by NOEMI LOPINTO

For 11 years, a segment of Montreal activists have gotten together to renew their verve and hone their social consciences at Concordia’s Institute in Management and Community Development (IMCD) summer program. This year’s four-day event, running from June 16 to 20 at Concordia’s Loyola campus, will present a number of seminars and workshops for activists on a wide range of topics.

However, with so many pressing issues coming to the fore at the same time, the program’s overall atmosphere is highly introspective. With organizers’ challenging presenters with two important questions—“What is at stake?” and “What is possible?”—the event will reflect a certain gloominess that has descended upon the activist scene in recent months and years.

Yet all is not lost. One of the themes that Brian Murphy, author of Transforming Ourselves, Transforming the World: An Open Conspiracy for Social Change, will be discussing in his keynote address on June 16 is “maintaining hope.” Murphy spoke to the Mirror from his home in Ottawa.

Mirror: Are you going to be talking about activist apathy, how to keep hope up in scary times?

Brian Murphy: Essentially, I have been asked to speak about what is at stake in the times we are living in. Our feeling this year is that there is a sense of urgency coming from everyone. That there is a sense of, “We have to be doing something,” a very nebulous urgency. Also, there is a tension between discouragement and feeling that we must do something. When people are very active, there is a point when they feel they are going against a stream.

M: Well, what do you focus on first? Militarization of space, environmental degradation, the anti-missile shield, globalization—how do you pick your cause, your direction?

BM: I know this is a question on a lot of people’s minds. It’s not really a question of what to do or what to choose from. What issue you choose, and even the level at which you choose to act, is not so crucial as how you approach that choice so that the choice engages you, expands you, gives you joy as well as drains you.

Our active life comes from a motivation that is internal and is not merely created by the external issue, the enemy outside that we want to deal with.

The point of it all

M: When the United States went to war in Iraq, people protesting made no difference. There are people with energy enough to continue to engage in activism despite what seems like failure, but how is the ordinary person supposed to find hope?

BM: It’s not true that it made no difference. It made a big difference. The Canadian government publicly declared that they would not participate in the invasion. That is an incredible victory, if you want to use that word. And it wasn’t just achieved in Canada, but in many countries.

The only way this war can be justified is on the worst utilitarian grounds: it worked. We won, therefore we were right. But actually the world population knows that that’s not true. The only justification in fact was power, and the moral justification, the political justification, was a fraud. For heaven’s sakes, the Ottawa Citizen and the New York Times tell us that.

That is tremendous, an important step. In all of my life, and I was involved against Vietnam and many other struggles, I have never seen a mobilization and galvanization around an issue so broadly.

M: But people died anyway.

BM: That’s why, going back to your earlier statement, my advice is that [activists] not focus on very limited, quantitative, short-term goals. If they do, of course they are going to get disappointed, and they will have missed the broader picture.

For instance, was that invasion [of Iraq] different, qualitatively, because of the mobilization, most particularly on the streets of America? You bet. Are they, the U.S. government, approaching that situation now differently? You bet. Were less lives lost because of clear opposition? I believe so.

The way to judge success is not whether we stopped an invasion or not, although I do believe it’s significant that the Canadian government opposed that invasion. What is significant is, how did [mass opposition to the war] happen? In human events, the really interesting events take place before things become visible [to the world public]. That’s the spectrum of activism I’m going to be addressing.

M: The invisible spectrum? How would you define that?

BM: The invisible is when things are happening at so small, so local, so personal, so individual a level that the media—who are followers, not leaders—are not going to see anything. My interest is in the local level, the individual level, how people sustain this movement, before the media come. And then, when they do have media attention, how they recognize what happened and not get diverted from their cause.

To protest is human

M: What about the environment? Isn’t there an urgency there?

BM: If your question is, “Are the planet and the universe going to hell in a handbasket?” I would have to say I’m not going to justify my actions on the basis of success. It is human to act responsibly, it is inhuman to collapse and cease to be a conscious human being. That is what is at stake. Our society turns people into lumps. The reason to act is because action is sane and healthy.

M: What kind of person becomes an activist?

BM: I’ve asked myself that a million times. I believe that with people who have a natural drive for it, the issue they choose is almost a question of opportunity. There is enough going on, you can see that history is long, the world is large and that we are responsible not for what happens, but for what we do. How we engage with what is happening. Frankly, a utopian society would be a society in which everybody was engaged, thoughtful and didn’t roll over.

For more information on the IMCD, visit http://instdev.concordia.ca/ or call 848-3956