Imaginer or Manager

Within the last few years “green” became a fevered pitch.  Literally, it became a pitch, a SALES pitch.  Remember when it was “alternative” to be green?  When you were somehow countercultural if you loved the Earth and people thought that “serving, loving, and protecting the environment” might end up in worshipping the trees?   Those days quickly got swept up into expanded consumer class conscience.  Middle class mom and dad’s with conservative buying trends suddenly turn over the box or the bottle to ensure that it’s ecologically safe (50% of American’s say that the largest factor in their buying choice is environmental concerns).  While blue bloods and boycotters have always been eating organic, now bible belt bistros are serving up local and fresh.  In fact, economic studies tell us that Green has become Big Business.  

Corporations (the same ones that have often pumped billions of toxic chemicals into the environment) are jumping on the band wagon right and left.  Why?  Well, part of it is probably genuine concern.  I don’t doubt that.  People every where seem to be more environmentally conscious.  Board rooms in the biggest corporations are still made up of individuals–they MUST care.  Still, I also know that bottom lines are the, well…the bottom line of Business.  Profiteering and the all important dollar are still the king.  Doesn’t this seem a little interesting to you?  Many of the corporations who the countercultural earth muffins and tree huggers were boycotting are now the same ones pumping billions of dollars in advertising to convince people to buy their LATEST green product.   They’re banking on the fact that you and I will.  We will because we care.  And…and…there may be another reason.

It’s what Walter Brueggemann spoke about in The Prophetic Imagination.  He said that the Empire of control and competition, is constantly co-opting people’s revolutions.  In other words, when was the last time a revolutionary didn’t eventually become Emperor?  Think Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler…but maybe even more unfortunate are those true believers like the French revolutionaries whose ideas of liberty and equality eventually turned into a reign of terror.  Why?  Brueggemann points out that it is because those revolutions and revolutionaries bought into a critical deception.  The immediacy of their hope.  Anytime, he comments, the hope is too “here and now” it becomes prime real estate for imperial control.  The tangible, touchable, manageable realities of linear thought and rational process are Their domain.  Finally he councils us not to be Managers of change but rather to be Imaginers…  Poets, provocateurs, singers of songs, artists, prophets, painters, sculptors, wordsmiths, etc… Envision a new world, live into that new reality…but don’t necessarily engage in the dangerous assumption that CHANGE is the end all solution.  

Along those lines I read recently that one of the modernist (here I mean the philosophical Modernist project not actually the era of being modern) agenda’s is the perpetual state of CHANGE, that hope is wrapped up, not in something beyond sight, but rather in immediate diversions of course.  This has led to a devaluing of the present, a distant reconfiguration of an idealized (unrealistic) past, and the enshrining of the future.  Change is all the rage in the modernist age.  Which is where green comes into play.

I have nothing against a Green world.  The fact is a green world will be better than the trajectory we’ve been going.  But I think it’s an interesting overlap.  The Empire figured out what people wanted, the revolution that people were demanding, then they processed it–packaged it–and sold it to us.  What’s wrong with that?  Nothing per se… save only that it just gives the system of control and conquest and competition an extension.  It gives the powers that be a little longer to live and live off of us, ordinary people trying to make our way in a world gone mad.  I like Brueggemann’s advice, though I struggle with its implications for participating in the politics of change.  Still, it resonates with me to be an Imaginer, not a Manager.