Leading by Example

Years ago I was doing some banking with some volunteers in the local Green Party riding association. Basically I had to cosign one volunteer Chief Financial Officer off the bank account and put another one on. This resulted in my standing on the sidewalk with a woman while we waited for another guy to show up. One of the woman's co-workers happened by and they had a bit of a conversation. He asked what she was doing and when she explained, he started up with the usual "yeah, this is all idealistic but no one actually walks the talk---people are all hypocrites" blather.

It was a bitterly cold winter's day. The roads were clear but a blizzard was coming in and there was a howling wind with snow flurries. In the midst of this guy's rant our fellow rolled up on his old Dutch bicycle. The cynic's mouth literally dropped and his eyes bugged out. He simply couldn't believe that someone was so concerned about climate change that he would ride a bicycle in that sort of weather. It rendered him actually speechless to see someone "lead by example".

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In the struggle for Indian independence there was a campaign titled "Swadeshi" that used "leading by example" to encourage Indians to think about how their day-to-day decisions impacted their country's economic independence from the British Empire.

Basically, the idea was that India's rural poor had been grotesquely exploited by an economic system that forced peasants to grow cotton, ship it to England, where it was turned into cloth, which was then shipped to India where it sold for less than that created by domestic production. This kept the peasants poor and stopped local Indian industry from developing as a competitor with Britain. 

The Congress Party of India sought to raise people's consciousness by encouraging people to buy cotton and spin thread which they then sold to artisanal weavers to make a special type of cloth known as "khadi", which they could buy and make their own clothes from.  Indeed, this was such an important campaign that people staged protests where they burnt English cloth to show that they would no longer buy or wear it. People bought their membership in the Congress Party with homespun thread. At one convention, Mohandas Gandhi (then President of the party) devoted a 40 minute talk to quietly sitting on a stage with a spinning wheel making thread for the weavers. 

Khadi is still sold in India.
This image from the Womenweave
organic co-op. Used under the "Fair Use" provision.

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When I first started working on this blog I wanted to make it an "open book" project. That is, I thought that I'd keep track of my hours and thereby tell readers how much time I put into researching and writing these missives. I quickly decided keeping track of my time would be a waste of effort. To a certain extent most of my life is now devoted to the project---I go to events and talk to people and that helps with stories. Even when I'm at home by myself I am often reading or listening to podcasts. Even when I'm not doing much of anything at all, at least part of me is always thinking about a story.

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Gandhi was a real master of the concept of "leading by example". Unfortunately, a lot of this is lost on people who don't understand the issues he was dealing with. For example, he started out trying to be a "proper English gentleman" during his legal career. This involved wearing a suit and tie. But eventually, he stopped trying to "ape" the British and instead decided that he would live and look like an ordinary, poor Indian. This helped immensely in his attempt to connect with the Indian masses---who were alienated from the tiny Anglophile elite who tended to lead the independence movement.

Gandhi, seated in the middle. The early elite, Anglophile.
Original image from Life magazine archive.
Public Domain image, copyright expired, c/o Wiki Commons.

A later Gandhi who was actively trying to court the vast majority of Indians.
Another public domain image. From the The New Indian Express website.

This process also extended to attempts to change the attitudes of Indians with regard to what Gandhi considered their own particular prejudices. For example, at the first Congress Party of India convention he attended he volunteered to be in charge of providing and cleaning the latrines. As an upper cast Hindu (Gandhi's father had been a prime minister in one of the "princely states"), it would have been seen by most people as absolutely bizarre for him to take on a task that should only be done by a Dalit (the horribly exploited class of "untouchables" created by India's caste system.) But this was just another case of his trying to build bridges between the different groups. The existing divisions between the different religions and castes of India had been exploited by the British for centuries. Gandhi not only saw a moral imperative in breaking down these barriers, he also saw that many people would not support independence if it meant that majority Indians would be free to horribly exploit their particular minority group.  

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The reason why I'm going on about this issue is because I think that it's time the environmental movement started to exploit the tactic of "leading by example". I say this because this is one of the few ways that it is possible to change the minds of the 30% or so of the population who are fighting absolutely tooth and nail against doing something to stop the human race from committing mass suicide.

There's a retired University of Manitoba psychology professor by the name of Bob Altemeyer who devoted his career to studying what motivates right wing people---both leaders and voters. The conclusion he came to was that these people are pretty much impervious to evidence and logic. But the one way that they do tend to change their worldview is through personal and vicarious experience. That is to say they build their worldview around people, not ideas.  

Let me illustrate with a couple examples. 

Altemeyer did some research on worldview changes among people who go to university. What he found was evidence that the old adage of "the fellow lost his faith when he went to college" is actually true. A lot of people do go through profound worldview changes. But what he found was that it wasn't because their course work enlightened them. Instead, it was because they were exposed to a lot of different people with different life experiences. It was the informal social interaction that destroyed their preconceptions about the world. 

Let me illustrate with one of these "worldview changes" that people have gone through in our lifetimes. At first the idea that gays could marry was opposed by a majority of Americans. But now a majority are in favour of it. What changed? Because of court rulings and a concerted campaign for gays to "get out of the closet", a lot of people who were opposed to gays in principle found out that some of the people in their lives who they really liked or respected were, in fact, gay. This forced them onto the horns of dilemma. They either had to drop kick these people out of their lives or change one of the basic building blocks of the way they viewed the world around them. In many cases, they chose the latter instead of the former. 

Chart from the Pew Forum webpage, presumably used with
their permission, as they have it set up to easily download.
Click on the image for a clearer image. 

This isn't a question of demographic shift (ie: "civilization progresses one funeral at a time"), because if you break the survey sample into different age cohorts you see the same change in attitudes.

Pew Forum et al. As you can see, lots of people---regardless of age---changed their minds about gay marriage at
roughly the same time. Altemeyer says this didn't happen because of evidence or logic.
Instead it was learning that uncle Fred was gay and Aunt Muriel is a lesbian.

(If you are interested in learning more about Altemeyer's work, he published a free to download Ebook that on the subject. If you are interested in learning more on the subject covered in this post, you might want to read my first book Walking the Talk. At the top right side of this site there is an advert for it with links to where you can buy it either as an Ebook or paperback. The paperback is also on sale at the Bookshelf downtown. And the public and university libraries each also has a copy.) 

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One of the first things that I saw after Steve Dyck announced that he was running for the local Green Party of Canada nomination was a snide remark about the fact that he was currently in Central America. The idea was that if he really believed in climate change as an issue, he wouldn't have blasted off a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere for a frivolous winter vacation. This isn't a "one off". The web is awash with memes talking about the disconnect between what leading environmentalists say about the environment and how they live their lives. Here's a small sample that I'm sharing with you under the "fair use" provision of the copyright law. 

From the "Bookworm Room" 

From "The Top 12 Celebrity Climate Hypocrites"

From "Leading Malaysian Neocon"

From garyvarvel.com.

     

I could post a lot more of these. The point I'm trying to make is that there are a lot of folks out there who think that if you really do think that climate change is an existential threat, then you should live your life in a way that looks like you really believe it. I think that they have a point. 

If an environmentalist says that the world is reaching a crisis point over carbon dioxide, then they shouldn't be jetting around the world to go to on vacations, conventions, to visit family, etc. This isn't to say that your particular trip is going to tip the balance, but learning to do without this is something that shows that you really mean what you say. Otherwise, it looks like you want other people to give up their "goodies" while you keep yours. And that stinks. Even worse, it is sabotaging the environmental movement when we need to bring as many people "on board" as we possibly can. 

This isn't to say that many environmentalists haven't already made big changes in the way that they live their lives. But some high-profile environmentalists still seem to live excessively "large lives". But the point is that there needs to be a conscious campaign to harness the symbolic value inherent in "living the like you already live in the world you want to inhabit". Gandhi knew how to do that, I don't see why modern environmentalists cannot do the same thing. 

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

The Voice of the Unheard

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Image from
the Nobel Prize Committee, c/o Wiki Commons

People routinely use Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an authority to suggest that there is never any justification for making waves. The idea is that he showed that it is possible to make great changes in society without using violence. And in some vague extrapolation, this has been expanded to suggest that there's ultimately no reason to create any disorder or even inconvenience in order to make the world a better place.  This does a profound disservice to the man, who was acutely aware of the necessity of rebellion in social progress. Moreover, while as a Christian he was generally opposed to violence, he was sensitive to why people become violent.

 “I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”

I raise this point because there are a lot of people who believe that only "wack-a-doodles" ever become "activists". I realized this a long time ago during a boozy backyard get together with a person who has been a city Councilor in Guelph for many years. After several beers the conversation came around to the Residents for Responsible Development, the battle against Walmart, and, one of Guelph's past leading lights, Ben Bennett. I was completely taken aback when my host mentioned that he thought Ben was a nutcase because he was involved in a ten year battle to force Walmart to abide by the city's official plan.

This surprised me because the man who's beer I was drinking is someone I respect as an intelligent, thoughtful professional. And also because I know Ben really well (he was best man at my wedding) and I know that he is also a very thoughtful, intelligent person who had a career where he was a respected part of an important profession. (He retired as head of the Municipal Waste Association.)

I raise this point to illustrate a bit of a divide between people who are adamantly, absolutely, and, exclusively committed to electoral politics and others who see it as just part of an on-going and multi-faceted struggle between different elements of human society. The fact of the matter is that people forget that just about every worthwhile thing in our society came about not because rational elected officials decided that a certain thing would be in the public interest. Instead, what we consider human "rights" have come about only after hard struggle outside of the electoral process by people who were considered silly or dangerous "wack-a-doodles".

Another dangerous wack-a-doodle,
on a church's stained glass window, no less.
From a theology blog. 

People conveniently forget that Martin Luther King Jr. was absolutely vilified during his lifetime. He was a dangerous radical to a great many people. We forget that he was actually named after a much older, dangerous wack-a-doodle who had a death sentence hanging over his head most of his life and only survived because his monarch (Frederick the Wise) moved heaven-and-earth to keep him alive.  Sometimes it seems like we even forget that he was assassinated.

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I'm raising these points in this weekend editorial because I've been watching another movement that might become every bit as important---if not more---than the Southern civil rights movement in the 1960s. I'm talking about the group Extinction Rebellion. This is a group that is built around the idea that time is absolutely running out to deal with environmental issues, none of the political parties are giving them the priority that they deserve, and, we need to totally mobilize society in order to avoid total catastrophe. As a result, they are committed to pulling all the stops to raise the issue. This has included mass disruption of transportation in London England through blocking major bridges and the subway system. Another example was when protesters in the gallery of Parliament disrobed to show their absolute disgust with politicians who spend their time bickering over Brexit while ignoring the fact that the earth's life support systems are on the brink of failing catastrophically.

Image c/o Mother Board, original attribution to a Twitter Feed capture from Extinction Rebellion.
Used under the Fair Use provision of Copyright legislation.

I'm especially happy to see that Guelph has organized it's own chapter of Extinction Rebellion. It held it's first protest on April 15th. This helped local members "get their feet wet" and to help raise awareness for the proposal to have city Council declare a "climate emergency". No roads were closed and even though it was a sunny day, it was still far too cold for shaming nudity.

April 15th protest, next to the Church of Our Lady in Guelph, on it's way to City Hall. Photo by Bill Hulet

The underlying thesis of this group is absolutely bang on. Time is running out and we need to organize on the same sort of footing that we did in WWII to defeat Fascism. It's absolutely outrageous that in the face of frantic calls to action by the scientific community the Conservative party is building it's brand around sabotaging action to prevent climate change, and, the Prime Minister thinks he needs to build oil pipelines to get the "social license" to do his bit to stop the human race from committing suicide. This is just a tiny protest, but I hope that it will be a harbinger of greater things in the immediate future.

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After 31 years I've finally finished my day job. I hope that this means that I'll be able to spend more time working on stories and editorials. But it also means that my income has dropped considerably. And there are expenses associated with putting out the blog. For example, I just subscribed to another news source, the National Observer, which (with taxes) costs almost $150/year---but is an excellent source for provincial and Canadian news. That's part of the research that I have to do to keep the stories coming. So if you can afford it, why not think about helping out with my expenses by subscribing through Patreon or putting something in the Tip Jar? Every little bit helps. 

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!