I can't sleep so I'm posting some observations about CM (all positive,
but maybe nothing that has not yet been explored?? curious to find
out... would like to hear some responses)<br>
<br>
As a newcomer to critical mass (being from a non-large city for many
years), but not to the kind of thing it is, I'm fascinated and inspired
by the whole decentralized self-organization factor of CM. There
really is no leader, just humble "leadership" actions that move things
along. Obviously there is also no ideology, though there
certainly is a "grassroots action" orientation and a shared sentiment
that 4 wheels and a motor=bad, a structure pedaled by feet=good.
I agree. And critical mass is both really fun and (I think)
coherent as a form of effective activism.<br>
<br>
At the risk of stating the obvious, there seems to be a number of
tactics that emerge. No one ever sat down and said ok here is our plan,
here's what we'll do, but the situations created by this moving
free-zone of course creates a need to secure that space, and that leads
to these tactics being applied. For example, in
order to maintain the unique environment of a CM there needs to be a
contiguous block of bikes, (of a certain amount, which is fuzzy but
there's where the critical mass metaphor comes in), so people call out
"mass up" to bring the group back together. Because cars breaking
into the contiguous block of bikes would be unsafe and fissure the
mass, people take the role of acting as "human shields" if you will, to
stop side traffic from coming in. Because stopping at lights
would break the mass into two or more pieces, we don't stop at
lights. There may be other reasons for that one but they seem
vague to me. <br>
<br>
Ok, so again, bear with me because I'm probably just rehashing the
introduction to a book I haven't read about critical mass bike rides,
but I feel the critical mass is effective because it builds a movement
in the streets, grows in recognition over time, gains supporters
(because it is easy to be involved in, it moves slow, occurs as
regularly timed coincidence-- like the moon phases [or something
natural like that], & is easy to get to wherever else you need to
go next from, occurs before other evening events), and this matters
because it nurtures from the ground up a community of people who can
mobilize, not just in public displays, but in every day existence, to
break down the monotony of motor-vehicles-- which have killed cities by
taking people off of the streets-- maybe politically/spiritually wake
up the underlying creative/ mysterious/ awe-ing reality that never
really went away but just got divided up on the advent of the
disappearance of the active city-community (but also on the creation of
the sick nightmare known as the suburban neighborhood, and the
isolation of rural areas from community at large).<br>
<br>
Ok so here's my argument (this is also probably not new either) why CM
is tacitly coherent despite being ideology-free and self-organized
without fixed-role leaders.<br>
<br>
--. It's not about expressing a belief, concept, or call for action on
the part of any individual or organization. It's not about
changing the political structure or turning an election. It IS
about directly seizing and building a "temporary autonomous zone" in
the Hakim Bey/ Zappatista sense. It's not about influencing,
changing, or taking the government. It is about seizing democracy
, liberty, justice etc in this local space, at this time, right now, no
apologies and no justification added. <br>
<br>
The interesting/promising thing about this is that it doesn't seem to
end here, as this strategy (which CM is a manifestation of) can
and should expand until the TAZ is the permanent changing fluxing state
of most of our social institutions.<br>
<br>
--. I think the above fact is enough, but it converges with
another indicator that CM is coherent. We all come from different
backgrounds, cultures, have a variety of beliefs and priorities,
so As a creative decentralized organism, the last thing CM needs
is bulletted 10-point plan or an agenda to impose some kind of
structure on it, whether it be a grand plan of action, or a set of
dogmatic beliefs. <br>
<br>
Here's our state-the-obvious bare-bones common sense consensus:<br>
(I may not have this totally right and I probably don't...)<br>
1. Cars are bad. <br>
a. We all experience the inconvenience of biking in a city built for cars.<br>
b. Based on our actions we can say definitely that we all
respect pedestrians and human beings, and we all respect people LESS
when they share the road in a car.<br>
c. We may not agree on specifics but who can deny that
motor vehicles are inextricably linked to a destructive foreign policy
IN SOME WAY OR ANOTHER.<br>
d. While we may not all share the opinion that cars have
destroyed or minimized the active city-communities that once existed,
this fact is strongly supported by both common sense and historical
facts.<br>
<br>
2. Bikes are good (not the same as saying "cars are bad" because nothing is said about trains and electric buses, etc)<br>
a. Because we all experience the pleasure of riding bikes.<br>
b. Because we would rather breathe air than car exhaust,
and would if given the choice, accept and defend the right/ privelege
not to have to breathe carbon monoxide.<br>
c. Nothing is depleted, nothing is polluted.<br>
d. Bikes are cheap, available to more people.
Especially in terms of daily costs (little to none in any given month,
even cheaper given minor amounts of technical knowledge or interest in
figuring things out).<br>
e. Bikes do the reverse of the anti-social effect that motor vehicles have.<br>
<br>
Even there I'm probably saying too much (though I may be leaving out
something important). Regardless, what I'm trying to foreground
here is the fact that we don't need to overtly state our agenda because
there is a pragmatic, situated, humanly embodied core shared common
sense that could be called our "values" or call it something else that
might be more hard to misconstrue as something like prescribed
behavior, which it is not. What I mean here is not
prescribed but described facts of our underlying shared
motivation. <br>
<br>
There's some work in embodied cognitive science moving in the direction
of providing something extremely relevant to this work as well. I
want to disclaim first that I am aware of the dual nature of cognitive
science-- ie we are told what we are, and this alters the culture of
what we are-- and so on. But in my experience with this embodied
work, the cognitive scientists are getting at this in just the right
way, by welcoming in anthropology and other disciplines, and studying
the structure of conceptual systems-- what makes cultures different,
what makes them all possible, and other broad questions fleshed out in
more detailed research programs. <br>
<br>
Anyway, skipping the many details, the result of this are the findings
that meaning and emotion are woven into perception as it is enacted,
and that higher-order cognition is fundamentally imaginative and
"metaphorical", in the sense that you cannot know what it means to "go
down that path" without drawing on the knowledge you acquired from
going down actual paths. This seems obvious but the radical
discovery is just how pervasive this is is, the fact that it now seems
like every part of conceptual activity is manifested in image-schemata
and the rest of the repertoire of imaginative processes that neurons
somehow implement in an active organism's exploration of ones
environment. ---- The point of bringing this in is that it's
context by which cognitive science has revealed classes of metaphorical
structure that describe "common sense" of various varieties.
Liberal/Progressive common seems to be mostly based on a *family*
metaphor in which leadership exists not to police but to nuture a given
situation so that it develops in a healthy way.
Conservative/Fascist common sense is in fact base on a family model as
well, but it is the family resembling a police state, and to learn more
I reccomend Lakoff's Moral Politics. <br>
<br>
The bikesgood/cars bad list above can consistently and clearly be given
a Lakovian analysis which shows where CM common sense at this
time/moment will fall on the spectrum of metaphor classification.
I won't attempt it here but clearly we fall almost prototypically into
the central characteristics of the nuturant morals system.<br>
<br>
So my suggestion/question is, self-awareness may be helpful to a
movement, even if it is non-propositional movement which is clearly not
out to make a case ( instead to wholesale stake claim to freedom
despite "the system", and to realize the here and now, beyond
culturally empty and pragmatically ineffective political chess games,
etc). The self-knowledge is I think useful because it
reveals a common thread beneath what may have otherwise appeared
libertine and morally relativistic. Even the farthest left are
not morally relativistic, and CM has a very natural, strong, and richly
structured moral underpinning to it. Again, I mean moral in the
sense of a deep source of motivation that is part of who we are, not in
the sense of a prescribed way of life. <br>
<br>
Another reason, other than that it unites us in a non-trivial way, is
that it allows us to question our motivations in a detailed way.
Obviously this could only be a good thing because there may turn out to
be some details of our shared underlying common sense which are
extensions of metaphors but not relevant to experience. It's kind
of like the way molecules were first understood like planets, but the
details were later added in as refinements of the model. I'm not
advocating soul-seeking meetings- quite the opposite in fact-- but
considering that we have discussions about the critical mass, it is
worth putting on the table the consideration that the action is not
only coherent, but also that those who carry out the act are "morally"
a unified group despite differences on policy (war on Iraq, Israel
Palestine if it is relevant), and priority (economics vs.
health/environment vs. anti-war).<br>
<br>
Rob<br>