Uninitiated
I felt so ignorant when I started college. I had scraped into my course on second round offers, and it seemed as if I was the only one who couldn’t find my place. Normal People hadn’t been published yet, so I had no way of knowing that this is pretty much a universal experience. It seemed as if everyone else literally knew something I didn’t, and it followed that I was going to have to swot up to fit in.
Convinced that I could educate myself into the social graces of my peers, I bought a
student subscription to The Economist. This was a mistake. Trying to learn about the world by reading The Economist is like trying to learn Spanish by reading Don Quixote: it’s written for people who already know what you’re trying to learn.
I eventually gave up on The Economist and, in what should have been a valuable lesson, managed to make friends without first gaining a complex understanding of stock options, swaps and derivatives. Specifically, I found my place in a community of generous and committed volunteers in the Trinity Vincent De Paul Society. By third year, I had become head of research for that society’s subcommittee on homelessness, and that meant reacquainting myself with the news.
Informed
This second effort was to be more fruitful. I was learning with a purpose now, rather than passively consuming content. We could do nothing, we reasoned, until we knew the nature of the target at which we were aiming. It was less like learning Spanish by reading Don Quixote and more like learning Spanish so that I could read Don Quixote. In August of 2017 I couldn’t have told you the name of the Minister for Housing. By that time the following year I was being asked to speak on panels about housing crisis. I started reading about theories of activism in this time, too, and developed the endearing habit of never shutting up about politics. Being an informed citizen had become an indispensable element of my identity.
But for all our knowledge and enthusiasm, our committee achieved very little of substance. Some of this was down to inexperience and the competing demands of college life, and some of it was just bad timing – in the year of Repeal, the attention of Trinity’s activist class was directed elsewhere. But more fundamentally, I think I personally failed because my learning was motivated by the same insecurity that stopped me from making friends in first year – I was afraid of not knowing better.
By researching, I hoped to alleviate the daunting uncertainty inherent to political participation. The housing system is a complex beast, and we didn’t want to look like fools by rushing in where angels feared to tread. But caution can become a crutch, and we were never so confident in our understanding that we felt justified in acting on our political instincts. We probably never would have.
Engaged
I left VDP in 2018 and got involved with a different group of activists – ones who had been doing this sort of thing for years. I had attended some public meetings about the housing crisis that summer and was struck by the passion on display. None of these stalwarts of the Irish grassroots were afraid of speaking up and being heard – they were here to take action. Out of these meetings came a proposal for a festival of direct action to take place that August and September. I was too busy failing an econometrics exam to participate in organising these events, but that’s a story for another day. By the time I got back involved in the movement, this festival had culminated in an occupation of two derelict properties in the middle of Dublin city. It had also given itself a new name: Take Back the City.
Given what I’ve written here so far, you might expect these activists to have been oblivious to the realities of Irish politics, belonging as they did to the less-talk-more-action school of politics. In fact, the opposite was true – obsession with political news and commentary was directly correlated with level involvement in the occupation. Of course it was. Leftist radicals holed up in Frederick Street read the news for exactly the same reason the politicians they were targeting did: the news was about them!
We in VDP had been getting the direction of causation all wrong. We thought that if we simply read enough and knew enough, the uncertainty which kept us from acting would go away, but that was never going to happen. Action creates its own uncertainty, and the best the news can offer is a nudge in the right direction as you move deeper into unknown territory. You don’t learn a language so that you can someday speak it, you learn a language by speaking it.
Fixated
But my story doesn’t end there. In 2019 I had to pull back from activism for personal reasons, but I kept following the news long after I had any good reason to. My identity was still bound up in being an informed citizen, so I felt a perverse obligation to stay informed about struggles I was no longer participating in. I spent hours every day listening to news podcasts and scrolling through Twitter. Deep down, I was worried that some day I would end up in a political argument and it would be revealed to the world that I didn’t really know what I was talking about.
It might seem ridiculous to have imposter syndrome about something so trivial, but I actually think this is just one specific example of a more common phenomenon. I’ve written before about how we can end up attributing importance to our preoccupations as a justification for our being so compelled by them, but I now believe this phenomenon deserves its own name: Reddit’s fallacy. It goes like this: I’m paying attention to X. I pay attention to what’s important to me. Therefore, it must be important for me to pay attention to X.
I call it the Reddit fallacy because it’s characterised by the same lack of perspective which can be found in online fan and hobby communities, but the issue is more widespread and consequential than that. In his book Politics is for Power Eitan Hersh argues that many of those who in a past era would have been organising and agitating for change are now instead spending their time getting in tedious bad faith arguments with Twitter trolls (to pick a totally random example…). At its worst, the Reddit fallacy can be a form of false consciousness, where our fixation on some trivial issue prevents us from seeing the true source of our problems.
Unsettled
The remedy is obvious. We must embrace the vulnerability and uncertainty of true participation. That means splashing some cold water on our face, deleting our feeds, and joining an activist group or political party through which we can truly participate in the civic and democratic life of our society. We must speak the language of politics with each other, and by our combined voices make ourselves heard on the issues that genuinely matter – housing, healthcare, immigration – the stuff of human life. The alternative is a return to the isolation of a purely private life, while those with less sense and decency retain their monopoly on political power.
Of course, all of that raises an important question: Why on Earth have I started a blog?
If our obsession with information is such a fundamental obstacle to real civic participation, how is adding my voice to the cacophony of contemporary discourse supposed to make any real difference? For a long time, I wasn’t particularly bothered by this question. This was just a fun experiment to help me get comfortable with writing. It didn’t matter how good it was or if no one read it – that’s why it’s called The Bad Blog.
But times have changed. I left college almost a year ago, and I’m turning twenty-three this weekend. If this blog is supposed to be a frivolous hobby, it’s one I no longer have time for. As much joy as it might bring me, I just don’t believe I was put on this Earth to contemplate the future of the film industry or deliver piping hot takes about why Star Wars is Good, Actually. If I am to continue investing my time and energy into a project which no one has asked for and which doesn’t make me any money, I’m going to need a better justification for it.
Inquisitive
I have considered just chucking it in and moving on to more fruitful endeavours. But something in the back of my mind has kept me from throwing caution to the wind entirely and just leaping back into the fray of Irish activism. I’ve been thinking back to the last days of Take Back The City, when the limitations of our strategy were becoming evident. To some extent, the occupations fell victim to their own success, growing until they required more organisation and administration than we could sustain. But more fundamentally, we never found a clear path from the occupation to our ultimate political aim of universal public housing. When the text went out announcing the cessation of the occupations, I was struck for the first time by the thought which still keeps me tethered to this blog: I still don’t know what to do about the housing crisis.
The brains behind Take Back the City are still out there organising, and the journalists they pay attention to are still reporting on the housing crisis, but that itself is a sign of how little progress has been made. We know that the status quo is unacceptable, and we know a better world is possible, but we can’t see ourselves through from one to the other. As it is for housing, so too is it for healthcare, Direct Provision, and the other permanent crises of Irish society.
The fault does not lie with the activists. The legacy of Take Back the City can be found in the public’s rejection of Fine Gael in the last election and in the swelling ranks of CATU, a tenants’ union founded by some of the key organisers of Take Back the City. Rather, the producers of news and commentary in this country have taken their eye off the ball in exactly the same way I had after I left activism, focussing on what is compelling at the expense of what is useful. The problems of news media deserve their own post, but it suffices to say here that if you log on to Irishtimes.com, you will find much that is diligently and rigorously reported and very little that changes how you relate to the world around you.
Resolved
And so I’ve arrived at a new mission statement, for myself and for this blog.
From now on, my primary aim is to bolster existing social efforts to push against the barriers to progress by locating the frontiers of the struggle for a just society. It is the contours of this struggle which I will follow in my reading, and not the news itself. I will still be reliant on high quality reporting, but I will have to be more discerning about what is being written for consumption by political actors, and what is just content for political hobbyists. To wit, I will read whatever helps me answer the questions I need to answer.
The hard part will be convincing anyone to care about the answers I come up with. In the interest of credibility, I’m putting some skin in the game, becoming a member of a governing political party (guess which one!) and getting back in touch with the grassroots of the housing movement again. Normally, journalists avoid taking on political baggage which might conflict with their commitment to truth telling, and I respect that. But I am uninterested in being disinterested. If anyone is unhappy with the way people like me are shaping the public discourse, then there is an easy solution available to them: Take part.
I’m sure this all seems very melodramatic to anyone still reading. But if there’s one lesson that I’ve learned over the last five and a half years (Jesus) of trying to participate in society, it’s that half of the struggle is in just keeping your eye on the ball. So many of our social structures are designed to feed into our instincts for complacency, by distraction as much as by either apathy or ignorance, so I find myself needing continuous reminders of what it is I’m even trying to do.
Evangelical
Whether I succeed in that mission is, of course, a whole other question. And that’s where you come in, dear reader. I could be revealing the secret to cold fusion in here, and it wouldn’t matter unless there was someone reading it who was willing to put that information to good use. I hope you subscribe and keep reading, of course, but even more than that I hope that you give yourself a reason to keep reading. Because if all you’re doing is listening to me speak the language of politics, without taking the risk of participating yourself, you’re not really engaged in the political conversation at all: you’re just on the Reddit page for it.
Further Reading:
Politics is for Power by Eitan Hersh
Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
Movement Building Guide by People and Planet