’s energy gluttons, and more of the same a la Ciccarelli will only hasten the demise of our energy independence. He’s right that we do have smart people. Let’s put them to work asking smart questions like “Hey PPL, where DO you store those spent nuclear rods?” “What more could we do with solar, wind, a diversity of bio-fuels, hydrogen?” The environmentalists, of course, have been asking the hard questions for years. Their proposals for limiting meat production, producing gas efficient vehicles, reducing the production of plastics, controlling pollutants, etc., offer tough medicine—the kind that just might save us from soiling ourselves to extinction.


Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
594 words