Climate Camp and the Enlightenment

Spent a lot of yesterday evening at the South Coast Climate Camp helping to build a community allotment as one of the Saint Annes Diggers http://brightonclimateaction.org.uk/day-4-at-the-camp-%E2%80%93-so-here-we-are/ (In the photo I am doing the shrek impression at the back). The sentiment of the Digger's Song http://unionsong.com/u361.html, sung beautifully as we were digging, and the long tradition of resistance that it echoes might seem to fit badly with the modernising, liberal ideas of the Enlightenment, but appearances deceive.
One of the most important new understandings of the Enlightenment is as the project of improvement, which changed the terms through which humans related to their environment. The intensified circulation of text, song, image and new kinds of universal money in the eighteenth century encouraged new kinds of collective action and changes in individual behaviour which in turn made all manner of creative solutions to problems possible. The southern French peasants who changed their crop rotation to plant vines were risking their families' well-being even as they helping to move their society through the population pressures of the late eighteenth century. The subtle ways in which individuals and groups learned that change was possible, though traveling lecturers, pamphlets, talk at blacksmiths, in general through communication, was a tiny instance of a vast reorientation of ordinary people. The new ideas of universal rights and democratic self-governance appeared alongside these more workaday experiences as well. The Digger's desire to hold and work the land was not some anachronistic resistance to the necessary concentration through enclosure. It was an early instance of an alternative model of adaptation and change.
So the funny mix of new social media and garden allotments is not altogether new, if it is new at all. The Enlightenment project, at the ground level as well as at the highest levels of the culture, was amazingly successful. However the institutions it used to open up the possibilities of free human action, such as the secularised state, markets and money, now contribute to and in many cases create the constraints on human freedom we experience. We can inspired by the form the Enlightenment took, while we understand that a new project of improvement will demand new ideas and practices.