Let’s be honest: G7, G8, and G20 meetings have historically accomplished very little. They’re big, expensive opportunities for powerful people to get their pictures taken, trying to remind everyone how important they are (or how important they suppose themselves to be).
We’ve known this for a long time.
We should also admit that the corresponding protests, for their part, have accomplished even less [and I certainly don't prefer pushing high level correspondence among world leaders further into their backchannels; let them meet face-to-face for a bit of social grooming and relationship-building like any other professional network].
Why do the protests keep happening? I think we could say the people going into those are just as affected by a desire to be photographed looking (and feeling) like they’re doing something important.
I mean, I can’t really say I “blame” them — it’s just human nature.
And when so much of our world is sterilized and controlled by faceless conglomerates that co-exist with opaque networks of political elites (or whatever terms you want to use) doing senseless things, a lot of us start feeling like we don’t have a voice unless we take to the streets en masse and shout.
There seems to be a general sentiment that, “Well, at least we’re doing something…”
Sometimes “doing something” and taking action comes at a high opportunity cost. It can (and often does) actually prevent more effective things from being done — or at least imagining and working towards more generative accomplishments (I’m addressing both the politicians and the protesters with that criticism — and I should probably add police to that as well).
Now security costs look somewhat more justified, Torontonians are pissed about vandalism and violence they’re seeing on the streets of one of the world’s most peaceful cities, and the image good people crusading for social justice is (rightly or wrongly) being tarnished (for now).
No doubt most of the protesters have the best of intentions and feel passionately about making the world a better place. That’s excellent. But they still share responsibility for the outcome.
We can’t keep blaming bad guys for everything that goes wrong in the world. If we really want to make things better we need to be smarter, more foresighted, more pragmatic, and more compromising. There will always be bad guys, it’s the outcome of what we do about them that matters.
It’s absurd to suggest that politicians and other delegates can’t have good intentions too. Sure they act like a bunch of douchebags most of the time [and the G20 security arrangements seemed overly antagonistic: justifying the protests just as the protests in turn justified the aggressive security], and they fail to deliver on the vast majority of their promises, but does anybody have a shred of evidence that anyone else could do a better job?
Honestly. Put aside particular problems and failures and seriously think on a big scale about what the alternatives are.
The simple fact is, making decisions that affect millions (if not billions) of people is a very, very difficult thing to do. And knowing the right answers is the easy part. Getting other people to agree is even harder. Turning ideas into sustainable systems is even harder than that, and keeping them going is more difficult still.
But I take it the people leading the protests think they’re more capable. So what’s their track record for managing large, complex initiatives?
Well, let’s look at what happened today.
If plans for a rally with a few thousand people results in failure, how can we trust their thinking about what’s best for millions of Canadians and billions of people worldwide?
I appreciate that most protesters were peaceful, and they were spoiled by a few bad apples. I’m seeing a lot of comments on Twitter like, “Don’t confuse the protesters with the anarchists!”
And I fully agree, on a sentimental level.
On a practical level, isn’t every single thing we try to do going to be susceptible to exploiters and free-riders with selfish, misguided intentions.
How we deal with them in seeing our plans through to fruition is ultimately what matters.
Not that we should overlook the waste and suffering caused by the political institutions we have now, but we need to recognize and improve on the progress those represent, not disparage them and vilify their practitioners for not looking as righteous as our perfect ideals and dreams.
It doesn’t matter whose ideas sound nicest. If you can’t prevent a few exploiters and thugs from undermining your whole plan, your plan will ultimately be no good to anyone.
That’s why we have power structures [including corporate ones, and the networks of transactions that support them], legal systems and police forces — flawed as they may be. It’s why authorities have to act like ignorant, heartless, phony assholes. Unfortunately there are always going to be people trying to exploit people’s good intentions, and we need jerks to deal with those jerks.
Unless you can point to something that has worked better on anything close to a large scale, it’s an unfortunate fact we need to cope with while we painstakingly work out incremental improvements.
My own hopes, for now, are invested in the promise of collaborative democracy. It involves articulating our ideas and subjecting them to scrutiny and refinement by others, following through with real solutions to practical problems, which we then test and improve collectively, objectively— as in science.
(See Creating an Open Society)
This post is itself kind of a demonstration of that process. You can point to real evidence to help me correct or improve what I’ve said: real, positive accomplishments that protests (or summits) have made are welcome. So are suggestions for new opportunities.
However, I know a lot of people are sentimentally attached to the idea of fighting (rather than creating) for social justice. I can’t say I dislike them for it — it is, after all, an admirable cause — but that approach only reinforces the cycle of failure: it justifies and amplifies the perceived need for police barriers and political smoke and mirrors.
This vicious cycle has been perpetuated at global summits for over a decade now. It looks like nothing more than a big, expensive game of cat-and-mouse — or a playground battle: a grown-up continuation of the age-old war between “slackers” & jocks.
When are we going to learn to get beyond it?
I think those of us who see both sides owe it to ourselves not to be passive about this anymore. Don’t hesitate to call bullshit on someone — whether they’re a politician or a protester — promoting something for theatrical value at the expense of something more generative.
Certainly as Canadians, we owe it to ourselves to do better. We can’t call ourselves the world’s peacekeepers if we can’t keep peace in our own streets.
