Changing the world

If you want to change the world, you must first interpret the world, for if you don’t know what you want to change and why, in what way then would you change it? But once you have found a good reason to change the world and once you have a good theory that describes what is wrong in the world the next step consists of the practical measures to implement the changes considered necessary. In short this is the problem we face in this world that is threatened by a serious climate crisis, a crisis that is so serious that it could mean the end of the human civilization as it is. This is why these days world climate conferences are organised and why national governments and international agencies are developing plans of measures to fight against the global warming and have started to execute these plans. However, as Henri Lefebvre has made clear, changes cannot be brought about without penetrating into everybody’s everyday life. For if everyday life doesn’t change and if not everybody – or at least most of us– cooperates with the measures proposed from above and acts in accordance with them, so if the measures that attack the threat of the climate change do not penetrate into what everybody every day does, in the end climate plans will be frustrated and thus fail.
In the past, the churches have understood the importance of everyday life and their power was based on this understanding. They “created both a ceremonial external to the human, an official sumptuousness, an extra-national state, an abstract theory; and on the other hand, a psychological and moral technique of extreme finesse and precision. In every act, however small, of immediate life, religion may be present; in the ‘interiorised’ form of a rite or in the external form of a priest who listens, understands, counsels, is moribund, or ‘forgives’ ”. (Lefebvre 2024, p. 262) Communist states tried the same and made a quasi-religious and political structure in order to penetrate the thoughts and actions of the people. Although they were more or less successful in building the required communist institutions, they didn’t succeed to penetrate everybody’s everyday life. Superficially they did, but in depth they failed and people secretly and sometimes openly found ways to circumvent an ideology that wasn’t theirs. In the end, this undermined the communist ideology and the communist practice and so toppled the communist states.
Today, climate activists and institutes and organisations that see the need and are actively trying to implement measures to stop and if possible to reduce the global warming that is clearly taking place face the same problem as once the churches and political ideologists and theoreticians faced: On the one hand they must present a science-based and credible theory of the need to fight global warming and on the other hand they must come with a good strategy to penetrate daily life. Although on a theoretical and scientific level the danger of global warming is well substantiated, as is the need to act as quickly and effectively as possible, still too many people don’t see the urgency to implement right now the measures needed. Moreover, too many politicians and others who are or should be involved in fighting global warming have hidden agendas behind their plans and measures; agendas that centre on power maintenance by paying lip service to the need to take measures, while in fact for these politicians these measures are only ways of maintaining their power instead of solving an urgent problem (while delaying or postponing measures that do the latter but not the former). Some politicians even deny the problem despite all evidence. But once enough people, especially people in strategic positions like politicians, have been convinced to act now, then the next question is how to take measures (and which measures) that penetrate daily life. One problem is mistrust of the government and other authorities (especially in authoritarian states but certainly not only there). Another problem is that even the right measures always will harm certain groups. Such measures can make that some groups feel themselves unjustly made responsible for what in fact is not their problem but the problem of society as a whole and of those who lived before them (and often they feel so with right); they may feel themselves even scapegoated. Even if they are compensated financially, this will not yet mean that they are also compensated psychologically, and just the latter is important for getting their support. Farmers are a case in point. Moreover, despite its urgency, climate measures must be balanced with other measures that are at least as important to keep life liveable; if not to say that even fast grinding mills grind slowly and that it takes time to penetrate everyday life, also in case of people of good will.
Is there a solution? There isn’t and there will not be if it is not realized that the transformation of life in the end involves the transformation of everyday life, not only superficially as among communism, but in its details. Moreover, people must not be forced but be convinced, but this is only possible if the changes needed are their own changes and not enforced changes. If humans do not create their own world, there will be no world. That’s what the past has taught us and that’s the challenge.

Source
Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne. Édition intégrale. Montreuil: L’Arche, 2024; esp. pp. 262-4.

What are they waiting for?

Look at the photo. What are these people doing there? They are waiting. Apparently they are waiting for something special, for all have their faces in more or less the same direction, the direction where the object they are waiting for is or will come from. It is obvious what this object is: It is the tram in front of them. By they don’t go into the tram. Why not? It is because the doors of the tram are closed. So, these people are waiting till the doors of the tram will be opened, so that they can go into the tram. They are not so much waiting for the tram itself but for a certain event related to the tram. While waiting, some people are watching their smartphones. Others do nothing special. They are just waiting.
But look to the people at the right. They are looking at something: They are looking at the man near the front door of the tram. What is the man doing there? He is opening the door of the tram, for the man is the tram driver. Yet a few moments waiting and the doors of the tram will be open; people will enter and the whole scene has disappeared. And that was actually what these people were waiting for: for the end of the waiting.

Random quote
When you’re just trying to “neutralize” the opponent, you’re being nice to them. More often, you’re trying to “crush” the opponent.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) 

The importance of waiting

Most of the time, sociologists pay attention to striking social phenomena and philosophers do so as well in their way. Or they study problems that need to be solved. Usually they study problems that catch the eye. However, some sociologists and philosophers study less striking if not inconspicuous phenomena of everyday life, or phenomena that just happen, because they just happen, like those who use an ethnomethodological approach often do (mainly in the Anglo-Saxon countries; for example Erving Goffman), or (mainly in the francophone area) those who apply and develop the ideas of the French scholar Michel de Certeau, who studied society from philosophical, sociological and other perspectives, and the ethnologist Marc Augé. They and their students investigated or still investigate such everyday practices like living in a house, cooking, or making a ride on the metro. Indeed, some sociologists and philosophers do pay attention to themes of everyday of life in their studies. However, as Kalekin-Fishman has shown “From the diversity of theoretical approaches to everyday life it is clear that this area of study has no single empirical orientation.” (Kalekin-Fishman, 2013, p. 718) Moreover, “[d]espite the fact that everyday life has been important to social theory since the initiation of sociology as a science, the interest in investigating it as a phenomenon in its own right is relatively recent”. (id. p. 724) In fact, till today the study of everyday life has been a casual approach and not an independent field of interest, as it should be for such an important aspect of life. Even more, everyday life is not just an aspect of life, but it is life. Be it is it may, and whatever the approach is and whether it is embedded in other studies or whether it isn’t, studies of daily life are very interesting and important, if not significant, since they touch real life as it is lived most of the time. Nevertheless, the present investigations of everyday life still ignore or overlook some of the most basic but also frequent human activities. Take waiting. A closer look at it makes clear that waiting is one of the most common “activities” we perform. Moreover, it is an “activity” we spend much time on, maybe more than on anything else we do, with the exception of sleeping (which should be investigated, however). Nonetheless, when searching the internet, I haven’t found any study that pays attention to waiting. It is, as if from the perspective of the social sciences and from the philosophical perspective the phenomenon doesn’t exist or at least that it doesn’t deserve attention. But can an activity we spend so much time on be so trivial that we can ignore it? To ask the question is already to answer it. I think that it is weird to ignore waiting in sociology and philosophy, since it is an essential activity in life. It is not without reason that so much money is spent on making waiting spaces, like at bus stops, in railway stations, in airports, etc. Why spending this money if waiting is a ghost idea. Why spending this money if nobody would be waiting, not only now and then but often and sometimes for quite a long time? It’s true, planners think about where to make waiting areas; what is the best place for them; how many people probably will use a certain waiting space; and so on. I don’t doubt the value of their capacities and their work, but on a general social scientific and philosophical level the idea of waiting doesn’t exist. The most common is often the least perceived, and just this makes that it deserves attention.

Some literature
- Augé, Marc, Non-Lieux, Paris: Seuil, 1992.
- Augé, Marc, Un ethnologue dans le métro. Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 2013.
- Certeau, Michel de, The practice of everyday life. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1984.
- Certeau, Michel de; L. Giard; P. Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life. Volume 2: Living and
Cooking. Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press. 1998.
- Goffman, Erving, Relations in public. New York, etc.: Harper & Row, 1972.
- Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986.
- Kalekin-Fishman, Devorah, “Sociology of everyday life”, in Current Sociology Review, vol. 61 (5-6), 2013, pp. 714–732.

Random quote
The world is the future of man, because man is the creator of his “world”.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991)

The nature of the countryside

The peatdigger

It’s summertime. Many people go on holiday and many people visit the countryside. Or it’s just a beautiful day, and people decide to leave the city and to go for a stroll in nature or to take their bikes. It’s nice to be outdoors and to enjoy the sunshine and to feel the wind blowing through your hair. And so you took your bike and made a ride. You hear the birds singing, especially if it is yet early summer. Later in the season, you’ll see birds gathering together in the fields, preparing their soon to come long flights to southern countries, where they’ll stay in winter. By nightfall, huge flocks of thousands, no tens of thousands of starlings are looking for their sleeping places, moving as black clouds through the sky in spectacular movements. You hear a cow mooing. Other cows follow the sound with theirs. The bleating of sheep completes the choir. In the distance, a boy is singing a sad song. A dog barks. Other people enjoy the landscape as such: The woods they are walking through; a rippling stream; fields enclosed by hedges. The world around is wonderful and they enjoy its peace and its beauty. You feel yourself in nature and so do many with you.
Nature? Sometimes I wonder whether nature yet exists, for a deeper awareness will tell you that, especially around the cities, but not only there, most of the countryside is human-made. Even, where it isn’t, the human impact is inescapable. Some countries – mine, the Netherlands, in the first place – are completely human-made. There is a saying that “God created the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands”, but I think that it applies to many parts of the world in its own context. However, many people don’t realize it when walking in the countryside; or they don’t know it. As Henri Lefebvre makes clear in its Critique de la vie quotidienne (p. 163): when looking at the countryside and at much that we call “nature”, we confuse the facts of nature with human facts. When we walk through the countryside and see it as nature, we look at it in the way as “we look at the sea or the sky, in which each human trace is wiped out.” In the countryside “the human facts escape us.” We even don’t know anymore where to see them, where to look at them, where to find them, namely in the simple, familiar everyday objects, like the forms of the fields, the courses of the streams, the routes of the roads, the positions of the houses, the places of the forests. They are not simply there, guided by the will of nature. Everything in the countryside is human-made; even each grain of sand and clump of soil is, so to speak. The simple facts of human construction and artificiality are everywhere. And – what also many people don’t know – there is often much human misery and suffering behind these human facts; behind this human-made landscape. The work to make it often has been done by people enforced to work there, by direct force or enforced to take work because of the misery of their living conditions. People got meagre wages, too much to die from, too little to live on, and they lived as slaves or were enslaved. A plunge in history will make this clear to everybody who is interested in it and wants to know it. Enjoy your walk!

Random quote
Man will be daily or he will not be.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) 

Bread and games

I think that I could fill this website each week with a blog about Montaigne and his Essays. The man and his work are very inspiring. But that’s not what I want, so after two blogs about Montaigne, I should switch again to another theme. However, this time yet another Montaigne blog, so that you get a kind of trilogy. Next week, I’ll write about something else again, although I don’t know yet what it will be.Last week we saw Montaigne as a psychologist. As a psychologist, he had to be a good observer, which he certainly was. This is especially clear in the journal he kept during his journey through Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Italy. But also in his own country he looked around with a sharp eye. He praised what he liked and he criticized what he didn’t like or considered stupid, like in the essay “Of vain subtleties” (Essays I-54). This essay starts with a remarkable sentence: “There are a sort of little knacks and frivolous subtleties from which men sometimes expect to derive reputation and applause: as poets, who compose whole poems with every line beginning with the same letter…” This was done in Montaigne’s days, indeed, and I can understand that he thought that such artificialities were stupid. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable sentence, for what Montaigne probably didn’t know is that some time before, a Dutchman had written a long poem and the first letters of the fifteen verses of the poem put in succession made the name Willem van Nassov (= William of Nassau). William of Nassau was count of Nassau in Germany, and also, prince of Orange and Stadtholder of Holland (representative of the Spanish King there). Willem of Orange-Nassau, became the leader of the Dutch rebellion against the Spanish King, which led to the independence of the Netherlands. The poem just mentioned describes William’s doubts, problems and struggles as a leader of this rebellion. Now it is the national anthem of the Netherlands and it is also the oldest national anthem in use today. Moreover, the author of the poem is not known, so who got the reputation and applause of this poem? And was it the product of a vain effort? Yes, and no. In the same Book I of the Essays, Montaigne had written an essay titled “That men are not to judge of our happiness till after death”. Analogously, we can say that this also applies to the first sentence of his “Of vain subtleties”. But if we would apply this statement rigorously, it would be difficult to have an opinion, and that’s not what we want.
Must we accept then any activity as potentially useful, since later history may show it is, even if this would be very unlikely? Also in essay I-54 Montaigne tells us about a man who was praised and rewarded, because he “had learned to throw a grain of millet with such dexterity and assurance as never to miss the eye of a needle”. This made Montaigne remark: “Tis a strong evidence of a weak judgment when men approve of things for their being rare and new, or for their difficulty, where worth and usefulness are not conjoined to recommend them.”
If he had lived now, Montaigne could still make this remark. I know of a TV show that is about such “vain” activities. Central are questions like: Could this man throw hundred grains of millet with such dexterity and assurance as never to miss the eye of a needle? Is such a TV show senseless? Yes, it is, but then one should ask: Is amusement senseless? I think it isn’t for humans cannot live without it. Nevertheless, it can be a problem. Nowadays, we can see many videos with such “vain” activities in the internet. Many people like them. No problem. No problem? No, unless you see then another one, and another one, and another one… for hours, as some people do. And the next day maybe again, etc. No problem, unless you become addicted to them and spend your time on them and not or no longer on things that must be done. People may feel guilty that they have spent so much time on vain activities and that other things are not done. That’s already bad enough, but more and more websites have videos that are made that you become addicted to them; and especially that children and young people become addicted to them. It’s the revenue model of such websites. Is it a problem? Yes, it is. Since then the choice to become addicted (if such a choice exists) is no longer yours but the choice of another: You are manipulated. In view of this, Montaigne is right. Of course, he did not and could not foresee the internet and all that belongs to it. Montaigne warned us for the weakness of the human mind, which is of all times. Humans have a weak judgment, because they approve of things that are rare and new. Others try to misuse this weakness and make you addicted so that they can manipulate you. And then I haven’t talked yet about the political side of this. Bread and games, is that all we need?