Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

leadership in the long emergency S 107
actions. It is fi rst and foremost about direction, and only secondarily
about the “framing” of issues. True leaders do not rely on
what has lately been called “spin” or manipulation as much as
on truth telling and the arts of rational argument expressed with
eloquence and passion. Real leaders help others see the topography
of history through the fog of events and crises. Real leaders
energize people to act better than they otherwise would. Some
are charismatic visionaries, but more often they are rather ordinary
persons, blessed with a capacity to ask good questions, see
patterns, notice when the emperor is naked, and act while others
sit quietly. As Robert Coles and Garry Wills, among others,
note, leadership comes in a variety of forms and scales, in many
areas of life. And, of course, history, including our own, is full of
examples of people in positions of potential leadership who led in
the wrong direction, for which we are paying a high price.
Many people dismiss leadership as mostly pathological and
increasingly irrelevant. The real driver of progressive social change
supposedly comes from the bottom of society and works upward.
They envision a networked world in which electronic spontaneity
and the basic wisdom of the human heart displace the need
for leaders at all. Something is astir in the world, abetted by the
ease of e-mail, the Internet, and cell phones. Whether this will
amount to much I cannot say. Social movements fail as often as
not because their goals are inchoate, they work at cross-purposes,
or they fall victim to one human fault or another, or because
circumstances and the tide of history work against them. The
Populist movement in the late 19th century, for example, had a
great deal going for it, but it failed in large part because of the
power of capital and because rural populists and the urban labor
movement could not come together around a common agenda.
Similarly, what is presumed to be a rising tide of contemporary
social movements has yet to show that it has enough common
purpose, unity, and vitality to cause change of the right sort in
the time available.