Social Change: Awareness vs. Action

On May 13, Manifest Communications held an event called “Well, Well” that brought together Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell and Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell to talk about social change. Happily a video of the evening’s main speaking event has been made available here, and I recommend it highly.

Both Gladwell and Kingwell make compelling and thoughtful presentations. And while there is much to enjoy and to ponder over, there are also a couple of things to complain about. First, I think it is particularly regrettable that the exchange ended up being framed or dramatized as a debate. It’s not that the framework of a debate is incapable of illuminating a complex topic, for a good example to the contrary you can see this famous debate between Larry Lessig and Jack Valenti on the future of Intellectual Property at the Berkman Center at Harvard.

Moderator Avril Benoit kicked the evening off with a quotation from Jeffrey Sachs (of the Earth Institute): “Great social transformations…all began with public awareness and engagement.” The speakers were pitted in a debate, then, over the relative impact of consciousness-raising versus more direct forms of action in creating social change. So, from the beginning the evening was a frame-up of a false dichotomy, suggesting that we must align ourselves with one side or the other and forcing thought down the reductive runnel of the either/or. Perhaps it is too much to hope that such events would not only bring together such intelligent speakers, but also to design a more intelligent platform for their exchange, but I cannot prevent myself from applying this critical standard, nonetheless.

As you might expect, given the intelligence and skill of each, many interesting ideas and thoughts were brought to bear on either “side” of these issues. What failed to happen, however, was a dialogue, a true engagement of the thinkers with each other and the grappling with each other’s thoughts that would have allowed us to see thinking in action rather than the highly skilled display of two master rhetoriticians.

All this griping aside, the video of the Well, Well evening remains eminently worth watching and a powerful example that the web is bringing us access to events and interaction that mainstream media simply can’t and won’t. Enjoy this feast of “long tail” intellectual goodness!