Controversy and the Struggle to Define the Center

An illuminating moment for me occurred some years ago in a meeting with a local politician who we had thought would be on the right side but hadn't been voting the way we wanted.

"Well," the politico told us, pleasantly enough. "It's your job to force me to do the right thing."

For a long time afterwards, I considered him an @$$hole -- until I realized that the smartest reaction was to take the advice seriously.

It is not simply a matter of voting every few years to install somebody courageous to solve all our problems. The struggle may continue forever. Different groups have different interests, and there are always people who will happily line their own pockets by killing and stealing. Armies of full-time staff hired by our political opponents will descend upon whoever we elect. To confront these forces, we have only whoever we can mobilize and whatever political momentum results from the progressive consciousness of the general public. Meanwhile, anti-environmental war-profiteers control the industrial tools for producing mass consciousness, though they mystify their control by claiming loudly that the newspapers and TV have a "liberal bias."

Regarded as a fight for political power, this struggle may appear to be a struggle to push our own allies into the center, since successful politicians govern from there. But we cannot care merely to occupy the center, wherever it may be. If we want to live in a country that does not engage bloody foreign wars to secure oil supplies, and if we want to live in a world with life in its oceans or without run-away greenhouse warming, we must take seriously our long-term obligation to redefine the center.

By conventional definition, whoever sits outside the current center is an extremist -- and by the same definition, so is anyone who wants a different center. Since the center is produced by the attitudes and habits of millions of people and by the social structures associated with the economic activity that supports these people, it is not easily relocated. Nobody changes attitude or habit easily. We need organized presence. And sometimes, frankly, we need controversy.

Controversy does not succeed by convincing people that the controversial action is correct. What a good controversy accomplishes, rather, is to encourage people to discuss the issue: I really don't agree with what they did but I do have to admit they have a point, and at least they're doing something. The choice of action, of course, is critical: if we smash storefront windows, the public will rightly consider us vandals and that will be the end of the matter; if we disrupt a press conference, people will consider us trouble-makers but might nevertheless hear what was said; if we plead our case quietly and rationally, perhaps no one will hear ...