Change
Some reflections for International Day of Peace
Gandhi’s call to “be the change you wish to see in the world” has long since devolved into a catch-all, feel-good slogan for Etsy wall hangings and BrainyQuote.com listicles. Yet, it is clear that significant change is required if we want to make the world livable in the coming decades. Today, for International Day of Peace, I offer a few thoughts on the preconditions for change.
Perhaps the two most conspicuous forms of political action today are the march and the social media opinion. The march has a long and varied history in modern movements, associated particularly (in the US) with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. What I call the “social media opinion”—posts, links, videos, etc. shared through the social media platform-du-jour—is a successor of older forms of journalism, pamphleteering, cartoons, and similar forms of popular print (and later, radio and television) propaganda. Social media has increased the speed and accessibility of the popular complaint to powerful effect—as seen in the internet success of #metoo, the arab spring, and Black Lives Matter, to name but a few examples.
These two forms of action reflect what, in marxist theory, has long been referred to as the “theory/praxis” debate. Theory, from greek theoria or “contemplation,” refers to the intellectual process of studying, understanding, and critiquing the world. Praxis, related to the word “practice,” consists of putting that contemplation into action.
Marches can be generally described as “praxis” insofar as they pressure a government or institution to make a particular change. Criticism on social media (or in other spheres) falls closer to “theory” because it offers explanations of the world without, in itself, effecting any change.
The distinction between praxis and theory is often blurry (many border cases of both marches and online discussions could be named). Nevertheless, the “theory/praxis” debate helps us understand how we are engaging with the world.
Despite popular opinion, Karl Marx himself was not a barricade-building revolutionary but rather an intellectual critic. He wrote dense works of economic theory and German idealist philosophy, even as he wrote newspaper articles decrying the poor living conditions of the (then-new) industrial working class.
Yet Marx realized that philosophical critiques of the world meant little unless they were coupled with efforts to actually change the structures that they criticized. As he famously wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” For Marx, theory meant little without accompanying praxis.
Yet praxis without theory, or acting without thinking, can be equally as futile. When we don’t understand the changes we wish to make, we have no way to know if our actions are contributing to, or hindering, the change we want to see. As 20th-century political theorist Hannah Arendt emphasized, those who care about the world must both “think what [they] are doing” and remember to act on their convictions.
So what does it mean to “be the change we wish to see in the world?” First, we must recognize what “change” we wish to see—that’s our theory. Today, we are awash in messages about how the world is doomed. The Outrage Industrial Complex has a solid presence in our social media, our news, and our late-night entertainment. Yet the role of theory must not stop with identifying problems in the world.
It is intellectually lazy and socially irresponsible to repeat criticisms of our world without at least attempting to understand the origins and mechanisms the lie behind those critiques. Only by understanding why the world is the way that it is can we hope to change it. When we forget that the point of our theory is to change the world, we become like Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History”:
“His face is turned toward the past. . . . sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet . . . But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.”
Second, we must find ways to act on our convictions. To be the change is more than just to know what change we wish to see. Plenty of digital ink can be spilled debating the “performance” of activism online or in the streets. Instead, I want to focus on what political scientist Elizabeth Jean Wood described as “pleasure in agency.”
In her study, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, Wood described how oppressed people in El Salvador found “increased self-esteem and pride in self-determination . . . in the course of making history, and not just any history but a history they perceived as more just.”
We see a similar phenomenon within the Scouting movement. In place of climate anxiety, young people in the Scout are combatting pollution, responding to climate disasters, and rebuilding their communities. As one leader in Madagascar put it, working towards a more sustainable future is “exciting and engaging for the young people and, even more importantly, [they] feel it is worthwhile for themselves and the planet, which is their future.” Taking action directly towards the issues we care about invests our critiques of the world, our theory, with agency.
A recent article in Vox connected a lack of volunteering in the US with both the “loneliness epidemic” and a belief that individual actions were a distraction from, not a solution to, the systemic problems facing society today. Although there’s something to be said for the limitations of each individual’s impact, we can’t expect systemic change if we don’t also learn how to act, individually, in accordance with our wishes for the world. By taking direct action, we put our theory into praxis and become the change, no matter how small, that we want to see. Gandhi’s cliché reminds us that change has to start with our own engagement with the world.
In her powerful analysis of human action, Arendt wrote, “action can be judged only be the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary.” Arendt believed each of us are born as an unique individual which allow us to act unlike anyone else.
In our capacity to act as individuals in a shared world, we each have the ability to bring something new into our life as a collective society. So she wrote, “The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.” The “extraordinary,” the “infinitely improbable” bloom from the seeds of our individual actions.
When we align our actions with our beliefs about the world, our theory with our praxis, we embody a new model (unique to each of us as individuals) of what the world could become. Through a plurality of such models—of people acting in accordance with their dreams for the world—the world can begin to look different, not as any one of us dictated but as we all collectively imagined.