In Praise Of Just Not Being Arsed

My first couple of weeks on Twitter have been exhilarating. Having binged on following notable journalists, scientists, economists, radicals, comedians, theatres and friends, the opening few days represented a kind of sensory overload: buckets of links to interesting stuff speeding past at a rate of knots, debates spiralling out into the ether in tiny 140 character bubbles, the business of the day being consumed so fast that societal indigestion seemed a probable outcome, all punctuated by @big_ben_clock's helpful BONGS as suitably atmospheric background. What it brings into focus more than anything else, though, is just how little I can be arsed.

I'm a liberal left winger interested in inequality and education reform and foreign intervention and censorship and racial injustice and God knows what else. But I don't really do anything about any of it. I sign petitions occasionally, give money to certain causes, post hectoring statuses about things when I think my HectorQuotient is sufficiently replenished, but I am not as radical as I am being asked to be by the constant drumbeat presented to me by Facebook and Twitter. Everything clamours for our attention and it is simply not attention we can afford to give it to the exclusion of everything else. You could spend your entire life signing petitions for worthy causes shared online. Focus E15 are occupying a housing association in Newham. I agree that London is forcing out poor people, so, going by the amount of Twitterbadgering Josie Long is giving me, I should be sharing their story, donating to their cause, turning up to show solidarity. But I don't because I could also be protesting against further intervention in Iraq or against BP or the Catholic Church or others in the rogue's gallery.

My work is cut out picketing Dark Lords

Twitter contributes to the grand desensitisation to good causes that the social media age represents. Our conscience is pricked so frequently it starts to resemble a colander, and leaks out resolve accordingly. A week ago a Facebook friend of mine wrote an essay entitled The English Education System In The Age Of Neoliberalism, the thoughts of a Marxist on being a teacher today. Being not-a-Marxist myself, my natural instinct was to engage, to argue, to learn from it where I could, but eventually to oppose. And yet since I hadn't the time or the experience to bring a truly nuanced view to the whole thing, I sat it out. And I felt angry with myself for doing this.

I felt angry because what was being presented was the implicit jab that I didn't care enough. By writing that the entire education system was at risk of being drowned in market-orientated stupidity, the challenge is made to the reader to either present an alternative take or be responsible by inaction for watching the destruction of good, decent things. And this, I get the feeling, is where an awful lot of reactionary thinking comes from. Your average non-bleeding-heart liberal is confronted with a world of gigantic injustice and is asked to care about it all. There is racism and sexism, homophobia, inequality, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and you have to Care about it all, or you're a Bad person. The easiest reaction to all this is to simply deny that any of these things exist. It's the liberals and the socialists and the radicals who are the reverse-racists, the true sexists, the real aristocrats.

The real polluters

Because deep down, none of us want to believe that we are a bad person. The use of "do-gooder" as an insult tells you something about the mindset of reactionary thinking: the dislike of those whose first instinct is to do good in all situations is a concealed fury that one's own largely blameless life is being implicitly called into question simply because you don't share that instinct. Political Correctness is so despised because it holds default behaviour and language to account; while all things being equal most people would see the logic in not using certain language in individual cases, as a lifestyle demand the need to hold yourself to a decent standard of liberal behaviour is grating enough that PCness itself is deemed ill-founded, an enemy to freedom and honest people everywhere.

I feel twinges of this fury when reading my Facebook or Twitter feeds. How can I possibly be expected to care about all this stuff with the attention it deserves? I feel under fire from everyone more radical than me, that I'm some kind of quisling for the establishment, simply because I'm not shouting as loudly as they are about every injustice under the sun. This is an illusion, but a telling one. I'm not as impressively feminist as some, not as forceful about racial stuff as some, not as left-wing as some. And all that makes me want to spend my time arguing with those people to validate myself, indeed probably taking deliberately more centrist opinions just to annoy those bastards implying I'm a bad person, rather than facing those powerful interests who are probably far more of a threat to my beliefs.

Anonymous board members being ironically harder to hate than Anonymous

But in the end I am happy just not giving as much of a shit as other people. And that, I think, is a perfectly defensible stance. Progressive change needs a large reserve force of people only marginally interested in every issue who aren't put off by feeling they should be more involved. These are the troops of attrition, the people who, for example, reject the homophobia of previous generations and so gradually outnumber and marginalise the forces of reaction without going on a single march.  If women's power and dignity is to move forward in the coming century, it will be because a vast number of otherwise moderate, uninterested people take up the cause of feminism by default, the sort of process that much as I hate to admit it  Emma Watson and Upworthy contribute to.

Radicals require the help of more moderate people like me because solidarity is how change happens. I am an ally of progressive forces, and I will do more than just sit on the sidelines, but I will do so on my own terms. My duty is not to be needled by the endless pin pricks to my ego that Twitter activism represents, but rather stand at a distance, respectfully disagreeing, but always remembering that overall I want them to win. We all have to not be arsed about quite a lot of stuff. The trick is ensuring that when someone tells you you can't be arsed, you don't get so annoyed you forget that they're probably right.