Yet another call for youth to save the planet.
Is it just me, or does that sound like the most lazy, annoying cop out ever? Consider:
... But young people are not cynical or jaded like many adults. They believe they can truly make a difference - and they can. ...
This may be true. It had better be true. And the reason it had better be true is because the people who say it have too often given up. So who else is going to do it?
It's deeply frustrating to me to to hear someone with 20-30 years worth of professional experience, social networking, capital accumulation and political influence say that what they're really waiting on is for a bunch of people with none of those advantages to come do what they couldn't manage. In the same vein, I know that leading figures in many activist issue camps, whether elected officials or NGO staff, hope that young people, or bloggers, or 'local' activists, really, anyone else, will get out and start rocking the boat so it doesn't have to be them. I've heard some version of this conversation too many times.
So, yes it would definitely be nice if the young people manage to fix the climate problem, and we should try, as should everyone else. It would be great if bloggers could manage all by ourselves to push the boundaries of debate and give cover to NGOs with large staffs and research budgets, or to elected officials with ready access to establishment media megaphones. But hey, a little help, that would make everything go better, right?
Yet time and again, the people who've been designated as leaders by the electoral process or getting high level promotions within powerful organizations so often fail to be out in front on important issues like global warming. They come over all Whitney Houston, with the "I believe the children are our future," (and we sang that song at my 6th grade graduation, to my enduring irritation) and defer actions to some shining white knights of the future whom they fantasize will take the reins when they're retired or whatever. Thing is, we absolutely don't have time for this nonsense, but I thought it might be useful to explore some possible reasons for it.
Read this, from The Change Masters, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, courtesy the Xyleme Learning Blog:
... Though innovators are diverse people in diverse circumstance, they share an integrative mode of operating which produces innovation: seeing problems not within limited categories but in terms larger than received wisdom; they make new connections, both intellectual and organizational; and they work across boundaries, reaching beyond the limits of their own jobs-as-given. They are not rugged individualists -- as in the classic stereotype of an entrepreneur -- but good builders and users of teams, as even classic business creators have to be. And so they are aided in their quest for innovation by an integrative environment, in which ideas flow freely, resources are attainable rather than locked in budgetary boxes, and support and teamwork across areas are the norm.... just about all innovating has a "political" dimension, ... But I am using "political" not in the negative sense of backroom deal making but in the positive sense that it requires campaigning, lobbying, bargaining, negotiating, caucusing, collaborating, and winning votes. That is, an idea must be sold, resources must be acquired or rearranged, and some variable numbers of other people must agree to changes in their own areas -- for innovations generally cut across existing areas and have wider organization ripples, like dropping pebbles into a pond. ..."
Think about those definitions of innovation and politics as you read the following, from an essay linked in the same post containing the previous excerpt, about Why Nerds Are Unpopular:
... I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.
For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular. ...
... Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please. ...
Popularity, as you've probably discovered, doesn't stop being useful after high school. Certainly popularity competition among adults is somewhat less obvious and in most situations less intense. It generally does not end with the losers getting wedgies or being publicly taunted by a ring of laughing peers. But who you know and how much they like you affects your prospects for every major life goal in adulthood. And politics, the game of figuring out how you get a lot of people to live together and share resources, is driven enormously by popularity and, therefore, by how well someone has learned to please others.
It isn't the mavericks and eccentrics who normally rise to positions of power, it's the people-pleasers.
That's not a terrible thing, but there come times where innovations beyond cost-cutting, streamlining existing structures and fiddling with existing programs need to happen. At those moments, it stands to reason that the people who pleased their way to the top of the power pyramid will be so bound to the relationships and deals they formed in order to get there that a fundamental reevaluation of the way they do business creates an almost existential crisis for them.
If there's a new system, what place will they have in it? What use will they be? What purpose will they serve?
Make no mistake, these are legitimately scary questions.
When you don't have a home of your own, a family, or a long roster of social obligations, these questions seem sort of abstract. When you have those things, they resolve into one fundamental fear: how will I earn a living? With power comes constraints, at least, that's usually the case.
So we come to it, I think. The advantage of the young isn't really that they're less cynical or jaded. The well-meaning person who wrote the editorial I started off linking to isn't even actually without hope, he thinks there's some solution available. But when he looks at his peers, he sees their constraints and restrictions more than he sees their power. He looks at politicians, people who've become masters at popularity contests, and clearly understands that they're unsuited to the task of upsetting all the people whose approval they've spent their whole adult lives seeking. He looks at younger people and sees, not really an attitude, but that they've got nothing to lose by bucking a system that hasn't rewarded them yet.
This seeming to be the case, the wheel must be reinvented over and over again by each generation of activists as the resources of social capital accumulated by their predecessors sit largely unused. The powerful continue to beseech the powerless to save them from their blinkered bondage.
Folks, it's time to play another game.
When it comes to climate politics, delay is as deadly as denial. The vast mailing lists, media access, public respectability and political clout of the older generation can't be allowed to sit on the shelf gathering dust as the 'youth' wait for these bequests to be passed on to them. They have to be mobilized now.
The true mission, should you choose to accept it, is far more difficult than saving the planet. If you read a lot about global warming and climate change issues, you probably know that the technical understanding of the problem and its possible solutions isn't the obstacle, the challenge is the foot-draggers. It would truly be a feat rarely accomplished and more difficult than almost any other organizational problem to force existing power structures and political figures to change course and purpose without needing to be ousted.
Next time you hear someone praising youth activism, consider that they mean well, but be sure to deplore in return the terrible state of activism by the powerful. Because those people have really got to get their acts together.
x-posted from it's getting hot in here
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