Progressivity and the Problem of Hypocrisy

I received an e-mail from one of my best and brightest students earlier this afternoon, which consisted mostly of administrivial matters (questions about grading and other end-of-term sorts of things), but which culminated in an interesting observation of a kind I am noticing across many quarters of our beloved Intrawebs this weekend:

Did you hear about the pollution caused by the recent live earth concerts? Apparently it will take something like 100,000 trees to undo the emissions produced. The irony would be hilarious if it weren't killing us.

This was my response:

It seems to me that this observation loses much of its force when we contemplate the pernicious environmental impacts of the likely alternate employments of time and energy to which the participants in the concerts would otherwise have been devoted.

Industrial civilization is, of course, always environmentally devastating as it is currently constituted, but surely the best possible application of that civilizational devastation for Green-inclined folks would be to marshall it in the service of education, agitation, and organization to reimagine and reorder civilization as a less environmentally devastating proposition?

Isn't this sort of objection rather like those who like to point to the hypocrisy of prosperous progressives spending their money in the service of social justice causes? There are surely questions to be asked about the coherence of critiques that seem always only to be interested in the environmental impacts of environmentalist activism but of no other activity, or in the exploitation that contributes to anti-exploitation activism but to no other activity.

None of this is to argue that there is no place for critiques that would ameliorate the pollutive or exploitative impacts of environmental or social justice activism itself, since such critiques would certainly appeal to the same intuitions that make the activism appealing in the first place. But it is crucial to realize and then always to remember that there is, to be sure, no non-hypocritical stance, no non-polluting practice, no non-exploitative positioning available to inhabitants of the relatively prosperous North Atlantic societies, built and maintained as they are on blood, poison, and toil.

And so, those struggling against pollution and exploitation and so on cannot prioritize concerns of personal purity or hypocrisy over concerns with concrete progressive outcomes except at the cost of those outcomes, while those who benefit from pollution and exploitation will always be tempted to prioritize questions of the appearance of hypocrisy precisely to maintain the outcome of incumbent privilege, whatever the costs.