A One Way Door

Ceding Power to Leviathan

George Monbiot has been writing advocacy pieces for greenism in the Guardian for a long time now.  He is an educated chap.  He knows how to turn a phrase.  He is passionately committed to the Great Cause of saving the world.  To write such a phrase immediately conjures up comic book heroes of childhood days.  George, regrettably, is apparently still reading comics with all the fascination and credulity of a seven year old.  Worse, he is attempting to live them, earnestly believing the Caped Crusader actually exist, and Gotham City is as perverse as ever. 

In his most recent piece, George mourns the ebbing of global greenism.
  He is starting to show a touch of cynicism.  For a while there he genuinely believed the world would coalesce around the United Nations and take necessary, yet drastic steps, to save mankind.  The Caped Crusader was rushing hither and yon with all the excitement and adrenaline rush of a nine year old. Now, it's all fizzled. 

Rio 2012: it's a make-or-break summit. Just like they told us at Rio 1992

World leaders at Earth summits seem more interested in protecting the interests of plutocratic elites than our environment

Worn down by hope. That's the predicament of those who have sought to defend the earth's living systems. Every time governments meet to discuss the environmental crisis, we are told that this is the "make or break summit", on which the future of the world depends. The talks might have failed before, but this time the light of reason will descend upon the world.

We know it's rubbish, but we allow our hopes to be raised, only to witness 190 nations arguing through the night over the use of the subjunctive in paragraph 286. We know that at the end of this process the UN secretary general, whose job obliges him to talk nonsense in an impressive number of languages, will explain that the unresolved issues (namely all of them) will be settled at next year's summit. Yet still we hope for something better.

Like the exiles in Babylon, he recalls the glory of former days that have all turned to dust.

This week's earth summit in Rio de Janeiro is a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago. By now, the leaders who gathered in the same city in 1992 told us, the world's environmental problems were to have been solved. But all they have generated is more meetings, which will continue until the delegates, surrounded by rising waters, have eaten the last rare dove, exquisitely presented with an olive leaf roulade. The biosphere that world leaders promised to protect is in a far worse state than it was 20 years ago. Is it not time to recognise that they have failed?

Now comes the credulous bit.  We have charged George with living in perpetual childishness, believing in heroes that will save the world.  A bit harsh maybe.  But, consider what he is actually saying and hoping for in the following wistful lament:

The environmental crisis cannot be addressed by the emissaries of billionaires. It is the system that needs to be challenged, not the individual decisions it makes. In this respect the struggle to protect the biosphere is the same as the struggle for redistribution, for the protection of workers' rights, for an enabling state, for equality before the law.

So this is the great question of our age: where is everyone? The monster social movements of the 19th century and first 80 years of the 20th have gone, and nothing has replaced them. Those of us who still contest unwarranted power find our footsteps echoing through cavernous halls once thronged by multitudes. When a few hundred people do make a stand – as the Occupy campers have done – the rest of the nation just waits for them to achieve the kind of change that requires the sustained work of millions.

Without mass movements, without the kind of confrontation required to revitalise democracy, everything of value is deleted from the political text. But we do not mobilise, perhaps because we are endlessly seduced by hope. Hope is the rope from which we all hang.

To George, the Caped Crusader is the masses of ordinary people rising up to throw down the power politics of conflicted interests and money (Gotham City), replacing them with people power.   For one glorious moment at the turn of the century,  nations were being pressured by Non Governmental Organizations working through the United Nations.  The people were rising up, using the UN to force their governments to act.. 

It has apparently not yet dawned on George that the UN represents uber-Gotham, uber-money, uber-plutocracy.  The "people" may drive out the billionaires of one's own nation-state by appealing over their heads to the United Nations.  But that body is far more corrupt, distant, uncontrollable, and mendacious than any other government yet conceived by mankind.  It is Babel.  In a nano-second it becomes the ally of the global plutocrats.  National politicians turn on a dime to make sure they and their plutocratic supporters are standing close to the UN money-spiggots--only there would now be no way back.  People power would have not just waned, it would be extinct forever.

While George may lament the "turning" of President Obama into just another dirty money-grubbing politician allied with the plutocrats, it has not yet dawned upon him that this is always the way.  Big government means zero people power, an nemesis of all Caped Crusaders.  Appeals to the "people" are just a cheap trick to get hands on power, money, and influence.  The only politician worthy of our trust is one who hates government and wants to see its intrusive power diminished so that people can more readily take control of their own destinies.  But this kind of politician is hated by plutocrats--and, need we say, by the George Monbiot's of the world.  They have bigger things to fry.

The kind of Caped Crusader (people power) George loves works best when it brings pressure upon local governments.  But when people power is deployed to go "over the head" of local and national governments to global government and the UN, it is a one way door.  Cede power to that Leviathan and people power will be dead and buried forever. 

The question remains: why cannot George see this?  It can only be because he has never grown up: he remains an idealistic schoolboy, still captivated by Marvel Comics.