A couple of asterisks for “be the change you want to see in the world”

(This starts out about recycling, turns to the behavior of tobacco controllers, and finishes with a bit about vegan ethics. So something for all my peeps here.)

The aphorism in the title -- often misattributed to Gandhi -- is a favorite among the people in the US labeled “liberals” (a confusing term that departs from the philosophical definition and has subsequently lost most of its practical definition; it refers to a segment of the population who are fairly conservative bourgeois in most ways, but favor some progressive policies -- so long as pursuing those policies does not require distasteful fighting or substantial deviations from the status quo, or that it would require them to step outside their comfort zone; see also, MLK: Letter from a Birmingham Jail). The aphorism’s recommendation is productive advice for a some choices, cases where each person doing the good thing contributes one share of the possible social progress (such as avoiding harmful consumption choices), and cases where one person does not really change much directly but each person joining in can help recruit others toward getting toward critical mass via inspiration or positive network externalities (such as making racism unacceptable in a society).

Many times, though, the technological or social conditions that make unilateral “being the change” useful are not present. The advice needs an asterisk to note this conditional. For example -- in keeping with that derisive definition of American liberals I offered above -- you might want the world to be such that everyone is cooperative and respectful in their political discourse and never makes controversial bold moves without getting most everyone on board. But if you are up against opponents who do not share that aspiration, and take advantage of every opportunity to advance their goals to the detriment of your own, then unilaterally being “civil” in the face of incivility and relentless gaming of the system is equivalent unilateral disarmament in wartime. Play-acting how you want the world to work, when it very much does not work that way, is often a really stupid thing to do. “I want the world to change so it is safe for me to walk in that neighborhood, so I decided to be that change”, he told the police from his hospital bed.

Getting an electric car and installing solar panels in 2015 was a valid way to “be the change” and encourage more of it. But doing so in 2000 would have been wasting resources on a technology that was not ready yet (and your expenditure would have done nothing to accelerate society toward readiness).

What got me thinking about this was my efforts to get our church to stop spending quite a bit of money, as well as a fair bit of custodial effort, to have a separate bin for “mixed recyclables”. For those who are not aware, post-consumer mixed recycling (in which households or non-manufacturing workplaces can put most metal and paper, and some plastics in a bin to ostensibly be recycled) falls somewhere in the range of “ridiculously low cost-benefit ratio” to “out-and-out scam” on a scale of environmentally beneficial actions you can take. (This and further statements on this topic are based on the current situation on the ground where I live, and generalize to most of the United States; the accuracy will vary across place and especially across situation and technology changes, which is kinda the point here.¹)

I would go so far as to argue that post-consumer mixed recycling is primarily a disinformation campaign to keep people consuming more -- those people who might otherwise consume less in order to be more green -- by making them think that despite imposing the environmental costs of causing something to be manufactured and shipped, they are being eco-friendly by discarding the single-use packaging in a green bin. Such actions also tend to compete with, rather than inspire, meaningful actions (“I put out my recyclables and carry reusable grocery bags, and that is enough to make the world greener, so shut up about me routinely eating meat and taking airplane trips”).

If an institution is a subscriber to private trash hauling, they charge a substantial premium to let you put some of your trash into “recycling” bins outside, which they pick up separately. I pointed out to people at the church that metals are the only post-consumer materials that are really worth recycling in our current environment, as evidenced by the fact that if you sort those out, then someone will actually pay you for them once you have enough, rather than demanding a premium to haul them away. The mix of post-consumer cardboards and paper -- unsorted, mixed with plastic, and mostly wet or messy (at least by the time it is collected and hauled as part of the mixed stream) -- is unusable for any purpose other than burning for fuel. There is not even enough demand for recycled paper to productively use all of the cleaner and better sorted scrap from manufacturing, warehouses, and other large operations. Paper and cardboard make up most of the contents of mixed recycling bins, and it all goes to the same landfill as the regular trash bins, but requires the extra resource-consuming steps of sorting it out (first into a special bin by hand and then by machines at the “recycling” plant).

Some plastic bottles can be machine-sorted and the material used, but again the potential supply massively exceeds demand and so the marginal value of putting one in the recycling stream is nil. All the other plastic, mixed materials items, and whatnot needs to be extracted from the items that might actually be recycled in order to send it to a landfill. A substantial portion of what goes into the bins isn’t even supposed to be there (I mean, c’mon!, do you really think people are going to get the detailed sorting rules right?), but a lot of what is supposed to be there is merely theoretically recyclable. Meanwhile, I discovered that over half of the actually-valuable metal trash our church generates ends up in the regular trash bins, not the recycling bins (an empirical observation that I can’t say was pleasant to research). I proposed that this would not happen if there were designated bins for collecting just cans and other metals, which give clear visual clues, rather than mixed recycling bins whose contents just look like any other trash bin (and basically it are). Thus, a policy of collecting only metal would actually increase the value of the recycling we did, in addition to saving money.

I should note I was quite pleased with the response to my proposal to make this by the people tasked with taking such matters seriously (I will report back if I am ultimately successful because it should include an interesting story of what I was asked to communicate to the rest of the congregation). But a lot of the responses I got were in the aforementioned asterisk zone.

It was suggested we should make our decisions about recycling based on one’s vision of an ideal world, without regard to the real state of the world. “It is chemically possible to recycle some of those other plastics!” (Never mind that it is prohibitively costly to sort and process them. We used to send container loads of mixed recyclables to brutally impoverished communities in Africa where the noxious mess was sorted by hand -- is that what you want to start doing again?) “Someone invented an efficient way to...!” (Great, but it is not installed here, so that potential tech does not really change anything, does it?) “Norway recycles 90% of household waste!” (I am skeptical, but even if it is true, it’s Norway. They are capable of having rules about consumer products and can afford to pour a lot of resources into gold plating their recycling processes beyond the point it has net economic value.) Every objection I got could be paraphrased as “be the change you want to see in the world.” But acting according to what you would do in the world you want to see is often not wise in the world you are actually in. In this case, it is worse by every available measure.

This brought to mind the behavior of a lot of supporters of anti-tobacco policies, especially those that interfere with the availability of low-risk tobacco/nicotine products. To be clear, I believe that most dedicated anti-tobacco drug warriors are motivated primarily by hate. The haters viscerally despise anyone who wants to consume nicotine and want them to suffer. Since people who use low-risk products do not inherently suffer harm, other than the free-market purchase price, the haters want to manufacture suffering. For several decades it was clear that most of the haters got that way by starting out being genuinely concerned with helping people (smokers), but got increasingly angry when their “help” was not appreciated or successful. So they started hating those ungrateful druggies who would not do what they were told. That is a common story among do-gooders who don’t include “nothing about us without us” in their governing principles. I am not sure that story is really predominant anymore, since most current anti-tobacco warriors joined the movement when it was already a hate group.

But outside of the hardcore warriors, there is a large collection of well-meaning “liberal” type activists and fellow-travelers who want to see”no tobacco” as a change in the world because they (mistakenly) think it would be good for people. They want no one to be smoking, but also no one to be consuming nicotine at all. So they pursue the change they want to see by discouraging vaping and other low-risk delivery systems (smoking has built-in discouragement after all, so no use wasting time on that). In the real world we live in, discouraging low risk products encourages some quantity of additional smoking, and there is no way that the resulting equation does not lead to an increase in total health costs from all usage. Yes, ok, ~yawn~. This observation -- that discouraging low-risk products is contrary to the stated health goals of tobacco control -- is not insightful. Maybe it was when I and a handful of others were saying it a quarter century ago, but now you cannot read anything on the topic without someone pointing that out. The fresh observation here is that this can be seen as an example of the far-too-common behavior of ignoring the asterisk. Even the non-hateful tobacco controllers are guilty of destructive misplaced idealism (which not to be confused with morality, as I stressed in my previous post).

That brings up a second asterisk. The usual vibe of the aphorism -- as seen when it is presented alongside pictures of nature and rainbows and progress (and Gandhi by those who do not realize the attribution to him is apocryphal) -- are that following the advice makes someone an agent of good. But the changes many people want to see in the world are absolutely horrible. Why would someone want to see the change of eliminating low-risk nicotine consumption? It is not as if such consumption is bad for you.

“Being the change” does not ensure that that change a good thing. The people running the U.S. and Israel right now are being the change they want to see in the world. So a second asterisk is needed to make the aphorism live up to its intended spirit: “*so long as the change you want to see in the world is actually a good thing, because merely following this advice does not mean you are pursuing good.” In fairness to the aphorism, a much larger proportion of the people who are fighting for good causes are willing to walk the walk and openly support the cause, as compared to those who want to bring about evil who prefer working in the shadows, mudslinging, and getting someone else to do the dirty work. But that is not universal; yes, racists mostly worked in the shadows for the last few decades, but they are now openly being the change they want to see. In addition, good people who are willing to walk the walk are often misguided about whether their “change” would really be for the better (he writes, with a sense of overwhelming understatement). If the change you want to see in the world is to deprive people of a drug that improves their lives, then you are fighting for bad, not good.

The upshot of these two observations seems to be that the aphorism is not such a great slogan after all. I didn’t start writing this thinking I hated that slogan, but I hated it by the time I had worked this through. Someone wanting a change in the world doesn’t make that goal something we should be pursuing, sometimes because the desire is evil and sometimes because that well-intentioned change is not well-reasoned. Also, being the change is only a useful way to pursue that change under limited circumstances. I suppose it would be too awkward to meme “live your life in ways that incrementally advance your social goals by virtue of your actions alone, but only after becoming expert enough to understand whether your worldly goals actually advance your ultimate goals rather than just feeling like they should, thereby making sure that you are really having an impact and not just playacting a fantasy world; oh and only do this if your proposed changes are for the good good and just f**k off to isolation and inaction if they are evil.” Or I suppose you could just say just “stop scrolling and meming, and go take some real action”, but that is a topic for thousands of posts that others have already written.

Addendum:

As I was finishing this, I read a great post by David Ramms about how vegan advocates with absolutist tendencies (no compromise, no strategic cooperation, and such) often try to liken any compromise, strategic cooperation, or incremental progress with supporting anything short of complete abolition of human slavery (and other examples of actions that are generally regarded as evil). David’s thesis is that the only reason we are now in a position where it is even possible for someone to weaponize that comparison is that dedicated advocates fought against slavery (etc.) for decades, making the compromises that were necessary for incremental progress, to get us to where we are today. The absolutist position, thus, is out of touch with history. If you want to use history to say “humanity achieved X so we can achieve our thing” you need to understand the history of the hard work a committed segment of humanity had to do in order to get to X, not foolishly say “and so we ought to be able to achieve our thing tomorrow just by ranting about it.”

Living vegan and other consumer choices are a genuinely good case of “be the change...” actually working. If you personally do not consume something because you do not like the impacts of people consuming it (resource use, supporting harmful companies, animal torture, etc.), you can contribute one person’s worth of not consuming it to the world. But when you transition to the social action realm, simply pretending you are a world where yours is the predominant attitude and behavior, or that just “doing you” is sufficient to achieve change, is a recipe for failure. (Put another way, the most ardent vegan activists are almost certainly doing more harm to their cause than good.)

I helped run our church’s picnic this past weekend. I delighted at various opportunities to tell people “no, we do not have a recycling bin for that plastic bottle or cardboard packaging because.... (but if you have a soda can, I am collecting those over here).” Being an educator is the kind of being the change that can work.

1. It is remarkably difficult to sort out good information on this topic, even starting from the level of generally understanding most all the underlying economics, environmental science, and technology, and having strong bullshit detector skills, but with limited subject-matter expertise. The most accessible information is obviously motivated reasoning (usually from those who make money from recycling and pseudo-recycling, but also from the “anything that codes as green must be good” crowd). Most of the attempts at honest answers seem to have substantial limitations. Very frustrating. It seems remarkably similar for what it must be like for someone to sort out health claims when they have just enough understanding of epidemiology to recognize problems, but not enough to instantly sort the good from the bad. For either topic, someone who gathers information from a position of zero expertise might as well be picking claims out of hat, and no simplistic “these are the sources you should trust” type advice does much to improve that.