path: root/chapter3.md

## Chapter 3

Thesis: green rhetors need to use apocalyptic rhetoric in order to motivate
their PMC audiences to a martyrdom ethic.

13. John's rhetoric exhorts his audience to a martyrdom ethic
14. R needs to exhort their audiences to a martyrdom ethic
15. Socialist rhetoric in the past has used apocalypticism for this very purpose
16. Once rhetors addressing the PMC have fixed all the other problems with R,
    they'll need this apocalyptic hope, too

In the previous two chapters, I've explored how and why contemporary green
rhetoric is too often failing, and argued that the apocalyptic form is not one
of the root causes. In this chapter, I aim to show that when green rhetoric
succeeds, it draws much deeper on apocalypse than catastrophic narratives do.

The Apocalypse of St John is written from below and primarily written to readers
reading from below. He places their struggles in a larger context: of a cosmic
battle between Jesus Christ and legions of demonic powers, a battle which will
be ultimately won by Jesus, delivering a world free from all evil, oppressive,
life-denying powers. He thus exhorts his audience to keep resisting the powers
of evil which oppress them.

How does this rhetoric work for John's subaltern audience? Large parts of this
are impossible now to reconstruct. John probably wanted his audience to stop
eating food that had been sacrificed to idols. What serious problem was this
supposed to solve? How was it supposed to solve it? We can't know for sure. What
we do know is that his audience were capable of following his exhortation. Thus,
if the rest of John's analysis, which is lost to us now, stacked up, he would
have identified an audience that could credibly make a difference. The question
that remains is: why would it be good for his audience to act in this way?

John's vision serves to answer that question. He does it by nesting their small,
local, temporary action in a much larger cosmic and eschatological context.
While he doesn't deny that their action cannot bring about large-scale social
change -- in fact, he emphasises their relative powerlessness -- he shows how
their acts of resistance meaningfully participate in a much bigger social
transformation. By resisting the temptation of the Beast, they are anticipating
and securing their privileged place in a future where the Beast is destroyed,
and in its place is its mirror image, the New Jerusalem. In contrast, those who
submit to the Beast and take on her mark are only participating in her
destructive, suicidal death-drive.

This is in fact just what green rhetoric needs.

First rhetors need to fix all the first three points. They need to correctly
diagnose the problem, identify a credible route to a credible solution, and
address an audience that can make a difference. This can be done in the way the
@{climate-change-class-war} does it, by exhorting workers in strategic sectors
to force change by threatening industrial action. But Huber is too pessimistic
about the power of the PMC: they can also bring about social-scale change
through their power over the state via the political parties and the civil
service.

The question that remains in both cases is: why is it good for me to take part?
Just because collective action is good for me doesn't mean that my individual
participation is, too. Most collective action suffers from the prisoner's
dilemma. It follows that what we need is a martyrdom ethic: I am prepared to
sacrifice myself for the greater good. How can martyrdom be good for me?

Apocalyptic rhetoric provides the solution by revealing how individual actions
participate in cosmic battles and eschatological futures.

Socialist rhetoric is often excellent at doing this: joining a union becomes
part of a cosmic battle between the proletariat and capital, and participates in
an eschatological future where the rule of capital is broken and the means of
production are socialised, and are thus all the wonders of scientific technology
are harnessed to the interests of everyone instead of the few.