> On basically all political issues, unwavering is a good attribute.
Only in the movies. In real life, this trait can be disastrous towards making any progress for the betterment of society.
Only in the movies. In real life, this trait can be disastrous towards making any progress for the betterment of society.
If you see Stallman's role as the personification of an ideal, you probably laud his "unwavering" position. If you see his role as that of a pragmatic politician, who should try and find small wins when large wins are out of reach, you see probably find his "unwavering" as impractical.
You mean the movies made about people who were unwavering in real life? Gandhi, MLK, Lincoln are a few high-profile figures that spring to mind, but there are countless throughout history who have made a difference by standing up for what they believe in.
I understand your point, that romanticized notions rarely have a place in reality. But I think Stallman, even with all of his eccentricities, is the perfect figurehead for these ideologies. He is a believer, and that gives others permission to believe themselves. It's a very powerful thing.
But if this is the case, then it was his belief in his country that motivated him and that qualifies Lincoln as a believer. In my mind that was enough to not delete his name after typing it. :)
It's a thin-ish book and I highly recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Long-Pursuit-Lincolns-Thirty-Year/...
EDIT: To add to the discussion - not many people are aware but MK Gandhi was indeed very thorough in his use of Non-Violence and other means of protest. On few occasions when a protest became violent he was the first to call off the protest. When most of India & Pakistan were celebrating their independence he was busy caring to people affected by Hindi/Muslim riots. Having unwavering attitude is not just stuff of movies.
> There is no such thing as "Gandhism," and I do not want to leave any sect after me. I do not claim to have originated any new principle or doctrine. I have simply tried in my own way to apply the eternal truths to our daily life and problems... >> The opinions I have formed and the conclusions I have arrived at are not final. I may change them tomorrow. << I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills.[120]
(emphasis mine)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Prin...
MLK Jr's early campaign to desegregate the city of Albany, Ga., for example, is usually considered to have been a failure (in terms of return on investment) because the political dream of desegregating the entire city was seen as too big to effectively organize a campaign for:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albany_movement
> “The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair” (“Martin Luther King: A Candid Conversation”).
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclo...
What followed, of course, were the Birmingham bus boycotts and other campaigns with a much more limited scope. To me, this represents a "waver." In retrospect, we can say that MLK was just changing tactics and he never wavered in his belief against segregation...but is that something you would've guessed if you were one of his contemporaries? Or would you have thought, like many of his anti-segregationist rivals, that MLK was being an "Uncle Tom" and deliberately aiming for small-victories as to not upset the white status quo? It's easy to say "Well, MLK was unwavering all along" 50 years later...but had his smaller campaigns not gone so well (and he was most definitely not the only person making inroads in the civil rights movement) and resulted in only localized successes, then we would be viewing MLK as a man of compromise today.
The larger point is that effective revolutions encompass a large degree of compromises. Sometimes a leader will give on something to reduce the number of opponents he/she has to face.
So to the original commenter's point, it is not admirable in politics (art and martyrdom is a different thing) to be unwavering, at least by those who practice it and want a real degree of success.
And with respect to "art and martyrdom" - These figures, all of them, had a very real degree of success affecting political change. The fact that they are martyrs is secondary and the argument could be made that they were martyred because of their political success. In fact, these 3 sprang instantly to mind when I wrote my original comment specifically because I think it's possible (not necessarily probable) that RMS could join them in both regards. Successfully banning patents on software could potentially effect a lot of people's wallets and history has shown this to be a good motivator for creating martyrs.
No one should suggest that Stallman should have to change his beliefs. Instead, he should realize that his goal is pretty much impossible to accomplish in the current political climate. Because it is impossible, he should seek to achieve the smaller goal of successfully reforming patent law, because a small win is better than a big loss. It doesn't mean that you have given up, it just means that you realize that you aren't going to win the war in a single day.
I think the point that they were trying to make was that accepting reality and compromising ones beliefs are two different things. It's unrealistic to act as if you can enter a conflict with a party that thinks you are 100 percent wrong, and successfully negotiate an agreement that gets you 100 percent of what you wanted. But minds can be changed over time. If we can place limits on software patents, and the changes prove themselves to be conducive to a healthy economy, then we will have an easier time convincing people that the copyright system is causing more harm than good.
This was exactly my point. The parent was suggesting that MLK compromised on his stance but presented only evidence of a change in tactics.
I agree completely with your other assertions.
I think it would help to distinguish that there are really 2 arguments happening here, muddying the waters: Unwavering belief and unwavering actions.
I personally think that unwavering belief in something is commendable and this is where my comments have come from. I think this is necessary in order to effect any real change as the process is usually long and arduous.
Unwavering commitment to a losing tactic, as danso points out, is stubborn and foolish. A person who is unable to adapt when facing challenges does no favors for their cause.
This is what I was trying to get across, but you expressed it much more concisely than I.
This would seem to require -some- people to be unwavering.
But consider the gist of MLK's situation:
1) His primary goal was to create equality among whites and minorities. I'll agree that he never wavered from that. In the same way, every major figure on either side of the abortion debate, at every point in the continuum, will argue that they've never wavered for their respect for human life. The problem is getting to that big goal, and that path almost always requires wavering.
2) In support of my point, the idea of desegregation was so big that organizing a campaign against it devolved into a messy unorganized effort (current-day example: Occupy Wall street). When he tried to campaign against ending desegregation in Albany, he had very little success. He underestimated the widespread opposition to such a sea change.
3) In Birmingham, he changed his strategy to attack obvious injustices that moderately conservative whites could back. Yes, changing the bus-seating policy is a form of desegregation, but it was possible to change that policy and still have Jim Crow laws still be the law of the land.
So if you were an observer of the civil rights movement at that time, yet outside of King's inner circle, what could you possibly conclude except that from Albany to Birmingham, MLK has moderated his stance against desegregation? Certainly, as the audience that MLK wanted to reach -- the white status quo -- you could get on board with treating blacks more decently, as long as they didn't go to the same schools your kids do.
It's only after the successes of these limited campaigns that King himself could be seen as a successful leader of the movement. His strategy to fight small battles as to be more palatable to segregation-supporting whites was critical...and it was politics. Politics is about compromise and choosing battles wisely. The problem with your argument is that you don't see that one man's "choosing battles and running away to fight another day" is another man's "spineless flip-flopping appeasement", which MLK certainly was accused of being. It's only through the passage of time, when all those events are compressed into a convenient explanatory narrative, that you can think of it as MLK Jr. being a constant, unwavering political force.
I'm also impressed by your knowledge of the Civil Rights movement. I'm not sure that it sheds a lot of light on the current argument, but your comments are definitely a good read.
That's where Stallman's stubbornness bites him in the ass.
Both approaches are needed. Diplomacy will get you further short term, but unwavering commitment will be able to change things in a more sustainable way, longer term.
Gandhi actually has some interesting quotes on this topic, e.g. http://www.mkgandhi.org/momgandhi/chap07.htm
Some picks:
"I have sacrificed no principle to gain a political advantage."
"All my life through, the very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise. I saw in later life that this spirit was an essential part of satyagraha. It has often meant endangering my life and incurring the displeasure of friends. But truth is hard as adamant and tender as a blossom."
"Human life is a series of compromises, and it is not always easy to achieve in practice what one has found to be true in theory."
"My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth."
I read him as saying that you can be uncompromising on your core principles while still being neither uncompromising nor adamant in your opinion. In particular, I think that "On basically all political issues, unwavering is a good attribute" is a common and dangerous perception, in that it denies you the opportunity of admitting that you were wrong. If you change your stance after learning more, or even after the underlying situation has changed, you will be accused of flip-flopping and inconsistency.
I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know how he is being portrayed in current pop-culture, but the only thing Lincoln was unwavering in his support of was keeping the Union intact. That is generally not the issue that he was considered 'unwavering' on, but it is.
Anyway, kind of OT.
Would _open source_ have caught on if Stallman (and GNU) hadn't been there? That's an interesting question.
But being right (even very right) in the 80s and 90s doesn't make you automatically right forever after; I found his assertion that you should starve rather than write or run a single line of unfree code[1] to be wrong and very counterproductive to spreading free and open source software.
The biggest challenge with lobbying is education. That whole reality-based thing. I've only lobbied on issues that nearly everyone is in complete agreement over (e.g. fair and accurate vote count), but the details were in dispute (e.g. touch screens are secure, reliable vs all forms of electronic voting are bad).
In the case of patents, the original US law states their purpose is to foster innovation.
The current game winner's defend the status quo making the argument that the patent system is working. Stallman and other advocates are arguing that patents hurt innovation.
Same values. Different policies.
Personally, I think that it has had the opposite effect. OSS (both the software and the ideology behind it) has changed the world. Almost all computing appliances run OSS code or interface with other machines which do. People without much money can use state of the art software for free, leaving them more to spend on the basics. All of this has been due to an unwavering political attitude.
Perhaps it is not whether an attitude is unwavering which influences the net effect but the content itself. A good idea is a good idea whether you firmly believe in it or not. Firmly believing in a good idea has a positive impact whereas the same belief in a bad idea will have negative consequences.
Both types are needed. Because Stallman is uncompromising, he'll never be in a position to make change. But he can pressure and try to convince those who are.