What Now?

by Anthony Weston

weston@elon.edu

Copyright 2004

So the right wing has finally pulled off its cultural revolution. Really it’s only half a surprise. For decades – literally – we’ve been thinking about winning elections while conservatives were taking over the churches, infiltrating school boards, building networks under the radar. In this grand project they played to their strengths: traditionalist thinking, patriarchal authority structures, large numbers of marginalized and (in truth) somewhat culturally demeaned people with time on their hands. We knew it was happening but never could quite take it seriously. This is the 21st Century, for God’s sake…

But they have succeeded. The old icons are falling, only the reactionaries have bold ideas, and “moral values” are all the rage. Never mind how utterly inapt the term: it’s axiomatic that the Dems don’t have any. Red versus blue, metro versus retro, the grand old populist farmer-labor coalitions tilting right (think Minnesota). This is the payoff. They’ve been at it a long time. Even God apparently has come around.

Some of my colleagues on the religious side of things now talk of working to win back the churches (to, as one puts it, “the prophetic tradition as opposed to personal morality based on vague and easily misused ideas.”) All to the good, for sure. Yet in the largest view it is still a reactive project, still starting from way behind, playing their game. Is that the best we can do? Really? Isn’t there something truer, closer to the heart, even maybe genuinely joyful, places where we start ahead and not already far behind?

Suppose – just suppose – that we put ourselves back where the conservatives were when they (some of them, the foot soldiers) committed themselves to the slow, genuinely grass-roots work of changing the culture, one out-of-the-way voter at a time. Suppose that we look to cultural change as a fundamental strategy rather than expecting to just argue it out at the last minute on the way to the polls. We might ask a rather different but fundamental question of ourselves. What kinds of cultural transformation play to our strengths? Seriously: where is our game as opposed to theirs?

It’s not a time for modesty, OK? Our strengths are, in part: creativity, social inventiveness and optimism, celebration, freedom in expression (as much or more than freedom of belief, a more traditional epistemological conception), open-ended community, cosmopolitanism and pleasure in diversity, good food, good music. So here’s the question: could we not make (a better word might be “revive”) a cultural revolution based upon these things?

Case in point. Clearly we’re not going to get gay marriage anytime soon. Well then: let us invent a new form of committed relationship. Let us make it better than marriage – or anyway, really wonderful in some other directions: more celebratory, more creatively articulated, more communal (meaning, maybe: the support and conviviality of others is built in from the start). As sacred as you like, too: maybe a good label would be “Covenant” – or perhaps something equally evocative but new, and clearly identified with this project of social invention. Meanwhile, separately, establish a relatively standardized list of choices for civil unions or other kinds of contractual conjoinings of resources or interests (because no law under capitalism could conceivably ban contracts, could it?) Sympathetic spiritual assemblies can simply start performing such Covenants, and of course not only for same-sex couples but for anyone who wants to benefits of Better-Than-Marriage. Imagine the rush…

I know, I know, traditional marriage will continued to be favored in law and policy. But all the more reason to make Better-Than-Marriage really good. (And you think the right will simply appropriate the good stuff? Really? From gay people? And if they do – wonderful! Make them a free, vocal, visible gift of it.) We may take heart also from the fact that even some conservatives now argue for entirely splitting civil marriage from religious marriage. Fundamentalists, I’m told, have even invented more restrictive kinds of marriage. If they can reinvent marriage, why shouldn’t we?

Another example. We have a military very good at fighting wars but inept at rebuilding the social fabric necessary for democratic civil society. Even so it was amazing what some military units were able to do in Iraq, 23-year old soldiers setting up village councils and rebuilding electrical systems on the fly. Nonetheless the expectations themselves are impossible. We need people trained to do these things, in short a new global institution, something like a Social Reconstruction Corps, that can move into both war-ravaged and other damaged states and rebuild, indeed build better.

We are unlikely to get this from a ruling order whose objectives are overwhelmingly economic and military. But there is no reason why we cannot begin to create it on our own. Actually, it is already arising, piecemeal. Private aid organizations of all stripes, from the International Red Cross to Doctors Without Borders, are often the first to arrive – or indeed are already stationed – in global regions of need. But how much farther all of this might go! Along with courageous organizations like Doctors Without Borders, we need a whole range of others, speaking to no less compelling needs: say, Librarians Without Borders, and Musicians without Borders, and Electricians and Democrats (small-d) and, who knows, even Philosophers without Borders. How about a Global Ecological Reconstruction Corps? How about Weapons Inspectors Without Borders (now that would be something, eh? Work it out… for one thing, there would be no “stigma” to inspections – one of the usual objections – if inspectors went everywhere…) How about, um, Elections Monitors Without Borders?

Oh and by the way, why are we waiting for national governments to empower a real world government? Why not create a world government from scratch, right now, by voluntary associations of people, Change-Makers Without Borders, NGOs, local or bioregional shadow governments everywhere? What are we waiting for? At least, what about a Free University of Social Change, maybe global in scope, web-based, linking individual people as students and teachers across the world and beckoning the traditional institutions to follow?

Of course there will be a thousand objections to any of these ideas. Of course they all need work (that’s part of the point). But you get the feeling: the spirit of inventiveness, indeed chutzpah, and the immense possibilities for working in a primarily cultural rather than purely political sphere.

It’s not a time for nay-saying but for multiplying possibilities. This very weekend my students are putting together their own “social inventions” to submit to a global on-line clearinghouse for just such ideas: the British-based Global Ideas Bank (you can do it too: check out www.globalideasbank.org.) The Bank ran a Global Social Innovations Day on November 2^nd – a deliberate and symbolic attempt to find a common ground “beyond” the current divisions, knowing that whoever won, half the country would feel it lost. This was, or rather is, a way to go on, creatively, together.

What else can be done with the Internet, for instance? Why are we ceding it to sales pitches and terrorists and pornographers? This is not a question restricted to the usual progressives; whole new and wonderful kinds of virtual communities could invite everyone in.

Speaking of quasi-pornographic media, meanwhile, those of us with an inclination to media had better get to work inventing alternatives to Fox-style “news.” But again not just in a reactive mode. We needn’t duplicate what Fox does on the “other” side. Maybe we need a whole new concept of what TV can do, how events can be understood and the “news” organized?

How can we create new levels of resiliency in civil and technological systems so that there are fewer “Achilles’ heels” (deliberately exploited, or accidentally triggered) in a system that for better or worse we all depend upon? A creative response might invite actual community organizing, like a few progressive groups pioneered in response to Y2K worries: looking for ways to build cohesive and semi-self-sufficient neighborhoods, for example, in place of the diffuse collections of near-strangers so many of us now inhabit, maybe with back-up (and why just backup?) neighborhood power systems, collective gardens, etc. Of course there would be enormous civic benefits from such a move in addition to really, for once, strengthening “homeland security.”

And what about those so-called “moral values,” anyway? Are we really going to let “morality” be reduced to preventing certain kinds of loving partners from making a marriage commitment to each other, meanwhile forcing every single pregnancy to go to term even if the pregnant woman dies? Imagining that God speaks to you alone? In truth these are not moral values but immoral values – so why don’t we, insistently and persistently, use the term that way? Meantime, more constructively, let us insistently embrace and then expand the sphere of “moral values.” Indeed we might put this move at the center of everything we say and do. Here are some real moral values: social justice, for example; and caring for the Earth. Living just so that we don’t hand off to our children a world like a sucked orange: that might be radical enough.

Of course just saying this won’t make it so. We’ve been saying it for a long time already. It’s probably no wonder that environment shows up so little on the political map when the only environmentalism we know speaks the language of fear, danger, looming disaster. Why not also, then, a celebratory environmentalism: an environmentalism of equinox and solstice festivals (or rather, in part, recovery of the awareness that this is what we’ve already really got); of Lights-Out Nights to welcome the full or new moons or meteor showers or just the billion-year spree of the galaxies, there every clear night; or festivals keyed to whale or hawk migrations? Put even a fraction of the energies devoted to electing Kerry and Bowles into something like this, and everything could be different. “The Earth” no longer as some distant and uneasy abstraction, but right next to us, right here and now.

And when we get our Earth festivals and our Better-Than-Marriages and our Citizens-Without-Borders going, then – let us invite everyone. This is where the new center could lie. Of course there will be a few who choose to stay in their church basements watching reruns of “Faith in the White House” and designing ever-more-restrictive abstinence-only sex education (so-called), or whatever. Most people – metro or retro – respond better to hope. More festivals, more music, more joy. Living well is not only the best revenge. It’s also the best way to change the world.