I am about to start a consultancy with a friend, who heads the International Cooperation
office of the Sicilian Regional Administration, to help them conceptualise and design a number of projects in the Mediterranean area. Most of their dealings in Tunisia seem to be with governmental offices and private companies, matter-of-factly bypassing an organised civil society, which experts of the calibre of Christopher Alexander from MERIP
depict as too weak(-ened) to be effective. Ten years ago, the thought of working with Italian government officials would have simply made me puke. Then, as I browsed the Internet trying to gather
information on the human rights situation in Tunisia, I started wondering whether my ethical standards had begun to wobble. In Helen Fielding’s satirical novel about aid workers, Cause Celeb, one of her characters wears a T-shirt set out like a multiple choice questionnaire for relief workers. It reads: (a) Missionary? (b) Mercenary? (c) Misfit? (d) Broken heart? Am I about to become a (b), a Mercenary, willing to trample all over my principles just to earn a few bucks?
I've always considered myself a radical.
Wikipedia tells us that the term Radical has been used since the late 18th century as a label in political science for those favoring or trying to produce thoroughgoing political reforms which can include changes to the social order to a greater or lesser extent. Historically, early radical aims of liberty and electoral reform in Great Britain widened with the American and French Revolutions so that some radicals sought republicanism, abolition of titles, redistribution of property and freedom of the press. In the later 19th century in both the UK and continental Europe the term
radical came to denote a
progressive liberal ideology. Historical Radicalism should be distinguished from the modern usage of the word radical, which merely denotes political extremes of right or left, and which for simplicity we'll call here
pseudo-radicalism. Needless to say, the relationship between historical radicalism and pseudo-radicalism has never been smooth:
From this starting point, if we look at the hugely diverse incarnations of progressive liberal ideologies today, we immediately realise that the clear-cut boundaries that defined political identities and ethics during the 19th and 20th centuries have now shifted entirely. In 1978 you could step into a philosophy lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris and know for a
fact that you were surrounded by radicals (or pseudo-radicals). Today, instead, as a new wave of religious and ideological polarisation grips Europe, with
skirmishes about creationism creeping
inside British universities and resembling the theological clashes between Protestant Reformers and Catholic Counter-Reformers that preceeded the Thirty-Years' War, radicals like myself are left pondering which forces are on "our" side and which are against us. But, perhaps, posing the question in this antithetic manner is already misleading. Fifty years ago, wherever you looked, you
knew the world had a dual structure: right and left, Communists and Capitalists, State and Market, Men and Women, everything was there to remind us that - just like the movies you went to see on Saturday night with your sweetheart - the world was black and white. Today things are not as clear: Neo-Cons and New-Labour, Third and even
Fourth Sector, Transexuals, Transvestites and
Metrosexuals. This is not a world that can be as easily split in half along its axis.
This vision of the past is of course hugely simplistic, but in social and political terms those past reference points really did help us identify our role models, our natural interlocutors, and most importantly our ethical identity and niche. Today, instead, no matter how many times pseudo-radicals insist on re-drawing this bi-polar map, some placing multinational corporations, others religious fanatics on the "other side" of the fence, I can't help thinking that they're wasting their (and my) time. There no longer is A fence, but countless fences, ditches, paths and bridges, which have turned our world into a far more complex, interconnected and frankly labyrinthine mechanism. It's as if we had acquired a sudden fourth dimension (or fifth if you consider time to be the fourth one), which escapes us all, because it moves faster than the speed of light in that twilight zone that has emerged with the end of the Cold War, the advent of the Internet and Globalisations' leap forward during the late 20th Century. It's as if Rubik's cube - which I have never been able to master, let alone draw ludic pleasure from - had suddenly turned into something like this...
Like those children's demons in Pullman's masterpiece His Dark Materials, radicalism is now assuming so many different shapes and forms, that you come across it in the most unexpected places. First you
learn that those old chums at BP have been learning from rich kid Zac Goldsmith (himself a student of St Francis it appears) how to give their riches—and their fathers' and shareholders' riches—to the poor, planning to invest $8 billion into clean energy technologies over the next 10 years. Then you
read that China has promised to close the divide between its new rich and the numerous poor still languishing in the immensity of its rural provinces, by building a 'new socialist countryside' (which makes me wonder: what the hell have they been up to since 1949?!?!). So, as radicalism starts spilling into some previously-uncharted territories, turning multinational corporations and autocratic governments into the brains and hands of radical social change, I had to ask myself the following question: at which point should we apply old ethical limits to this new unbounded world? Or, in other words, is it morally right to do business with the devil if we think this might do some greater good to the world?
I have two friends who are real hippies. They met while volunteering at
Sunseed a few years ago, and were so committed to their environmental beliefs that they cycled there and back from Newcastle! I had a conversation with them a few months ago, during one of their rare visits to London, on the importance of sticking to your principles at whatever cost. For them, there was no middle ground: you either pollute, or you don't. The technology is there, the rest is down to will-power, moral coherence and gutts.
But what happens - I asked -
when you just HAVE to compromise? When you are sent to work on a humanitarian project in Africa and you simply CAN'T cycle there!" For them, the answer was simple. If you compromise once, you won't be able to stop compromising. At the end of your life, you'll look back and see how you've trampled all over your principles. When I left them, I couldn't help feeling rather sheepish, wondering if it was already too late for me to live up to my principles, and calculating how many times I could actually afford going back home every year if instead of booking a seat on the usual Ryanair carnage I were to cycle from London to Tuscany over the Alpine glaciers...
But it really ain't that simple. My flatmate Paul - with his usual native-American wisdom - says it's naive to see the world in this black-and-white manner, but the temptation to edge towards pseudo-radicalism or outright extremism, especially at this time of heightened tensions between contrasting ideologies, is always huge. Surrounded by a sea of seemingly demented fanatics - from
Christian Evangelists trying to prevent the BBC from broadcasting
Jerry Springer the Opera, to
British Muslims chanting "Europe you'll come crawling when the Mujahideen come roaring" at an anti-Danish cartoons rally in London back in February - I am left wondering whether my political scruples have no place in today's world. In the words of that enlightened US president George
Dubya Bush, if "
you are either with us or against us", where does that leave us, old-fashioned radicals who want to bring deep change to this world without necessarily signing up to an Al-Qaeda or US military training camp?
Paradoxically, I think working across these ideological barriers might have become the new radicalism. As more and more people become entrenched in their moral highground, embracing Islamism, or environmentalism, or whatever other
-ism takes their fancy, radicals like myself are forced to triple jump from one political/ideological sky-scraper to another one. If there aren't - as I suspect - two simple sides to the argument, but countless one-sided views, then siding with
anyone equals embracing a political conservatism that is diametrically opposed to the progressive liberal ideology I believe in. This means, at times, accepting to work alongside (but not
inside) the bureaucracy of a hugely corrupt Italian government willing to develop links with a repressive North African state. It means doing this without forgetting what my liberal principles are and trying at all times to advance my progressive radical agenda. The alternative would be to barricade myself inside an ideological (and of course environmentally sustainable) ivory tower, complacent with my ethical choices but ultimately powerless beyond the four walls of my high-rise.
Er... is this a diabolic snigger I hear in the distance...? Must stop wearing hemp clothes...
Last night, wriggling in my childhood bed, under the dark silhouette of the old cedar tree that stands in front of my mother's house, I planted a seed. 
