Monday, November 3, 2014

The Problems Go Deep

The Problems Go Deep

I wrote previously about the possible governance structures for the future that would be needed to deal with the complex problems coming to both the Arctic and the wider world. Truly this is important in a nuts and bolts kind of way, important like a beam is important to a building's structural integrity, but I have to also think about things more fundamentally. Policy and the like is ultimately something of a reflection of what people want, at least in democracies. People put that beam there. Corruption and the like aside, governments cater to us, or try to anyways. But people want what is easy and what is comfortable, and generally we think about things in the short term and the near.

There's a sense in the US that voting and citizenship is just picking from an established menu, and for that reason politics seemed like something very far away. If people are conditioned this way, and think largely in the short term and selfishly, and governments reflect this kind of thinking, how will it be possible to address complex problems like those in the Arctic? I've been researching strategy but it seems that along this line of thinking it's going to reflect and cater to the same thin, short term thinking that has gotten us into this jackpot. 

 A New Way to Frame the Mindset

Recently I came across Jon Alexander's talk on Citizenship and Consumerism on the BBC, which you can check out here if you'd like, that inspired this line of thought. In it, he described the deep-set nature of how we have been drilled to think as consumers in all things, which he describes as being about passive choosers of the "best of these [options] for ourselves, measured in material standards of living, as narrowly defined individiuals, in the short term." And he does a good job putting into words something I had thought of in a nebulous way, which is that everything is measured against this mentality. Our success is measured in how much money we earn, what objects we have, and, especially growing up in southern California, it seemed that most people were content working simply to fill up their houses with accumulated bricabrac and fetishes (as in, objects of attributed worship) like a magpie or an infintely less useful accretion disk.

Mr. Alexander relates this seemingly unconnected way of living to politics, in that peoples' desires to be satisfied in material means in the short term over thinking to the long term and towards the collective good is reflected in politics, where politicians are elected to satisfy the same desires. You can relate this to Arctic strategy in that every one of the documents seems to hold economic performance and development as a high priority. I think back to the public relations element of these documents and have to wonder if all of that language about environmentalism is just to keep up appearances while countries continue to delve right into the paradox of Arctic development. It has seemed as though the bonanza won't be realised quite as fast as people thought, but that's perhaps more a function of global economic factors like lowering oil prices more than a conscious choice to leave the Arctic unspoiled, despite the more or less known long term benefits of doing so.

What to Do?

In terms of actual positive trends, Mr. Alexander sees some serious cause for hope in the Internet as a medium, in that it's very participatory and is a great tool to get involved and to become more of a Citizen than a Consumer, which he distinguishes as someone actively trying to take some agency over the menu rather than just picking from a set of options. Of course, I've been on the Internet enough to know that it can just be another area to be barraged with consumerist propoganda, but at least it is a two way street, unlike the television. We'll see if it becomes another case of "we can't have nice things" in the future. I can see either way.

Ultimately the message you can take away is that people need to be more participatory and look beyond their short term comforts as the only thing to worry about. One thing the Arctic has going for it as a region is that, in fits and spurts, it is seeing quite a lot of high level active participation in policy making by the average citizen. You can see that reflected in the Arctic Council, with indigenous participants, NGOs, and the like. In all it's a more experimental mix of vested participants than the usual arrangement and national strategies should be encouraging more of that diversification and more participation from the average citizen. To try to break the citizen out of apathy, in other words. But maybe that's not the place of government, and more the place of the citizens themselves. I suppose that's a bit cyclical, does the government prod the citizens or the citizens the government? Perhaps both.

Though as I pump up the grass roots good of the Arctic I look at the Arctic Frontiers conference coming up, wanting to go but baulking a little at the pricing just to attend. I feel like I'm trying to buy some Super Bowl tickets. Is this Doha or what? It's expensive to be a Citizen!



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