A couple of Sunday afternoons ago I was laying on my sofa watching Sunday Arts on the ABC.
My somnambulant ease was momentarily disrupted. A young theatre/film director was pointing out how so many Australians lie back on their sofas all weekend, reaching out for another stubbie, flicking between sports and arts programs. His thrust was that this is no way to make things happen. It is a squandering of our positive freedom. We ought not be like that. Get up off
your sofa you slob and go out there and conquer the world. Make a difference, to
your own life if not to that of others.
Was this worth thinking about? Sure, I had a knee jerk prick of guilt; and I'd guess that everyone else who saw the segment did too. A natural reaction to being accused: "Who? Me?"
So in between being too bored with Gaydar to bother, and actually getting up long enough to grab some fresh porn, I did think about it. Is Australia a nation of pathetic, apathetic slobs who don't deserve the freedoms and standards of living that they enjoy (as this young man seemed to be suggesting)? Even if so, what is the reason? Are Australians naturally formed to be apathetic slobs? Are most people in the world actually so disposed, so that given half the chance they'd be slobbish and apathetic? Is it a natural fault that we have to fight against? Is it social conditioning: get it easy and you get lazy?
I think there's a degree of truth there; but I think there is a lot more to it than that. On reflection, I thought this young director exhibited unconsidered views: rash, self-sure, vivacious youth led him to error, but he definitely deserves a good spanking.
For various reasons, it has only been during rare moments of great social crisis that the bulk of people in any population have been energetically, positively active in society, outside their ordinary, weekly routines.
One reason is that no socio-economic system could sustain ongoing effervescent agitation by all its members. The result (at an extreme) would have to be something like an inharmonious anarchy, a lurching social animal ever in danger of reverting to an unpleasant "state of nature." Can you imagine what Australia would be like if every Sunday afternoon the Domain and the foyer of the Young Liberals were over-run by enthusiastic, well meaning intendant caesars? What if every second gay boy in your building decided he was going to emulate the disclosing, chasing victories of Chas and the Lads?
In fact, during the early days of democracy, back in Athens, citizens were expected to actively participate, though not in a Chad-ish way. Were you a landholder, you'd be expected to spend a lot of time in the agora (market and meeting place). You'd be expected to judge too: when the Chad-ish Socrates was brought before the court on charges of infecting the youth with impious thoughts, he was judged by 500 of his peers. Socrates, by the way, claimed that he was guilty of no more than asking people to think clearly. Death by hemlock.
Of course, this Athenian democracy didn't include all the sweating, naked bodies you'd see labouring in the fields: slaves didn't count. To be worthy of being called a citizen you'd have to be born to the aristocracy or at least be in the free upper classes, and definitely not be female. The politically empowered actually ruled courtesy of the surplus created by the working poor. A good labourer was a productive, quiet labourer.
European fiefdoms worked much the same way, right up till such events as the abolition of the "rotten boroughs" in England, mid-19th century, and women actually started to get a political say, a century ago. Marx may have had dreams of a peaceful post-industrial utopia, but that final revolution never happened and we are still living under what it was supposed to replace: capitalism.
Can capitalism work if everyone hops up off their Sunday sofas and starts getting politically active? Hell no! What if everyone refuses to buy over-priced iPods (over 100 000 000 sold during the last 6 years: I've owned three) or Nokias, let alone refuses to work for the companies that produce the iPods and Nokias that they buy? Gawd!!!
True, there are certainly times and places when individual mass civil disobedience are comely things: times when the platitudinal untruths the system feeds the people just cannot be swallowed anymore. Roll in the suffragettes and Lech Walesa.
True, even the well oiled machine needs occasional maintenance, and our particular society is hardly a well oiled machine, despite its manifest virtues. We do need people to jump up and down, paint pictures for galleries, direct economically unsuccessful theatre, bring down the house with a too-soon ruined tenor voice, paint slogans on the side of the Opera House, write to their M.P's about immigration laws, stand up and heckle during Condelisa's guest lectures at the Con., and so on.
But through training and necessity, we cannot all so act.
Nor, I think, through nature. Most people are born to watch Mardi Gras and strip shows in the Manacle, not to participate in them. Nature has endowed the many with the blissful propensity to be followers, not agitators or leaders.
Apathy may not be a virtue, but it isn't about to vanish.
technorati tags:Philosophy, Morality, ethics, apathy
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