Lucie Kinchen, Climate Change student activist
“The time for non-violent activism is now”
Throughout history, non-violent direct action has got results. Without people willing to take action, we would not have many rights which we now take for granted. For instance, as a woman I would not have the right to vote, and racial discrimination would still be enshrined in US law. From Gandhi to Emmeline Pankhurst, people throughout the world have recognised that when governments fail or refuse to act to tackle injustices, it is left to citizens to do something about it. To effect radical and positive social change, individuals need to be empowered to take action.
Direct participation in UK democracy is limited to a vote in the general election every five years or the opportunity to lobby your MP. When these processes cannot deliver on the most important issues the need for action becomes clear. Some call for an ‘exhaustion of the legal channels’, but one could always write one more letter or sign one more petition. The efficacy of mass demonstrations is questionable – one million people marched against the war in Iraq in 2005 only to be ignored. More direct action is needed.
According to the Global Humanitarian Forum, 300,000 people every year die as a direct result of climate change. This number is set to increase, and if we continue emitting carbon dioxide at the current rates we are looking at 250,000,000 climate refugees – displaced from their own countries by famine, droughts, flooding, and wars over resources – by the middle of this century. Our government has recognised this need for change and makes positive noises accordingly: the UK was pioneering in having the first Climate Change Act (2008) to attempt to prevent runaway climate change. But these legally binding targets – to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 and by at least a third in the next 11 years – are nothing without the actions to fulfil them, and these actions are lacking.
Twenty years ago, Margaret Thatcher said that it would be “irresponsible” not to act on climate change and yet in that time not nearly enough has been done. Even leaders, such as Al Gore, stress that the time for action is now.
Our protest at Didcot power station last week was part of an ever-growing movement of people willing to take non-violent direct action to tackle the root causes of climate change. We need a mass movement, but it needs to be a movement composed of people willing to do more than just switch their lightbulbs off or only boiling the right amount of water in their kettles. We need active social change.
Marius Ostrowski, PPE Magdalen
“The illusion of acting replaces critical rationality”
One of the joys of pure liberal democracy is its steadfast adherence to freedom of speech, allowing anyone to voice any view, however controversial, without fear of suppression. And wherever there is a view to be voiced, an issue to be protested, or an event to be condemned, it is a reasonably safe bet that there will be a gaggle of students there to throw their weight behind it.
Such omnipresent idealism, while very much the norm at universities, is a source of resigned irritation to pretty much anyone who isn’t a student. The students see themselves as the lone defenders of their faith, locked in an uphill struggle against The Man. To the public, they’re a bunch of loud-mouthed, immature layabouts, spoilt brats for whom ‘idealism’ has become warped into weird guilt-trips of liberal self-flagellation, rebelling against the very institutions that made them students in the first place: their private education, their investment banker father, their BUPA health insurance. Student activism is seen by the wider population as thinly-veiled NIMBYist hypocrisy, worse than champagne socialism or krypto-authoritarian ‘liberal paternalism’.
While much of this image stems from negative reactions of inherently socially conservative institutions like the media, Church, state and civil service, there is an underlying problem with student activism that must bear much of the blame: its inherent lack of critical reflection and self-evaluation. Pure activism requires a degree of absolute conviction in one’s cause. Alternative views are targeted and demonised, with the worrying illiberal, anti-democratic aim that they be ultimately suppressed.
The fine line between merely supporting a cause and becoming active on its behalf is defined by one’s openness to alternative points of view – once that line is crossed, it becomes very easy to be consumed by a cause to such an extent that the illusion of acting replaces the critical rationality or emotive reasoning that brought one to the cause in the first place.
Activism is an ironic intellectually-passive modus operandi – one is wholly dependent on the ideologues in the cause’s elite for instructions on what to achieve next and how to achieve it. A healthy dose of sceptical cynicism is pretty much the only antidote, which is what most people think student activists don’t have. Until this view is reconciled with those that the students represent, student activism will remain more of a hindrance than a help to the causes it sides with.
