My daughter, 7, has the makings of the quintessential politician of our age. She was recently elected Eco Rep for her class. She claims that, despite facing seven opponents, she secured about 60% of the vote. She provides no corroborating evidence for this, but simply rolls her eyes in condemnation if I suggest she check her maths.
Her first action as Eco Rep was to design a new recycling system that could be built into the walls of the school. She has filled several pages of A4 with complex schematics showing how it will work: how food waste will be composted into gas which heats the building, how metal will be melted down and turned into cutlery, and how plastics will be shredded and remanufactured into swimming costumes. And yes: all this is to happen inside the school walls.
Unfortunately, the teachers at the school have imposed a set of draconian restrictions on the cadre of Eco Reps. The teachers say the children are only permitted to take forward suggestions that are actually possible.
This failure of ambition and imagination has been roundly condemned by my daughter, who would have roused a rabble in rebellion if the school holidays hadn’t come around in the nick of time. When September came around, I feared she’d have them chanting “Build the (recycling) wall”, and declaring that the teachers just need a good dose of optimism to get things going.
I fear my daughter belongs in today’s politics far more than I do. Because I rather like confining my thinking to the possible. I’ve got very little interest in bulldozing through to another plane of reality, where up is down, left is right, climate change isn’t happening, the gravitational model of trade doesn’t exist, and liars make the best leaders. I’m a possibilist, and proud of it.
The first possibilists were a faction of the French socialist movement, led by Paul Brousse and Benoît Malon. They were leftist firebrands and radicals, but they opposed the anarchists, and those advocating for a worker’s revolt, because they didn’t believe those solutions could or would ever work. Instead they proclaimed the reformist principle of achieving only what is ‘possible’: working for the measurable, reachable gains instead of the utopian ideal.
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