We seem to be in another one of those periods of heightened activism. Whether it be climate catastrophists, DEI disciples, censorship ninjas, pro-/anti-/pro-war junkies, or just iridescent keyboard warriors, the usual levels of activism are spiking beyond that which generally persists in any given time period. The minimal respect that many have held toward activists for their enthusiasm, selflessness, commitment, and conscientiousness, is eroding. There has always been something of the bore or arsehole buried in the activist, but now there is something sinister, threatening, illiberal, and even anti-democratic.
The spirit of activism that animates our time comes across as narcissistic, self-serving, neurotic, ignorant, intolerant, and dogmatic. This kind of activism is not subject to critique or reflection. It’s not even something disciplined that restrains itself within the intellectual bounds of an articulate historical movement. It is rather an activism that is incorporated into one’s identity, projected out into the world as a psychosocial function of that identity and made available for exploitation or redirection by others. This has always been there, but over the last decade or so it has palpably metastasized into something truly awful: activistism.
One core principle of critical philosophy resounds down through the ages from Marx’s Eleven Theses on Feuerbach (1845). The succinct note sounded by Thesis 11 could not be more direct – “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. Clear, simple, and thoroughly modern, Thesis 11 has formed the backbone of critical theory since the 19th century and ever since has inspired future-oriented political engagement among those who wish to see a better world, a world that is as realistic as it is an improvement upon what exists.
To the conservative or Burkean traditionalist, clarion calls such as Thesis 11 send a shiver down the spine, for in it there lurks also the long road to the Gulag, or worse. To those of such a mind, Thesis 11 looms as a great enabling axiom that unleashes the egoistic proclivity of homo faber to dominate its surroundings and bend the World to its disposition.
Naturally, one of these two positions will immediately present as more attractive to the reader. However, as the independently thinking and autonomously moral agents that we wish to be, we must recognize that we all actually inhabit a space between the two. We are drawn hither and thither, constantly vacillating between them. As children of Modernity, even the most cynical conservative critic is inevitably compelled to argue through the themes and predicates of Modernity, and even the most starry-eyed progressive cannot evade the lessons of a 20th century in which the path of social engineering led innumerably into various nightmares-of-a-different-kind.
Across a whole range of issues this dichotomy lives on today, and it’s our obligation as independent minds to navigate between this Scylla and Charybdis. The way we combine thought and action in our attitude to change is under pressure like never before. Sadly, we seem to be living through a period in which the spectre of mindless group action has returned with especial intensity, and the punishments meted out to those guilty of heterodoxy and individual thought-action are swifter and harsher than we have become accustomed. Perhaps most disturbing is that these tendencies are most marked among the young, whose proper education and preparation for life as fair and strong individuals has been seriously neglected, perhaps even abused.
A desire to engage in the public space for the betterment of the commonweal is admirable. To want to improve life for oneself and others is an unadulterated good. But a maniacal drive to turn the world into an empire for one’s neuroses? This is not good. To abscond from our responsibility to create autonomously thoughtful and reflective individuals, who strive for a sophisticated understanding of the World? This is bad. To turn individuals into groups of malleable dupes for our own cynical purposes? This is evil.
Thesis 11 is a motor born in Enlightenment optimism, capable of orienting our thought to the practical enhancement of material and immaterial living, both collective and individual. Untempered, unconsidered, and uncalibrated, it can provide an aimlessly enabling mandate for all manner of frightening behaviours.
My mind is cast back a few years to an event organized in Ottawa by the WE Charity. Otherwise known as Free the Children, this Canadian NGO was ostensibly set up for the conventionally laudable purpose of helping those less fortunate in parts of the world marked by poor social organization and underdeveloped productive forces. At this now-infamous WE Day event in 2015, an indoor stadium full of egged-on teens roared “We Are Canada!”, as the philosopher-king Justin Trudeau waited in the wings for a heavily choreographed cameo. In fact, Trudeau had become involved formally in the charity around this time, a move which he surely regretted some years later, given the scandal that would unfold around his family’s relationship with the charity subsequently. However, the spectacle was disturbing not merely for the boy-emperor’s naive and hammy presence on the stage, but for the mis-en-scène itself. There was something chillingly reminiscent in this tableau.
At a carbon copy event back in 2012, Trudeau had been there screaming… “Who’s ready to change the World?!” The answer had ripped back from the teen-crowd… “We are!”. “When are you going to do it?!"… “Now!”. This time around, an MC shouts out to the mass… “WE Day, do you feel the power?!", followed by “Together, we can change the world!”.
As we found out later, the power to change the world that was present in that massive room, was not a power to be exercised in conformity with reasoned judgment, mutual benefit, or individual responsibility for actions. It was a power to be harnessed by the usual cadge of charlatans, politicians, useful idiots, and moneymen. This is not surprising, because the power latent and manifest in any mass crowd in the modern world is a power to be exploited, channeled and directed by whatever pied-piper happens to be stood in front of it (in this case, it was toward Boeing, Dow Chemicals, and a host of parasitic middlemen).
Historical parallels need not be stated. Crowds get manipulated. But there was something a bit more subtle at work on this occasion. Something less obvious. It was this hackneyed idea of ‘changing the world’. I’ve always been skeptical about the admonition to ‘change the world’ that is mindlessly thrown upon the young. Questions arise: Why? In what way? Be more precise? Change for change’s sake is not an unalloyed good, even in the dogmatic terms of Progress with a capital P.
The most preposterous actions in human history have been motivated by a desire to ‘change the world’. The notion that a person might want to ‘leave their mark on the world’ is understandable psychologically. The idea of ‘doing good in the world’ is unambiguously virtuous, but fairly anodyne. Wanting to ‘change the World’ can sound praiseworthy, but on closer inspection it seems monstrously self-centered. As the saying goes,… Who made you God? What right do you have to change the World? I suppose that calling on young people to ‘adopt a critical posture toward empirical reality in a manner that will open up a space for social improvement, anchored in autonomous judgment, and realized through contingent political action carried out in negotiable association with others’ is not quite punchy enough for a stadium of teens. However, the mantra fed to those Canadian kids sounded sinister. It still does.
In their youthful exuberance, the two precocious Canadian teenagers who had founded the charity in the 1990s – Marc and Craig Kielburger, both in their 30s by the time of Trudeau jnr – seemed (unsurprisingly) not to have reflected upon the problem. Even the name of the charity seems to have been alighted upon without a moment’s pause. One need not fall back on the eponymous Russian dystopian novel We (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin to get that it is doubtless the most politically unnerving of pronouns.
For those puzzled as to how the Canadian government under Trudeau has been able to enforce such draconian, illiberal, and anti-democratic actions, ranging from the de-banking of civil protestors to endless COVID mandates and the chilling horrors of Bill C11, it is not so difficult to anticipate the average 20-something Trudeau-voter of today in the WE Charity crowd of yesterday. The formation of his base is there for all to see. Schools of collective mindlessness, programmed to act without reflecting upon telos, and encouraged to speak sweepingly and self-righteously in the name of others, do have graduates and those graduates have votes.
“Are you committed to making the country and a better World?” Hollered one of the Kielburgers to the throng. “We want you to say, on the count of three,… [the stadium joins in]… WE ARE CANADA!” Of course, they are not Canada. They are just one part, but one part that now speaks for the totality – the We. It is not such a great leap to then censor, cancel, and oppress the opinions of others who obviously do not speak for Canada (or indeed the World) as we do.
It has become customary to praise the young, explicitly acknowledge their intelligence and prescience, and to demonstrate unflinching faith in their intuitive wisdom about the World. No. It has become trendy. It has become one of those posturing bromides, like when politicians ostentatiously affirm their faith in the intelligence of the electorate when put on the back foot by a rigorous interviewer on the campaign trail. I am sorry to say that from within the ramparts of academia, I have to dissent.
With exceptions, the knowledge base, porosity to heterodox thought, and critical thinking generally have weakened among the young. This is conceded in a surprisingly large number of anecdotal conversationsI have with higher educators. It is becoming increasingly apparent that years of being told not to exercise disciplined self-control in a technological context that dis-incentivizes considered learning, younger cohorts are being prepared for collective action free from the constraints of reflection, introspection, and moral conscience. An education system that promotes instrumental rationality and implicitly discourages erudition has made these tendencies of the Zeitgeist only more acute.
Of course, this could be just the pessimistic reflex of someone who has allowed their minor neuroses to override that cautious voice in the back of the head that says ‘doesn’t everyone think this in relation to the young. Ah, back in my day, … etc, etc.’ It is a possibility, but I’m not so sure. It is not always a self-serving aspersion to be cast upon the youth. Historical epochs have proven that this kind of degeneration does actually happen in concrete historical reality from time to time, and it is not just a matter of prejudiced perception and a rose-tinted perspective on the past.
I’m put in mind of a scene in the film Cabaret (1972), starring Liza Minelli and Michael York, where York and a male friend are having a drink in a biergarten in 1920s Germany. They discuss the contemporary political turbulences, and the friend assures York that the NSDAP and Brown Shirts are a passing fad that can be ‘controlled’. A sweet-looking young boy starts to sing a folkish song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”. As the younger people present (and an intense schoolmaster type) gradually join in, some rising from their seats in passionate voice, the camera slowly pans out to reveal the boy’s Hitler Youth uniform as the song takes on the quality of a Marsch. By the end, almost all are singing, expect for one old man, who, looking uncomfortable and disdaining in his worker’s cloth cap, remains seated in morose, knowing, but resigned silence. As York and friend leave into a taxi, the pair turn back on the scene and York asks his friend… “You still think you can control them?” The friend shrugs and gets into the taxi.
At certain historical conjunctures, the folly of youth has a historical truth at odds with what we often take to be sour grapes and temporal alienation among the old. This brings us back to the matter at hand: activistism.
Coined back in 2004 by Liza Featherstone, Doug Henderson, and Christian Parenti,1 the somewhat clumsy term ‘activistism’ was intended to convey a kind of anti-intellectualism prevalent among unwitting followers of Thesis 11. When activists no longer synthesize their action with reflection, consideration, critique, knowledge, discussion, and idiosyncratic thought, they cease to be activists and become ‘activismists’. Contentless. Empty vessels ready to be filled with whatever program or passing impression. No longer able to exercise individual or discretionary judgment. Ahistorical and living in a perpetual present, the activismist must act, and act now! As Featherstone, Henderson, and Parenti report from the mouth of one such activismist… “We can’t get bogged down in analysis”!
The ideology of activistism is “as deeply felt and intellectually totalizing as any of the great belief systems of yore”.
This brave new ideology combines the political illiteracy of hypermediated American culture with all the moral zeal of a nineteenth century temperance crusade. In this worldview, all roads lead to more activism and more activists. And the one who acts is righteous. The activistists seem to borrow their philosophy from the factory boss in a Heinrich Böll short story who greets his employees each morning with the exhortation "Let's have some action." To which the workers obediently reply: "Action will be taken!"
We can chuckle, but it is the same catechistic back and forth that we got in Ottawa. Included among these activismists in the early 2000s were “the global justice, peace, media democracy, community organizing, financial populist, and green movements”. Sound familiar? Neither really socialists, anarchists, nor liberals, these are the footsoldiers of today’s activistism, who have now risen to mainstream ascendency in the philanthrocapitalism2 of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.3
The implications of activistism are not to be sniffed at. Censoriousness, if not outright censorship. Anger and rage directed at skepticism and disobedience to globalist causes célèbres. Worse. A generational cohort of misdirected kids driven by myths, untested assumptions, and even lies, without reflection or investigation, and animated by an almost pathological enthusiasm. Possibly an exaggeration? Readers will decide for themselves.
For Theodor Adorno, this kind of ‘actionism‘ enables an unreflective and unthinking “collective compulsion for positivity that allows its immediate translation into practice”.4 Perfect for enlistment into the agenda of power elites; not so perfect for the exercise of critical faculties or sober participation in reasonable associations.
In contrast to this pseudo-activism, no less than Slavoj Zizek encourages you not to just act, but to think before you act. It is a simple point, but a starting point. It is nevertheless essential for anyone who recognizes that open critique and fealty to one’s own autonomous judgement are not just the true core of Thesis 11, but the bases of any way of life that can call itself free and democratic .
Endnotes
Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti, “Action Will Be Taken’: Left Anti-Intellectualism and its Discontents,” Radical Society, 29, no. 1 (2004), 25–30.
Linda McGoey, Philanthrocapitalism and its Critics. Poetics 40, no. 2 (2012), 185-199.
INCITE, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
Theodor Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998 [1969]), 288.