Beyond Wedom vs Theydom
Issue Eight: The Understory
It was the spring of 1963. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) to create a massive direct action campaign against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. The campaign would be during Easter—the second-biggest shopping season of the year and a time for “moral witness to give our community a chance to survive” in the words of local leader, Fred Shuttlesworth.
On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy led a march from the 16th Street Baptist Church (bombed months later killing four little girls) and were arrested for violating an anti-protest injunction. Writing from his jail cell on the margins of the Birmingham News, King penned Letter from Birmingham Jail with this as the closing remarks:
“One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.’ They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience sake.
One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage.”
King recognized one of the fundamental flaws of movements. They tend to subsume the individual for the sake of the whole. By evoking the “real heroes” of the civil rights movement, King not only deflected attention from the heroization of him as a leader, but also reminded his fellow clergymen and citizens that the strength of the movement was individuals standing in for the values Americans revered. The “noble sense of purpose” provided the mental scaffold to sacrifice oneself for “conscience sake”—an internal realization that manifested itself outward in the actions of the demonstrators. It is this relationship between the individual consciousness and the collective of the movement that King oscillates between. Interconnection runs through King’s Letter, building off the theme discussed from the perspective of Indigenous world views in Issue Seven. In the words of King, “humanity is caught in an inescapable network, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
While the civil rights movement sought and achieved increased social cohesion, the climate change movement has increased societal bifurcation and little if any substantive progress over decades. What is the difference in the stories behind the movements that bring people closer or pushes them farther apart?
In this issue I’d like to identify the climate change story that has led us astray, and how the civil rights story might restore what has been broken. By moving away from ingroups versus outgroups, us versus them, good guys versus enemies, we can discover how to shape a different story about climate change. One that can bring societies closer together, restore our relationship with nature, and change our behavioural patterns.
Who is Responsible for the Climate Emergency?
When facing a problem, our evolutionary psychologies seem hardwired to look for threats posed by enemies intentionally seeking to do us harm (George Marshall). These make neat and tidy stories we can tell ourselves that both imagine and blame certain groups while releasing others and ourselves. We see the result in our present moment or on the horizon and gravitate towards who was responsible for what we now experience.
When it comes to the climate emergency, the question of who to hold responsible influences the stories we tell ourselves.
Is it corporations who have directly contributed significant GHG emissions, or indirectly brought about deregulation through political influence?
Is it governments who did not impose stringent enough policies, enforce those policies, or enter coalitions with others to work collectively?
Is it religious institutions that failed to acknowledge the linkage between the destruction of nature and reverence for a higher power and its creation?
Is it developed countries who, in the pursuit of exponential growth, have created increased flooding, droughts, and fires in less developed countries?
Is it activists and NGOs who fomented greater partisanship, further escalating a natural and human welfare issue into a political one?
Is it leaders from the private and public sector who have chosen not to use their positions of power to galvanize their communities to advocate for a different future?
Is it think tanks who were responsible for sowing the seeds of doubt about climate science and denouncing climate scientists?
Is it citizens who did not exert enough pressure on their elected representatives, or even show up to cast their vote for candidates supporting climate change action?
Is it consumers who continue to buy far in excess of their needs, and purchase extracted resources and goods from companies who are oppositional to their values?
Each of these groups and more are responsible for contributing to climate change. But who we blame depends on our proximity to these groups. In “The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual” (1994), McKenzie Wark writes how the media feeds us daily stories that enable us to recognize a larger unity or community than our contacts. These imagined categories create perceptions of distance, making some groups feel closer to us, while others farther away into “visible, distant visions of order.” John Hartley calls this effect “Theydom” whereby “individuals in Theydom are treated as being all the same; the identity consists in being ‘unlike us,’ so they are ‘like each other.’” The resulting boundaries of “Wedom” and “Theydom” become containers for abdicating or limiting responsibility, inevitably displacing our roles as individuals and the interconnectivity of all that binds us together in the climate emergency.
The Enemy Narrative
“Our political discourse is rife with good-versus-evil narratives. It is obvious to each side that they are good and the other side is evil (or some cipher therefore: sick, irrational, twisted, unethical, corrupt, ‘acting from the reptilian brain,’ etc.). Both sides agree on that. Therefore, both sides also agree on the strategic template for victory: arouse as much outrage and indignation as possible among the Good Folk so that they will rise up and cast down the Evil Folk. No wonder our civic discourse has degenerated into such polarized extremes.” Charles Eisenstein
Charles Eisenstein and George Marshall agree that it is in the evocation of an enemy narrative of imagined boundaries between (ir)responsible groups that have resulted in the partisan differences in climate science and the escalating urgency of the climate emergency. In “Climate-change activists are playing a dangerous game with their 'enemy' narrative” (The Guardian, 2013), Marshall constructs the two storylines of the enemy narrative, both assuming intentionality in action:
Enemy + intention → harms victims
Hero + intention → defeats enemy and restores status quo
You can then fashion your own enemy narrative by substituting the enemy/hero of your choosing with a specific intention to cause harm to. This enemy story structure is problematic when it comes to climate change for four reasons:
We are all the enemy (which means there is no enemy after all).
We are all victims to varying degrees, as climate change will affect everyone.
In most cases there is no intentionality to harm. Whether it is someone filling up their gas tank or an executive whose decisions increase the GHG emissions of their company, most actions that contribute to climate change are harmful without intentionality.
The status quo is gone as climate change is a cumulative and worsening condition.
In The Rolling Stone article, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math (2012), Marshall found this formulation of the enemy narrative in climate change. Written from the point of acknowledgement that environmentalists’ efforts to date were only producing “gradual, halting shifts,” Bill McKibben identified that the historic focus on individual actions would have little to no effect on staying below a two-degree celsius rise and under 565 gigatons more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
For McKibben a “record of failure” to tackle global warming necessitated a new approach. His idea was to build a movement. And, in McKibben’s words, “movements require enemies….and enemies are what climate change has lacked.”
McKibben’s chosen enemy, “Public Enemy Number One,” was the fossil fuel industry. And he called upon fellow partisan igniter Naomi Klein to reflect that “with the fossil fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It’s what they do.” And to be fair, the concern about the fossil fuel industry’s contribution to climate change is entirely justified. But the ends do not justify the means. McKibben was starting a war with fossil fuel companies that “don’t simply exist in a world whose hungers they fulfill—they help create the boundaries of that world.” A wartime strategist would question the logic of choosing an enemy of such outsized resources to one’s own. But even more significant is the rhetorical, dangerous game that McKibben chose to play.
Rex Tillerson at CERAWeek Houston in 2015 by Bartolomej Tomic (Shared by CC BY-NC 2.0)
By choosing to play the partisan game of the enemy narrative, McKibben created Wedom and Theydom, empowering us to ignore the changes that we all have to make. The enemy narrative demotivates individuals. It removes agency from our individual actions, and instead directs focus on imagined malevolent forces that seek to do us harm. For McKibben it was the fossil fuel industry and Exxon’s then CEO, Rex Tillerson, who was “the most reckless man on the planet.” Marshall reminds us that “there is always something else out there which helps us to divert the attention from the fact that ultimately this is something we’re doing to the way we live.” Instead of an enemy narrative, what we need is a story of common ground and cooperation that speaks to the concerns and aspirations of everyone.
But how is it possible to launch a movement that would be targeted at not only homogenized others, but even ourselves? Didn’t the civil rights movement need clear enemies to achieve broad social change? Wouldn’t it be much easier if we could target one of these groups and place the burden on their shoulders, thus fabricating a singular enemy while releasing ourselves from culpability?
Love Versus Hate
The U.S. Civil Rights Movement by U.S. Embassy The Hague (Shared by CC BY-ND 2.0)
The civil rights movement provoked moral outrage not by choosing the right enemies, but rather by exposing how pervasive the immoral behaviour was in treating African Americans as only partial humans. During this civil rights era it was impossible not to see the injustices, particularly if you lived in the American South. Micro protests of civil disobedience were erupting everywhere. And while the acts themselves might have been possible to turn a blind eye to for some, the reactions to them were impossible to ignore.
Insults and objects thrown at students as they desegregate schools.
Watching teenagers get covered in food while at a lunch counter.
Community members forcibly removing others from a city bus because of where they sat.
Screams cascading across downtowns as firehoses sent bodies flying across streets and parks.
King and others knew that no matter how painful the brutality was to endure, and how long they might have to endure it, love was the only path to transcendence.
King was highly influenced by the teaching of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi called his method of nonviolent action Satyagraha, translated as “the force that is generated through adherence to truth.” In Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (1950), Louis Fischer described Satyagraha in these words:
“Satyagraha is peaceful. If words fail to convince the adversary, perhaps purity, humility and honesty will. The opponent must be ‘weaned from error by patience and sympathy,’ weaned, not crushed; converted, not annihilated. Satyagraha is the exact opposite of the policy of an-eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye which ends in making everybody blind. You cannot inject new ideas into a man’s head by chopping it off; neither will you infuse a new spirit into his heart by piercing it with a dagger.”
Satyagraha recognized that a culture of violence could never be broken through the deployment of violent ends, an ideology whose results were validated by the research of Erica Chenoweth. The enemy narrative is in itself a form of violence. Gandhi instead sought to bring about a “change of heart” in the public. As Mark Shepard writes in Mahatma Gandhi and His Myths, Gandhi ruled out the use of direct coercion through physical means of blocking or verbal means of hostile language. “All these were ruled out because any of them would undercut the empathy and trust Gandhi was trying to build, and would hinder ‘change of heart.’”
The ideology of Satyagraha pervaded King’s writing. In Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958), he wrote:
“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert.”
By labelling the humiliation of others an immoral act, King recognized the rhetorical violence of the enemy narrative. One year earlier in his sermon, “Loving Your Enemies,” King sought to dissuade his followers from the path of the enemy narrative centred on hate and redirect efforts towards love. Fundamental to his dismissal of the enemy narrative was his direction to “discover the element of good in the enemy. Within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good.”
If we all contain some element of evil, that commonality binds rather than separates us into Wedom and Theydom. King says it is the “strong person” who should have the sense to “cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil.” By casting off hate in favour of love, individuals can avoid the tragic, ruinous, and injurious personal effects that result from hating others. According to King, “love is creative, understanding goodwill for all [wo]men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual.” Here King distinguished the individual evil from “evil systems” of legal and political injustices.
Love for King was not a dismissal of evil, but rather an acceptance of its inherent nature in all of us. In her Denktagebuch (Thinking journal) Hannah Arendt called for amor mundi—love for the world, specifically asking why it is so difficult. For Arendt, loving the world meant that we see it for what it is by taking the time to stop, listen, and think (On the Election of Donald Trump, Samantha Rose Hill). Thinking about how we might act in the world in accordance with our values is an act of love and our personal responsibility. For Arendt, we have to turn inward before we can turn outward. And we can only do that by finding the critical distance from what is happening around us. Samantha Rose Hill describes amor mundi as a “metaphysical certainty in a world that is always being destroyed. It is a relational form of love.”
Conclusion
Once we choose an enemy, we narrowly direct moral outrage rather than sparking a more pervasive outrage about the effects on everyone. The civil rights movement was a “struggle,” not a “war.” This semantic choice is one of great significance as we reach for parallels to the climate change movement. A war needs enemies. A struggle requires thinking and personal accommodation. If we choose war over struggle, we are not only choosing to externalize the enemy, but also further casting our climate future into one of greater partisanship and further damage to our living planet.
Unlike the climate change movement, the civil rights movement centred on the visibility of oppression and the willingness of millions to be instruments of that oppression. The sentiment “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest” quoted by King reminds us that sacrifice begins with ourselves by first turning inward. By resisting the enemy narrative, we not only focus on the transformative work within each of us, but also cut the chain of hate to disintegrate imagined boundaries of Wedom versus Theydom. And in that, we may find a new story to tell ourselves and a healthier planet as a result.
Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead.
Adam
In between issues I share my own reflections and those I have heard from readers. While the term community is often overused and thus abused, The Understory is a community of readers who value the comments of others. Please reply to this email or leave a comment on the website with any reflections you feel comfortable sharing 🙏.
Thank you for your writing. I believe that climate change is a fundamentally a cultural issue rather than a rights and wrongs issue. Its about developing a narrative about change, positive change about the way we live today from a social and cultural perspective and articulating the benefits of a new cultural shift, which is to begin to live within the new climate paradigm. This means adapting and improving our living conditions (think planning for climate resilience), improving our productive practices (think products, innovation and technology) and improving our social relations (think sustainable communities, business relations and education and equality). Effective and responsible resource management (planet, natural resources and their uses) is critical to the to transitioning to new paradigm. Ultimately it is about engaging in climate conversations, taking action at community and political levels and developing awareness of everyday behavior and how it influences our impact on the 'climate dial'. Unfortunately, the urgency of this issue is not yet apparent among the general population, beyond those most directly affected. In the absence of a coherent communications campaign, this cultural shift will be slow and and therefore change will be more painful, costly and unequal across the globe. Despite my concerns expressed here I do believe that it is possible to shift the dial and that human behavior can and will change. The Covid experience has demonstrated that we can make change rapidly if we are asked to through coherent messaging informed by sound behavioral and psychological understandings.
I may have mentioned this before, but community of exclusion is the easiest, and therefore most often default mode for humans, because it allows us to forge, and perpetuate, group identity and cohesion with the least amount of effort by setting clear criteria for who is in and who is out.
By contrast, community of inclusion is difficult, messy, and requires personal awareness and interpersonal work that takes time, and that in Western dominant culture is neither taught, nor valued. This is without getting into critiques of Empire, which perpetuates the former at the cost of the latter form of community by its nature.
Agreed that for the climate movement, we cannot afford to have enemies. We are literally all in this together, and we are only going to get out of it by collaborating. No enemies means we can also start significantly de-investing military spending and plowing all that into all the things we need, battery/ energy storage/ carbon capture technologies, etc. along with reshaping our economies to be as local and sustainable as possible. Look at what Costa Rica accomplished abolishing their military and setting their ecosystem and community health & education as the higher values.