As some of you know, I do a lot of reading, especially of the news. In this reading, I have recently come across a phenomenon that irritates me more the more I think about it. I can explain this phenomenon best in the form of a question:
Who gave activists legitimacy?
You probably know the people I am talking about. These are the people who rave wild-eyed and shrieking voiced about whatever their chosen cause might be. Any attempt to engage them in conversation on their chosen topic immediately disintegrates into a diatribe as soon as someone asks a question.
What is worse is that these activists often know very little that is useful about their cause. What they do know, they have cobbled together from a disjointed collection of sources, many of them other activists. Hence their aversion to questions: they simply cannot answer them.
The thing that is bothering me about these activists is that such large swaths of society give them so much credit. Somehow, these shouting, raving, half-informed people have gained a legitimacy that even televangelists and politicians fail to achieve.
I place the blame for this phenomenon squarely on a modern society that, since the 1960s at least, has completely failed to teach people how to think. From my view, activists are otherwise intelligent people who do not know how to deal with the visceral reactions they have when they are exposed to certain things in the world around them.
Because these people do not know how to think their way through these exposures, they respond in the only way they know how: with emotion. Unfortunately, emotion is neither rational nor very intelligent, so the result is a raving lunatic without a coherent thought.
Now, the average activist is part of the fringe, whichever side of the political spectrum on which he or she might reside. The rest of society, however, suffers from the same fundamental lack of thinking that the activists feed on; therefore, when the rest of society encounters the emotional raging of the activist, the rest of society gets excited too, often without really knowing why.
The result, then, is a kind of de facto legitimacy borne out of an ongoing series of visceral reactions to an issue that may or may not really have enough legitimacy to justify the reactions. This legitimacy ricochets throughout society, from individuals to entire institutions like the media and the government.
Eventually, people and governments make life and world changing decisions because of this visceral, emotional, reactionary legitimacy, decisions that nations and the world often come to regret in the hindsight of history. Unfortunately, hindsight can only reveal the wound; it can rarely heal it.
So, in the end, I have answered my own question, and I am left more irritated that I was when I asked it. Here we sit in a world filled with provocative, emotion-rending issues of great importance, but because so many of us cannot think our way through these issues, we can only react to them.
The result is that we react with instinct rather than logic, with emotion rather than rationality, with activism rather than a plan. Perhaps enough wounds inflicted because of activist legitimacy will hurt enough to force us back to a time where rational thinking was supreme and society viewed activism as the lunacy it really is.
Activism is supported by Amendment 1 of our wonderful constitution where the people have the right to peaceably assemble. The lack of legitamacy you speak of is due to a lack of intelligent fortitude in activism groups.
Yes, it’s a pity that society has bred a whole generation of mindless activists but this specific group you speak of are really only looking for a sense of belonging. We as Christians must forgive their usual stupidity and pray to Jesus Christ to grant them forgiveness in their ignorance and somehow point out a better way for them to vent their insecurities.
Activism is a form of lobbying and such strategic lobbying should be duly noted. For instance: Woman’s suffrage. Was that mindless activism? Unless one is a chauvanist, one can see the importance of having our hard working mothers and sisters with us at the polls in our great country. This land is their land too.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett activated a near 20 year campaign against post Civil War lynching. Her activism was definately, positively intelligent.
All slogans are a form of activism. Like the flags of the U.S. Navy saying “Don’t Give Up the Ship” or “Don’t Tread on Me”. I’m sure a good Ohioan can appreciate the war cries of Oliver Hazard Perry during the Battle of Lake Erie. He had a ship shot out from under him and he transferred our nations colors to a different vessel to beat back the pompous tyranny of the King of England’s cowardly attacks during the War of 1812.
Unfortunately the “Land of the Free” also contains unintellectuality as you wrote.
I can’t leave out the peace activism during the Viet Nam conflict. “Hell no, we won’t go!” There were so many people against so many others about the war that the public pressure led to the abandoning that post.
If your anti-activism extends to Iraqi Freedom then I have to hop on a bandwagon myself.
If we abandon our post in Iraq, we’ll have to stick close by. The carnage to follow during their blood curdling Sunni vs. Shiite civil war will be televised and your wide eyed activist will be the first people to gutlessly requst we intervene after all.
I agree that my attack against some forms of activism essentially “throws the baby out with the bath water”, however I would argue that there was a significant difference between the modern activism of anti-war protesters or global warning activists and the activism of Women’s Suffrage or the Civil Rights Movement.
In fact, I would argue that those differences are significant enough to justify giving the activism of Women’s Suffrage or the Civil Rights Movement a different sort of name, let us say proponency.
The difference between proponency and activism, then, is the intelligence, knowledge, and dignity with which the supporters of a cause display when presenting their argument for change to the public. Dignified women or blacks marching in peaceful protest to bring attention to their goals are a far cry from modern war protesters urinating on statues honoring veterans of previous generations.
I also acknowledge that activism is a free speech activity, even if it is misguided or wrong. I do not suggest that such activism should be silenced by force of law; rather I suggest that such activism should be rendered irrelevant by the measured, rational response of thinking people who look objectively at the problems activists support viscerally and emotionally.
In that light, then, my lament against activism is really a lament against the inability of many people to think rationally when faced with emotionally charged issues of great importance. I lament activism because it represents a decline from the positive changes wrought on society by proponency–true activism–a decline that has harmed us all in confronting the very real problems we face today.
-=DLH=-