A few weeks before the Better Angels convention, the Washington Post published an editorial by Julie Kohler of Democracy Alliance, "How Calls to 'Love Your Enemies' Enforce the Status Quo." She starts by quoting Joe Biden, who vowed never to "demonize" opponents and rejected the notion that the angrier candidate wins. Kohler then points to what she calls a "politics of love" that calls for Americans to be less angry, to have calmer conversations about politics, and generally be nicer to each other. She tags Better Angels as an example of this trend.
Her case against love-thy-neighbor politics parallels many of the concerns I've been voicing in recent posts. Love politics, Kohler argues, idolizes means--civility, politeness, respect--in place of ends, specifically "truth and justice." Love politics, in her view, frames systemic, institutional, and historical problems as simple matters of interpersonal misunderstanding, as if polite enough conversations would redress centuries of white supremacy and patriarchy. She notes how many of love politics' primary interlocutors are conveniently white and male, giving their calls for civility a condescending, Can't you be a little less angry/shrill/hysterical? overtone.
Kohler allows for the importance of empathy (citing stories of conversion from neo-nazis), and she credits the Movement for Black Lives with embracing a grander sense of love. But she rejects "love politics" as espousing an abstract, passive "depolarization" uncoupled from acknowledgement and redress of systemic injustices.
I echo many of Kohler's concerns about depolarization initiatives. But, as is often the case in ultra-short opinion pieces, the trend she offers for criticism seems a bit caricatured. Little in her essay suggests that she has much first-hand experience with the Better Angels, at least. I get the sense that (and I'm judging only by what I see in the piece) she's heard of Better Angels, maybe glanced through the website, and decided that it belongs in the same box as Biden and the other examples she mentions.
In any case, I wanted to put down three quick responses to the points Kohler raises.
First, Better Angels doesn't operate from "love." Despite the organization's Precious Moments-sounding name, no Better Angels meeting, workshop, or training I've experienced ever called for participants to love each other--or love anything beyond a workable democratic process. I've never heard them mobilize "love" as a frame. BA instead champions "patriotic empathy" and "accurate disagreement." Their strongest arguments for these values aren't (just) how unpleasant or hateful it is to demonize people. No, their most potent argument involves pragmatism. So long as US politics stops short of permanently vanquishing one's
political opponents after an election, we're stuck dealing with the brute fact that a
third-to-a-half of the country seriously disagrees with us. Affective polarization, BA contends, just doesn't work in such a context. It deadlocks government, breaking the primary mechanism for realizing and sustaining a society-wide vision of truth, equality, freedom, and justice for all. If we want those ends, we need the means of something like patriotic empathy
Second, love isn't the opposite of tense confrontation. I wish Kohler had taken more space in her piece to distinguish the "love politics" she critiques with what she describes as the more expansive love of, say, Black Lives Matter activism. Some of the negative attributes she assigns to love politics don't resemble love at all. She levels three main criticisms: "Love politics flattens anger"; "[l]ove politics is ahistoric"; and "[l]ove politics holds no one to account." Perhaps there are politicians and pundits who espouse such a Hallmark view. But I've never read any mature, experience-based account of a loving relationship that doesn't incorporate some anger, hurt, and accountability.
To the contrary, speaking from a place of rage, confronting history, and embracing responsibility are all acts that presuppose some level of mutual care and respect. Who can check me when I've screwed up better than those who love me? With whom do I experience the greatest fury, the deepest wounds, the most profound disappointments if not those I love? Or consider couples who brag that they never fight or disagree. Think how that admission reads as trouble to most experienced couples. Can you really be said to love someone you can't be angry at, hurt by, or disappointed in occasionally? Love, after all, isn't a matter of warm, fuzzy feelings; it's a pattern of priorities extended over time. I put you--I put us--before other things, even and especially when we've hurt each other.
Finally, I'll stipulate that a politics of "love" (in a simplistic, conflict-avoidant sense) gets us nowhere, but neither does a politics of un-love. We're in a cultural moment that celebrates anger, outrage, and righteous indignation. To a certain extent, it's long-overdue corrective. We've endured centuries of oppressive civility in which the marginalized (e.g., women, people of color, LGBTQ+ folk) were not at liberty to voice their pain and anger openly to those who wronged them (e.g., men, white people, straight-cis people). It is certainly not for me as a white, cis-male, middle-class, US citizen to dictate some appropriate amount of anger from marginalized and formerly marginalized people. (All right, you've been angry long enough! Now get over it.)
It never feels super-pleasant to be held accountable for one's actions, attitudes, or status-based privileges. It will always feel like you're being criticized too much, too harshly, too unfairly. Learning to absorb difficult truths about oneself or one's social group with grace and humility--not dismissing them, not diminishing them, and also not collapsing into a navel-gazing ball of guilt or self-pity because of them--takes time and work. Privileged folk of every axis--and we're all relatively privileged on some axis--have to learn how to take those criticisms and act to redress them.
It is unfair--flat unfair--that such learning requires time. But I don't see a viable alternative (at least, none that sustains some minimal view of human rights and dignity).
If we want to fix the systems that harm people, repairing or replacing the institutions that create and preserve unequal distribution of social goods, we will need durable buy-in from a democratic majority. It's not enough to win the next election with 51% of the vote; that just guarantees a whipsaw regression with the other side wins. No, we have to make our view of the world becomes more or less the political common sense of the society (a state which Gramsci called hegemony).
To do that, we have to garner lasting support from most folk. And, for better or worse, that "most folk" usually includes those who currently benefit from the current system's injustices, who perhaps are responsible for creating and sustaining that unjust, unequal system. Anger at them may be natural, healthy, and understandable. But at some point we need at least some of those people on our side if we want to achieve stable change. The message can't only be You've done this wrong thing; it must also be You can help us make this right.
I don't think we've perfected a politics that delivers both messages effectively. Certainly the kind of watered-down, puppies-and-rainbows politics that Kohler criticizes falls short. But so too does a politics of pure, vitriolic us versus them, a politics where the other side has passed beyond reach of reason and morality. At least within a democratic imaginary, such affective polarization renders us forever powerless. I can think of few surer ways to uphold and enforce an unjust status quo than to sanctify activist strategies that guarantee deadlock
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Saturday, June 29, 2019
Civility Battles Left and Right
As I've mentioned before, when I tell people about depolarization initiatives like those of Better Angels, I usually get one of two responses. Some say, That's awesome! We gotta get past hating each other. Others say, Miss me with that civility crap.
I get where the latter view comes from. As plenty of people have pointed out, civility is often a cudgel used to tone-police marginalized folk into not complaining so much about their marginalization. Naive or insincere appeals to figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., or Ghandi--see? They knew that incivility gets you nowhere!--overlook the elements of provocation and coercion that got their nonviolent campaigns results. (Most Americans in the 1960s did not see King as approvingly civil.) In the face of extremist misinformation and propaganda, in the face of emergencies caused by horrific governmental acts, tut-tutting activists to be more civil comes off as rationalizing pure evil.
I find it helpful, though, to note how a version of this same debate convulses those on the other side of the political divide from me. Within my blue/progressive/left bubble, I can all too easily fall into patterns where I over-exaggerate differences between "us" and "them," oversimplifying how complicated and heterogeneous "they" are. I like to think that my side's debates are more philosophically sophisticated and morally complex. In truth, similar patterns of activist discourse persist across social movements regardless of ideology.
Recently, National Review writer David French came in for some searing criticism by Sohrab Ahmari in First Things. In his piece, "Against David French-ism," Ahmari rejects what he considers a politics of niceness and coexistence (for which he posits French as avatar) as unsuited to the current political climate:
French responded promptly, decrying the strawman "David French" Ahmari manufactures and reasserting an unyielding support for respecting individual rights in every stage of political conflict. Ahmari is right, French concedes, about one thing: "I do not see politics as war, and while enmity exists, I seek to lessen it, not fan the flames." French then recalls a speech he gave shortly before deploying to Iraq in 2007. At the time, he said that the two biggest threats to the US were "university leftists at home and jihadists abroad." He writes, "Looking back, I’m ashamed I said it. It was fundamentally wrong, as I quickly learned during my deployment." University politics, he reflects, proved an utterly different world than actual theatres of war. He concludes thus:
But also recognize that something else--something other than panicked reaction--must follow that response. And that something else, it seems to me, cannot be an all-out war against political enemies.
Ahmari is right, I think, to remind us that civility is a second-order virtue. It's a means to an end, not an end itself. But so too is anger-driven militarism. We don't fight activist battles because fighting is in itself good. We fight because we want to achieve other ideals like equality, liberty, and dignity for all. If we can achieve those ideals at all or even better through some other route than pure battle, surely that's the path we should take.
That's not so easy, though. In practice, battle mentality creates its own perverse incentives.
More tomorrow,
JF
I get where the latter view comes from. As plenty of people have pointed out, civility is often a cudgel used to tone-police marginalized folk into not complaining so much about their marginalization. Naive or insincere appeals to figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., or Ghandi--see? They knew that incivility gets you nowhere!--overlook the elements of provocation and coercion that got their nonviolent campaigns results. (Most Americans in the 1960s did not see King as approvingly civil.) In the face of extremist misinformation and propaganda, in the face of emergencies caused by horrific governmental acts, tut-tutting activists to be more civil comes off as rationalizing pure evil.
I find it helpful, though, to note how a version of this same debate convulses those on the other side of the political divide from me. Within my blue/progressive/left bubble, I can all too easily fall into patterns where I over-exaggerate differences between "us" and "them," oversimplifying how complicated and heterogeneous "they" are. I like to think that my side's debates are more philosophically sophisticated and morally complex. In truth, similar patterns of activist discourse persist across social movements regardless of ideology.
Recently, National Review writer David French came in for some searing criticism by Sohrab Ahmari in First Things. In his piece, "Against David French-ism," Ahmari rejects what he considers a politics of niceness and coexistence (for which he posits French as avatar) as unsuited to the current political climate:
Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.What we (conservatives) need, Ahmari argues, is "to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good."
French responded promptly, decrying the strawman "David French" Ahmari manufactures and reasserting an unyielding support for respecting individual rights in every stage of political conflict. Ahmari is right, French concedes, about one thing: "I do not see politics as war, and while enmity exists, I seek to lessen it, not fan the flames." French then recalls a speech he gave shortly before deploying to Iraq in 2007. At the time, he said that the two biggest threats to the US were "university leftists at home and jihadists abroad." He writes, "Looking back, I’m ashamed I said it. It was fundamentally wrong, as I quickly learned during my deployment." University politics, he reflects, proved an utterly different world than actual theatres of war. He concludes thus:
My political opponents are my fellow citizens. When I wore the uniform of my country, I was willing to die for them. Why would I think I’m at war with them now? I disagree with the Left and much of the populist Right, vigorously. If and when any of my political opponents seek to undermine our fundamental freedoms, I’ll be there to pick a legal, political, and cultural fight with them. I won’t yield. I won’t stop. I won’t be weak. But I also won’t turn my back on the truths of scripture. I won’t stop seeking justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly. There is no political “emergency” that justifies abandoning classical liberalism, and there will never be a temporal emergency that justifies rejecting the eternal truth.The Ahmari/French debate soon became a flashpoint in conservative media, with various pundits staking out different positions pro- or anti-French. I find the pro-French arguments more appealing, and many of French's defenders on the right offer arguments I think relevant to left-wing civility discussions. In particular, National Review writer Charles C. Cooke starts his criticism of Ahmari with the following:
One of my biggest problems with the worldview that Sohrab Ahmari outlines . . . is that it gets extremely fuzzy when it reaches the questions, “What do we actually want?” and “How do we intend to get there?” Ahmari says he wants to “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” Okay. But what does that actually mean in practice? What does a “defeated enemy” look like? By what mechanism is the “public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good”? Which “public square”? — there are many in America. And what is the “common good and ultimately the Highest Good”? Who decides? Ahmari? The Pope? Nicolás Maduro?Cooke, in other words, brings up the question of the endgame, the goals of Ahmari's war. After you win, what? This is a question I ask myself about my progressive/left goals quite a bit, even and especially when I'm drowning in despair-alarm-adrenaline at X or Y latest emergency. Yes, please, immediately, without delay, fix the concentration camp scenario at the border. Stop stripping children from their families. Stop confining people in inhumane conditions.
But also recognize that something else--something other than panicked reaction--must follow that response. And that something else, it seems to me, cannot be an all-out war against political enemies.
Ahmari is right, I think, to remind us that civility is a second-order virtue. It's a means to an end, not an end itself. But so too is anger-driven militarism. We don't fight activist battles because fighting is in itself good. We fight because we want to achieve other ideals like equality, liberty, and dignity for all. If we can achieve those ideals at all or even better through some other route than pure battle, surely that's the path we should take.
That's not so easy, though. In practice, battle mentality creates its own perverse incentives.
More tomorrow,
JF
Friday, June 28, 2019
Red-Alert Emergencies vs Civil Discussions
Every time I think I'm ready to go out and evangelize for depolarization and pro-civility groups like Better Angels, I run smack into realities so heinous they make anything short of a screaming, red-alert reaction seem preposterous. Take this, for instance:
A pregnant woman in Alabama (Marshae Jones) gets in a fight with another woman, who shoots her (apparently in self-defense). The fetus dies. The (formerly) pregnant woman is charged with manslaughter for failing to fully defend the life of the fetus by keeping herself and her fetus out of harm's way. This is precisely the kind of Handmaid's Tale consequence of fetus-equals-full-person legislation that pro-choice activists have warned about. Blogger Echidne of the Snakes lays out those concerns well. If a pregnant woman is to avoid getting into fights or risk being prosecuted, she writes,
I'm hard pressed to imagine any encounter with a supporter of this case that doesn't end in me screaming. This isn't a failure of patriotic empathy. I get their logic. I can articulate their rationale in ways I bet pro-lifers would agree with. I just find that logic deeply scary and morally abhorrent. (And yes, I also get that pro-personhood folk think the same about my point of view about the non-personhood of fertilized eggs, zygotes, blastocysts, embryos, etc.) And I'm not even someone who'd ever be in danger of being forced to be pregnant or of being charged with failure to protect an unborn person I'm carrying.
In this situation, I can see how repellent the thought of a Better Angels-type workshop or debate about this issue with the other side might be. Yet--when the internal, WHAT THE ABSOLUTE HELL screaming in me dies down--I can remember this last weekend when I did participate in a fishbowl-style discussion of abortion and reproductive rights. The take-away there was that most reds (at least those represented in that exercise) weren't on board with full fetal personhood. They had pretty nuanced views (though still well to the right of mine).
I could imagine those reds reacting with concern about this case (as do a few commenters at that RedState article). In the Better Angels workshop I participated in, I saw real, intra-red tension between the moderate reds and the lone red who stalwartly defended fetal personhood. That person seemed painfully aware of their view's minority status in the pro-life movement, prefacing their arguments with a weary, "I know most people on my side think I go to far, but..." I wonder how that exercise would unfold in light of this week's news.
Of course, that hypothetical is of little comfort to Marshae Jones and other pregnancy-capable people in Alabama. They're stuck with a nightmare legal regime. Who cares if that regime seems nakedly dystopian from the perspective of most of the rest of the country? It's still happening right now, to indisputably actual (not potential) human beings. That reality makes arguing for civil conversations between reds and blues on this issue complicated.
And abortion is just one such topic. The how-can-this-be-happening concentration camp situation at the US/Mexico border, the mass-extinction-level threat of global warming, the ongoing systemic oppression/incarceration/murder of black and brown people--all of these are emergencies that demand immediate responses. Actions, not words. Decisiveness, not deliberation.
At what point does the call to discuss respectfully and disagree accurately about these emergencies become an indefensible distraction from the emergency itself?
I'll try thinking through some answers in tomorrow's post,
JF
A pregnant woman in Alabama (Marshae Jones) gets in a fight with another woman, who shoots her (apparently in self-defense). The fetus dies. The (formerly) pregnant woman is charged with manslaughter for failing to fully defend the life of the fetus by keeping herself and her fetus out of harm's way. This is precisely the kind of Handmaid's Tale consequence of fetus-equals-full-person legislation that pro-choice activists have warned about. Blogger Echidne of the Snakes lays out those concerns well. If a pregnant woman is to avoid getting into fights or risk being prosecuted, she writes,
She probably shouldn't drink alcohol, either, or smoke tobacco. She probably shouldn't go scuba diving or mountain climbing, she shouldn't travel to dangerous places, and she probably shouldn't be allowed to be in the military or the police or the fire brigade. What if she goes out alone, at night, in a potentially dangerous area? What if she eats too much tuna? Fails to take folic acid?Moreover:
Because any fertile woman is potentially pre-pregnant, and because pregnancy is invisible to outsiders in the early stages, this way of thinking can easily slide into the policing of all women between the ages of, say, ten and fifty, including keeping them away from dangerous occupations and hobbies and scrutinizing every miscarriage for possible evidence of a homicide.I've heard radio shows debating fetal personhood in which callers poo-pooed pro-choice slippery slope arguments as silly. A pregnant mother charged with manslaughter for accidental fetal death? That's alarmist. Can we stay on topic here? Yet here (see the comments) we see pro-lifers actively defending this very case. Once you define a woman (or any pregnancy-capable human) as primarily a vessel/servant for someone else, you guarantee they'll be treated as tools, not as people.
I'm hard pressed to imagine any encounter with a supporter of this case that doesn't end in me screaming. This isn't a failure of patriotic empathy. I get their logic. I can articulate their rationale in ways I bet pro-lifers would agree with. I just find that logic deeply scary and morally abhorrent. (And yes, I also get that pro-personhood folk think the same about my point of view about the non-personhood of fertilized eggs, zygotes, blastocysts, embryos, etc.) And I'm not even someone who'd ever be in danger of being forced to be pregnant or of being charged with failure to protect an unborn person I'm carrying.
In this situation, I can see how repellent the thought of a Better Angels-type workshop or debate about this issue with the other side might be. Yet--when the internal, WHAT THE ABSOLUTE HELL screaming in me dies down--I can remember this last weekend when I did participate in a fishbowl-style discussion of abortion and reproductive rights. The take-away there was that most reds (at least those represented in that exercise) weren't on board with full fetal personhood. They had pretty nuanced views (though still well to the right of mine).
I could imagine those reds reacting with concern about this case (as do a few commenters at that RedState article). In the Better Angels workshop I participated in, I saw real, intra-red tension between the moderate reds and the lone red who stalwartly defended fetal personhood. That person seemed painfully aware of their view's minority status in the pro-life movement, prefacing their arguments with a weary, "I know most people on my side think I go to far, but..." I wonder how that exercise would unfold in light of this week's news.
Of course, that hypothetical is of little comfort to Marshae Jones and other pregnancy-capable people in Alabama. They're stuck with a nightmare legal regime. Who cares if that regime seems nakedly dystopian from the perspective of most of the rest of the country? It's still happening right now, to indisputably actual (not potential) human beings. That reality makes arguing for civil conversations between reds and blues on this issue complicated.
And abortion is just one such topic. The how-can-this-be-happening concentration camp situation at the US/Mexico border, the mass-extinction-level threat of global warming, the ongoing systemic oppression/incarceration/murder of black and brown people--all of these are emergencies that demand immediate responses. Actions, not words. Decisiveness, not deliberation.
At what point does the call to discuss respectfully and disagree accurately about these emergencies become an indefensible distraction from the emergency itself?
I'll try thinking through some answers in tomorrow's post,
JF
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Why Blogging: Crap, Ceramics, and Icebergs
It turns out I forgot to press "Publish" yesterday after completing my post, so you get two posts for today.
In case it's not obvious, I've restarted posting to this site, the oldest of my blogs, for several reasons; none of them include "wanting to become a famous and oft-cited blogger." Actually--true confessions--I tense up a little bit every time I open my Blogger page until I see "zero views" on all my recent stuff.
I created this blog originally back in 2009 as a way to get into the habit of writing something critical every day--sort of as a ramp up to the book. Different people prefer different writing practices. Me, I subscribe to the idea (attributed to Raymond Chandler) that to write anything worthwhile, you have to write a million words of crap first. You gotta drain the sac of poison--cliche, bathos, warmed over rehashes of others' ideas--before you start tapping into whatever threads of gold you have shooting through the dirty quartz of your soul. (Even that image I pinched from Ole Anthony.*)
Have I gotten to a million words yet? No idea. I know that, for me, the crap never completely goes away, instead replenishing itself daily. The longer I go without writing, the more of a reservoir I build up. I've not written for a while--at least since my last conference presentation in March--so I have some crap to burn off.
I don't mean that crap is totally useless, though. No, crap teaches as it purges. I'm only modestly experienced as bloggers go, but what I've learned is this: quantity over quality yields the rewards.
In their excellent book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, Daniel Bayles and Ted Orland recount the story (no idea if it's real or a fable) of a ceramics teacher who divided his students into two groups for the semester. To one group, he explained that their grade will come from a qualitative assessment of ten works that they have the semester to produce and perfect. To the other group, he said that their grades are purely qualitative: produce one hundred products of any quality, and they pass.
The result? The students who produced one hundred works ended up producing better works. The qualitatively assessed students spent so much time trying to get it right that they never let themselves go through the necessary crap stage where they learned how they best made ceramics. The perfect, as they say, became the enemy of the good. The quantitative ceramics students, however, had the freedom to fail. They could produce guilt-free crap, which let them gradually learn not just ceramics but their own process at producing ceramics. They had the room to develop and refine a personal style and method. I write blog posts, then, in part to help me refine my own process.
I also find that writing writing writing pushes me to think about old topics in a new way. I learned early on to distrust any academic work I was engaged in until I ran into a stuck place in the middle of my writing. In that stuck place, the assumptions and arguments I had going in smash against the reality of my evidence or the logical results of my reasoning. I have to stop, rethink, back up, and reassess. It sucks, usually, even when I expect it.
But, usually, the hard passage opens into a new argumentative path, one better and stronger than what I had going in. Writing on a blog, every day, helps me break those dark nights and those wider paths into more manageable bits. I develop lines of argument as I go along. I see where and how certain paths end in cul-de-sacs. I explore ways out of them.
I tell my students regularly that the process for writing anything worthwhile, from an essay to an article to a dissertation to a book, resembles an iceberg. Ninety percent of the work you put into the piece remains hidden beneath the surface. Scads of research, pages of paragraphs, and whole other volumes of argumentative possibility--your reader will never see them in the piece you create. Only ten percent or so of all your work remains; that ten percent is what readers see. But, I caution, it's the ninety percent beneath the surface that makes the ten percent float. Otherwise, I warn, you create nothing more than a fragile layer of thin ice.
Thus, this blog--for anyone who might stumble across it--is mainly me working through ideas for myself. I'd love it if my meanderings proved useful to others; occasionally I'll even recommend a post to folk. But most of the time, if you read this and think "this is kinda crap," know that you're right! You're peaking beneath the surface, looking at the stuff that'll likely end up on my cutting room floor.
Morecrap tomorrow,
JF
*From a New Yorker article about Anthony:
In case it's not obvious, I've restarted posting to this site, the oldest of my blogs, for several reasons; none of them include "wanting to become a famous and oft-cited blogger." Actually--true confessions--I tense up a little bit every time I open my Blogger page until I see "zero views" on all my recent stuff.
I created this blog originally back in 2009 as a way to get into the habit of writing something critical every day--sort of as a ramp up to the book. Different people prefer different writing practices. Me, I subscribe to the idea (attributed to Raymond Chandler) that to write anything worthwhile, you have to write a million words of crap first. You gotta drain the sac of poison--cliche, bathos, warmed over rehashes of others' ideas--before you start tapping into whatever threads of gold you have shooting through the dirty quartz of your soul. (Even that image I pinched from Ole Anthony.*)
Have I gotten to a million words yet? No idea. I know that, for me, the crap never completely goes away, instead replenishing itself daily. The longer I go without writing, the more of a reservoir I build up. I've not written for a while--at least since my last conference presentation in March--so I have some crap to burn off.
I don't mean that crap is totally useless, though. No, crap teaches as it purges. I'm only modestly experienced as bloggers go, but what I've learned is this: quantity over quality yields the rewards.
In their excellent book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, Daniel Bayles and Ted Orland recount the story (no idea if it's real or a fable) of a ceramics teacher who divided his students into two groups for the semester. To one group, he explained that their grade will come from a qualitative assessment of ten works that they have the semester to produce and perfect. To the other group, he said that their grades are purely qualitative: produce one hundred products of any quality, and they pass.
The result? The students who produced one hundred works ended up producing better works. The qualitatively assessed students spent so much time trying to get it right that they never let themselves go through the necessary crap stage where they learned how they best made ceramics. The perfect, as they say, became the enemy of the good. The quantitative ceramics students, however, had the freedom to fail. They could produce guilt-free crap, which let them gradually learn not just ceramics but their own process at producing ceramics. They had the room to develop and refine a personal style and method. I write blog posts, then, in part to help me refine my own process.
I also find that writing writing writing pushes me to think about old topics in a new way. I learned early on to distrust any academic work I was engaged in until I ran into a stuck place in the middle of my writing. In that stuck place, the assumptions and arguments I had going in smash against the reality of my evidence or the logical results of my reasoning. I have to stop, rethink, back up, and reassess. It sucks, usually, even when I expect it.
But, usually, the hard passage opens into a new argumentative path, one better and stronger than what I had going in. Writing on a blog, every day, helps me break those dark nights and those wider paths into more manageable bits. I develop lines of argument as I go along. I see where and how certain paths end in cul-de-sacs. I explore ways out of them.
I tell my students regularly that the process for writing anything worthwhile, from an essay to an article to a dissertation to a book, resembles an iceberg. Ninety percent of the work you put into the piece remains hidden beneath the surface. Scads of research, pages of paragraphs, and whole other volumes of argumentative possibility--your reader will never see them in the piece you create. Only ten percent or so of all your work remains; that ten percent is what readers see. But, I caution, it's the ninety percent beneath the surface that makes the ten percent float. Otherwise, I warn, you create nothing more than a fragile layer of thin ice.
Thus, this blog--for anyone who might stumble across it--is mainly me working through ideas for myself. I'd love it if my meanderings proved useful to others; occasionally I'll even recommend a post to folk. But most of the time, if you read this and think "this is kinda crap," know that you're right! You're peaking beneath the surface, looking at the stuff that'll likely end up on my cutting room floor.
More
JF
*From a New Yorker article about Anthony:
“Peace is really what we’re searching for,” [Anthony] said, swivelling his fierce gaze around the room. “But a life without suffering is meaningless. We are like hunks of quartz, and our real identityis a vein of gold inside it. Whenever we prefer someone’s interest over our own, whenever we lay down our lives for someone, we knock off some of the quartz and reveal the gold.”
Three Performatives of Civility
My weekend at the Better Angels Convention prompted me to think more broadly about some of the basic gestures that diffuse enmity and affective polarization. What can we do in contexts of deep intergroup disagreement, antagonism, and outrage that de-escalate these states? How do we make intractable conflicts at least a little bit better?
Of course, entire disciplines and organizations devote themselves to studying the network of factors, agents, and actions that transform conflicts into something other than deadlock. Amateur that I am here, I focus on three actions (there are likely more) that seem implicated in long-term depolarization and reconciliation processes: listening, apologizing, and forgiving.
It strikes me that each of these gestures has a performative element to them. As philosopher J.L. Austin famously put it, a performative utterance is one in which saying is doing. Austin describes most statements as constative. They describe some reality and may conceivably be judged true or false via comparison with that reality. The dog is barking. Jishon has a blue dress on. The Ancient Egyptians built pyramids. The sky is neon green. God exists, and she's pissed. All of these are constative. They're either true or false (even if, as in the case of the last sentence, discovering whether it's one or the other seems difficult).
Yet other statements, Austin suggests, don't conform to the true-or-false criterion. When a judge, at the conclusion of a case, says to the defendant, "I hereby sentence you to three months in prison," the literal statement is the act of sentencing. When someone christens a boat, they do it by the statement, "I christen this boat Nostalgia for Infinity." When an officiant at a heterosexual wedding declares, "I now pronounce you husband and wife," the declaration is the act of wedding them.
Such statements don't describe some outside reality; they bring into being a reality. The unsentenced person becomes sentenced. The boat acquires a new name. Bride and groom become spouses. In this sense, Austin offers, the utterances aren't constative but performative.
If I were to boil the performative forces of listening, apologizing, and forgiving into utterances, the resulting statements might run something like this:
The ideal I apologize carries within it a host of other actions: as a full admission of wrongdoing, an unselfish taking of responsibility for the consequences, a sincere regret, a promise not to repeat the wrongdoing, and a commitment to engage in restorative acts.
An especially effective I forgive you might involve relinquishing the right to (or need for) retribution, letting go of "the hope for a better yesterday," and moving past all-consuming hatred or bitterness at a wrongdoer. (Forgiveness may or may not also lead to reconciliation or a "reset" on a relationship.)
But these gestures are rarely realized at their best.
Where constative utterances can be false, performative utterances can fail or misfire. They can be, in Austin's coinage, "infelicitous" or "unhappy." Austin is fascinated by the different ways that such utterances can misfire.
If some imposter dresses up as a judge or wedding officiant, that imposter's "I find you guilty" or "I now declare you married" are bogus. They don't work. Their performative force fizzles. Similarly, I can't go smashing wine bottles against random boats to rechristen them after the Game of Thrones dragons. Or, rather, I can do the smashing and say the words, but the words have no effect. Performatives rely on very specific circumstances to work. A judge can't go grocery shopping and sentence the person in front of them to jail for having sixteen items in a ten-items-or-less lane. Without the proper context or convention, a performative utterance languishes unhappily.
More subtly, some contexts might render a performative insincere or dishonestly uttered. A judge's verdict would get overturned or vacated were it discovered that the judge was bribed or blackmailed into delivering it. I might say I promise to love, honor, and obey my spouse while knowing full well that I intended to do no such thing. I have promised, to be sure. But the force of my promise goes awry. It's like firing a blank; it makes the proper noise but results in no projectile.
I cover this ground to get to my main point: listening, apologizing, and forgiving all fail when enacted in contexts of obligation. The more I feel pressured to listen, apologize, or forgive, the less likely I'll be able to pull them off. Enforced listening inspires boredom and other resistances. Coerced apologies drown in insincerity and/or defensiveness. Obligatory forgiveness sounds and feels as hollow as it is. Civility performatives require the free option not to perform them. No one has to listen, apologize, or forgive. To work, these gestures must be granted freely, not elicited by force or guilt.
This reality vexes calls to civility. A call to be more civil can all too easily come across as a series of shoulds: you should listen, you should apologize, you should forgive. Such imperatives are kryptonite to realizing civility.
More tomorrow,
JF
Of course, entire disciplines and organizations devote themselves to studying the network of factors, agents, and actions that transform conflicts into something other than deadlock. Amateur that I am here, I focus on three actions (there are likely more) that seem implicated in long-term depolarization and reconciliation processes: listening, apologizing, and forgiving.
It strikes me that each of these gestures has a performative element to them. As philosopher J.L. Austin famously put it, a performative utterance is one in which saying is doing. Austin describes most statements as constative. They describe some reality and may conceivably be judged true or false via comparison with that reality. The dog is barking. Jishon has a blue dress on. The Ancient Egyptians built pyramids. The sky is neon green. God exists, and she's pissed. All of these are constative. They're either true or false (even if, as in the case of the last sentence, discovering whether it's one or the other seems difficult).
Yet other statements, Austin suggests, don't conform to the true-or-false criterion. When a judge, at the conclusion of a case, says to the defendant, "I hereby sentence you to three months in prison," the literal statement is the act of sentencing. When someone christens a boat, they do it by the statement, "I christen this boat Nostalgia for Infinity." When an officiant at a heterosexual wedding declares, "I now pronounce you husband and wife," the declaration is the act of wedding them.
Such statements don't describe some outside reality; they bring into being a reality. The unsentenced person becomes sentenced. The boat acquires a new name. Bride and groom become spouses. In this sense, Austin offers, the utterances aren't constative but performative.
If I were to boil the performative forces of listening, apologizing, and forgiving into utterances, the resulting statements might run something like this:
- I hear you. (listening)
- I apologize. (apologizing)
- I forgive you. (forgiving)
The ideal I apologize carries within it a host of other actions: as a full admission of wrongdoing, an unselfish taking of responsibility for the consequences, a sincere regret, a promise not to repeat the wrongdoing, and a commitment to engage in restorative acts.
An especially effective I forgive you might involve relinquishing the right to (or need for) retribution, letting go of "the hope for a better yesterday," and moving past all-consuming hatred or bitterness at a wrongdoer. (Forgiveness may or may not also lead to reconciliation or a "reset" on a relationship.)
But these gestures are rarely realized at their best.
Where constative utterances can be false, performative utterances can fail or misfire. They can be, in Austin's coinage, "infelicitous" or "unhappy." Austin is fascinated by the different ways that such utterances can misfire.
If some imposter dresses up as a judge or wedding officiant, that imposter's "I find you guilty" or "I now declare you married" are bogus. They don't work. Their performative force fizzles. Similarly, I can't go smashing wine bottles against random boats to rechristen them after the Game of Thrones dragons. Or, rather, I can do the smashing and say the words, but the words have no effect. Performatives rely on very specific circumstances to work. A judge can't go grocery shopping and sentence the person in front of them to jail for having sixteen items in a ten-items-or-less lane. Without the proper context or convention, a performative utterance languishes unhappily.
More subtly, some contexts might render a performative insincere or dishonestly uttered. A judge's verdict would get overturned or vacated were it discovered that the judge was bribed or blackmailed into delivering it. I might say I promise to love, honor, and obey my spouse while knowing full well that I intended to do no such thing. I have promised, to be sure. But the force of my promise goes awry. It's like firing a blank; it makes the proper noise but results in no projectile.
I cover this ground to get to my main point: listening, apologizing, and forgiving all fail when enacted in contexts of obligation. The more I feel pressured to listen, apologize, or forgive, the less likely I'll be able to pull them off. Enforced listening inspires boredom and other resistances. Coerced apologies drown in insincerity and/or defensiveness. Obligatory forgiveness sounds and feels as hollow as it is. Civility performatives require the free option not to perform them. No one has to listen, apologize, or forgive. To work, these gestures must be granted freely, not elicited by force or guilt.
This reality vexes calls to civility. A call to be more civil can all too easily come across as a series of shoulds: you should listen, you should apologize, you should forgive. Such imperatives are kryptonite to realizing civility.
More tomorrow,
JF
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Evangelizing for Better Angels?
One of the initiatives that Better Angels Convention organizers left us with is the "4 by the 4th" challenge: sign up four new BA members by July 4, 2019.
As I've shared with a few people stuff about the conference over the last few days, I recognize a truth: Better Angels impresses me. I liked that Convention a lot. I like the workshops I've seen and participated in. I think the work they do is legitimate and important.
Maybe, I think, I should try to get some signups.
But.
I hate hate hate the idea of proselytizing. I spent countless hours as a kid screwing up enough courage to broach some truly cringe-worthy conversations with friends and strangers about "getting saved." Like: on more than one occasion, twelve-year-old, introverted me approached a total stranger and asked if they were saved. (I can't hear myself say those words in memory save in the voice my mother used when she was trying out some "cool" bit of jargon--and failing miserably to carry it off.)
My aversion to evangelizing probably led me to study evangelical outreach techniques generally. And sure enough, lots of the literature of, by, and for evangelicals about outreach acknowledges that the process is soaked in awkwardness.
It doesn't help that we live in a society full of tell-your-friends recruitment schemes and multilevel marketing (i.e., pyramid scheme) strategies. Back in 2015, designer Frank Chimero tweeted that the phrase "Hi, I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn" should be named one of the universal, all-purpose New Yorker cartoon captions (alongside "What a misunderstanding!" and "Christ, what an asshole!"). We've all gotten such push invites. We've all deleted them. It's creepy and mechanical, unctuous and insincere, making us feel like nothing more than a mark.
My father once preached that we get inoculated against proselytizing in this culture. We get just enough of something (Christianity, in the case of my father's sermon) to develop antibodies capable of recognizing and rejecting it instantly. The ubiquity of conversion attempts sours the appeal.
So I'm wary of asking folk to join me in this thing I like that I think is good. That's part of my reticence.
The other part of my hesitation, though, comes from the drawbacks I see to the Better Angels approach. I mentioned the other day about how a lot of my friends and colleagues react to the notion of depolarization and civility with revulsion: how dare you expect me to make nice with bigots and nazis?
Or, as one of the people I spoke to at Better Angels put it, "I'm just having a lot of trouble with this"--this in her case being all the walk-on-eggshells circumlocutions blues and moderators go through to avoid alienating reds. Moderators are trained, for example, to avoid uttering or affirming statements that code "blue," such as "Humans are the primary cause of global warming." Such statements are points of ideological contest for reds. They activate teamist dynamics.
But it's also unambiguously true. Humans cause global warming. Global warming constitutes one of the biggest threats to humanity we can perceive. No action to mitigate those effects can get off the ground without base-level acknowledgement of that truth. It hinders the cause, then, to regard that basic assumption as charged enough to avoid or politely bracket away.
Things get even more complicated when the bracketed truths involve things like race, immigration, sexuality, gender, or any of the other cultural flashpoints. (Reds, I'm sure, have their own list of statements they're frustrated at not seeing easily agreed-upon in BA for the sake of civility.)
I have some reservations, then, about how fully I can endorse BA for friends. It's similar, I think, to my reservations about endorsing the United Methodist Church for LGBTQ+ folk right now. I've had great experiences, but it's not perfect. It's work. It's not for everyone.
Still thinking, in other words.
More tomorrow,
JF
As I've shared with a few people stuff about the conference over the last few days, I recognize a truth: Better Angels impresses me. I liked that Convention a lot. I like the workshops I've seen and participated in. I think the work they do is legitimate and important.
Maybe, I think, I should try to get some signups.
But.
I hate hate hate the idea of proselytizing. I spent countless hours as a kid screwing up enough courage to broach some truly cringe-worthy conversations with friends and strangers about "getting saved." Like: on more than one occasion, twelve-year-old, introverted me approached a total stranger and asked if they were saved. (I can't hear myself say those words in memory save in the voice my mother used when she was trying out some "cool" bit of jargon--and failing miserably to carry it off.)
My aversion to evangelizing probably led me to study evangelical outreach techniques generally. And sure enough, lots of the literature of, by, and for evangelicals about outreach acknowledges that the process is soaked in awkwardness.
It doesn't help that we live in a society full of tell-your-friends recruitment schemes and multilevel marketing (i.e., pyramid scheme) strategies. Back in 2015, designer Frank Chimero tweeted that the phrase "Hi, I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn" should be named one of the universal, all-purpose New Yorker cartoon captions (alongside "What a misunderstanding!" and "Christ, what an asshole!"). We've all gotten such push invites. We've all deleted them. It's creepy and mechanical, unctuous and insincere, making us feel like nothing more than a mark.
My father once preached that we get inoculated against proselytizing in this culture. We get just enough of something (Christianity, in the case of my father's sermon) to develop antibodies capable of recognizing and rejecting it instantly. The ubiquity of conversion attempts sours the appeal.
So I'm wary of asking folk to join me in this thing I like that I think is good. That's part of my reticence.
The other part of my hesitation, though, comes from the drawbacks I see to the Better Angels approach. I mentioned the other day about how a lot of my friends and colleagues react to the notion of depolarization and civility with revulsion: how dare you expect me to make nice with bigots and nazis?
Or, as one of the people I spoke to at Better Angels put it, "I'm just having a lot of trouble with this"--this in her case being all the walk-on-eggshells circumlocutions blues and moderators go through to avoid alienating reds. Moderators are trained, for example, to avoid uttering or affirming statements that code "blue," such as "Humans are the primary cause of global warming." Such statements are points of ideological contest for reds. They activate teamist dynamics.
But it's also unambiguously true. Humans cause global warming. Global warming constitutes one of the biggest threats to humanity we can perceive. No action to mitigate those effects can get off the ground without base-level acknowledgement of that truth. It hinders the cause, then, to regard that basic assumption as charged enough to avoid or politely bracket away.
Things get even more complicated when the bracketed truths involve things like race, immigration, sexuality, gender, or any of the other cultural flashpoints. (Reds, I'm sure, have their own list of statements they're frustrated at not seeing easily agreed-upon in BA for the sake of civility.)
I have some reservations, then, about how fully I can endorse BA for friends. It's similar, I think, to my reservations about endorsing the United Methodist Church for LGBTQ+ folk right now. I've had great experiences, but it's not perfect. It's work. It's not for everyone.
Still thinking, in other words.
More tomorrow,
JF
Monday, June 24, 2019
Processing Better Angels Convention
Back home in Baton Rouge, thank goodness. Alan's happy. The cats are pleased.
And life continues beyond the anti-polarizing heterotopia of the Better Angels Convention.
Case in point: at the airport, I checked one of my standard progressive/lefty blogs, Lawyers, Guns & Money. In a post titled "Banning Trump Supporters from Non-Political Sites," LGM regular Paul Campos shared a link from knitting/crocheting site Ravelry--specifically its new policy banning posts supporting President Trump or his administration. "We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy," reads the Ravelry statement. "Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy."
Campos offers his own commentary:
Most commenters also endorsed the equation between "supporting Trump" and "white supremacist." Posters diverged slightly about whether this judgment includes "people who voted for Trump in 2016 (because he was the Republican)" or just "people who still support Trump." For some commenters, there's a little leeway given; for others, any Trump voter deserves to be "up against the wall."
A few posters ventured questions or disagreements with Campos. "Would we be OK with a union or other organization doing this? What are the limits?" Such questions were interpreted as trollish derails rather than good-faith inquiries. (This interpretation could be right. Comments are usually judged and responded to by folk who know the asker's history; sometimes that history suggests such inquirers are just sealioning).
One poster contested the Trump voter=white supremacist argument, insisting they know lots of Trump voters who aren't. That view cut no mustard with the LGM community. Actions speak louder than words, went the criticism. You can say you're not really white supremacist (write the commenters), but when you support a guy who strikes ethno-nationalist chords in his rhetoric regularly and whose policies demonize and immiserate people of color, well...?
In other words, at the airport I found myself (virtually) immersed in just the kind of single-color, polarized space Better Angels tries to disrupt. The LGM community, by and large, would likely be among those who would respond to news about BA with disgust: giving space and voice to evil = endorsing evil.
I read such voices--as I read those of similarly polarized communities on the right--because they represent a non-BA viewpoint. Dipping into that Schmittian friend/enemy world, taking its measure, listening to its point of view, keeps me realistic. It puts the anti-polarization ethos of BA into perspective, makes it stand up and defend itself. It keeps Better Angels from becoming (for me, at least) the same kind of echo-chamber of unquestioned/unquestionable assumptions that BA would accuse LGM of being.
It also lets me flesh out my own defenses of BA-ish initiatives in the face of LGM-like criticisms. "How do you live in the real world," asked some posters, "if roughly half the country is evil?" I think that's a really, really good question. The responses from the LGM community that didn't instantly dismiss that question ran something along the lines of "So? There are plenty of times in US history where half or more of the citizenry were evil. You can still do politics."
I'm struck by that willingness to accept that half or more of the populace is--not just misguided or ignorant or duped, but--plain evil. They can't be reasoned with; compromise with them is betrayal. They need to be ostracized, expelled, made to disappear (de facto or de jure). And to be clear, right-wing communities manifest exactly the same polarized mechanisms. The world isn't just full of fools; it's full of demons. You gotta live your best life among the devils.
I see a slippage between "they did a bad thing" and "they are a bad thing" common to just about any in-group's assessments of out-group actions. Ravelry, as some commenters (and even Campos himself) note, didn't ban Trump supporters; they banned comments supporting Trump. But the title of the post mentions banning supporters; the comments mainly run in that vein. In practice, the hating the action/hating the actor distinction proves about as fragile as conservative evangelicals' "hate the sin/love the sinner" rhetoric. Declare your hatred of homosexual acts often and vehemently enough, and all anyone sees is how much you hate homosexuals.
A lot of the distinction between BA and LGM (and I'm of course oversimplifying this comparison for now) boils down to the ethics of compartmentalization. BA relies on the capability and morality of compartmentalizing fundamental disagreements. Pro-lifers and Pro-choicers (BA would say) can and should work, live, socialize, and flourish together even as they diverge sharply on a life-or-death issue. Other communities balk at that notion. Some political positions (they would say) have all-or-nothing consequences. Some positions can be, must be, litmus tests for possible/ethical coexistence.
Tricky.
More tomorrow,
JF
And life continues beyond the anti-polarizing heterotopia of the Better Angels Convention.
Case in point: at the airport, I checked one of my standard progressive/lefty blogs, Lawyers, Guns & Money. In a post titled "Banning Trump Supporters from Non-Political Sites," LGM regular Paul Campos shared a link from knitting/crocheting site Ravelry--specifically its new policy banning posts supporting President Trump or his administration. "We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy," reads the Ravelry statement. "Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy."
Campos offers his own commentary:
... Supporting Trump makes you a white supremacist, whether you think of yourself as one or not. Trumpism is an authoritarian ethno-nationalist movement, whose core principle is that America is and should be a country run by and for white people.
Therefore bans of this sort are not only defensible, but affirmatively good. White supremacy should be opposed in every legal way possible, which means Trumpism should be opposed in every legal way possible.
Social ostracism in general is a powerful tool, and should be employed against Trump supporters at every opportunity. This includes telling Trump supporters on non-political websites such as these that their political affiliation is beyond the pale, and needs to be hidden if they wish to socialize with people who oppose white supremacy.The LGM commentariat mostly aligned with Campos, cheering Ravelry's decision (and decisions of other websites/forums). The support runs the gamut from "Yeah, fuck those fuckers!" and "I hope they all get stabbed with knitting needles" to "Social ostracism is the best these supremacists can expect" and "It's good that sites are making it harder for open white supremacists to spew their bile." (NB: Throughout this post I paraphrase the gist of comments rather than linking to or quoting them. I'm not interested in engaging specific commenters here, or else I'd have commented on LGM myself. I'm only working through my thoughts on some of the general positions raised there. For the conversation itself, see LGM post.)
Most commenters also endorsed the equation between "supporting Trump" and "white supremacist." Posters diverged slightly about whether this judgment includes "people who voted for Trump in 2016 (because he was the Republican)" or just "people who still support Trump." For some commenters, there's a little leeway given; for others, any Trump voter deserves to be "up against the wall."
A few posters ventured questions or disagreements with Campos. "Would we be OK with a union or other organization doing this? What are the limits?" Such questions were interpreted as trollish derails rather than good-faith inquiries. (This interpretation could be right. Comments are usually judged and responded to by folk who know the asker's history; sometimes that history suggests such inquirers are just sealioning).
One poster contested the Trump voter=white supremacist argument, insisting they know lots of Trump voters who aren't. That view cut no mustard with the LGM community. Actions speak louder than words, went the criticism. You can say you're not really white supremacist (write the commenters), but when you support a guy who strikes ethno-nationalist chords in his rhetoric regularly and whose policies demonize and immiserate people of color, well...?
In other words, at the airport I found myself (virtually) immersed in just the kind of single-color, polarized space Better Angels tries to disrupt. The LGM community, by and large, would likely be among those who would respond to news about BA with disgust: giving space and voice to evil = endorsing evil.
I read such voices--as I read those of similarly polarized communities on the right--because they represent a non-BA viewpoint. Dipping into that Schmittian friend/enemy world, taking its measure, listening to its point of view, keeps me realistic. It puts the anti-polarization ethos of BA into perspective, makes it stand up and defend itself. It keeps Better Angels from becoming (for me, at least) the same kind of echo-chamber of unquestioned/unquestionable assumptions that BA would accuse LGM of being.
It also lets me flesh out my own defenses of BA-ish initiatives in the face of LGM-like criticisms. "How do you live in the real world," asked some posters, "if roughly half the country is evil?" I think that's a really, really good question. The responses from the LGM community that didn't instantly dismiss that question ran something along the lines of "So? There are plenty of times in US history where half or more of the citizenry were evil. You can still do politics."
I'm struck by that willingness to accept that half or more of the populace is--not just misguided or ignorant or duped, but--plain evil. They can't be reasoned with; compromise with them is betrayal. They need to be ostracized, expelled, made to disappear (de facto or de jure). And to be clear, right-wing communities manifest exactly the same polarized mechanisms. The world isn't just full of fools; it's full of demons. You gotta live your best life among the devils.
I see a slippage between "they did a bad thing" and "they are a bad thing" common to just about any in-group's assessments of out-group actions. Ravelry, as some commenters (and even Campos himself) note, didn't ban Trump supporters; they banned comments supporting Trump. But the title of the post mentions banning supporters; the comments mainly run in that vein. In practice, the hating the action/hating the actor distinction proves about as fragile as conservative evangelicals' "hate the sin/love the sinner" rhetoric. Declare your hatred of homosexual acts often and vehemently enough, and all anyone sees is how much you hate homosexuals.
A lot of the distinction between BA and LGM (and I'm of course oversimplifying this comparison for now) boils down to the ethics of compartmentalization. BA relies on the capability and morality of compartmentalizing fundamental disagreements. Pro-lifers and Pro-choicers (BA would say) can and should work, live, socialize, and flourish together even as they diverge sharply on a life-or-death issue. Other communities balk at that notion. Some political positions (they would say) have all-or-nothing consequences. Some positions can be, must be, litmus tests for possible/ethical coexistence.
Tricky.
More tomorrow,
JF
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Better Angels Convention 2019 Day 4
So. Cancelled flight=stuck at a St. Louis Hotel. It's not bad, really. I miss home and Alan.
But--a quick anecdote about Better Angels. After the last session ("Depolarizing Within" with Bill Doherty--I'll need to process that later), I got an Uber for my red friend and three other folk. We spent the ride telling the driver about Better Angels.
"We're trying to get liberals and conservatives to talk to each other respectfully," one BA (a red, I believe) explained.
"Good luck," laughed our driver. We described some of the typical BA activities. The driver then shared some of his own political frustrations: kids aren't being taught critical thinking, teachers are imposing views, etc. It was strongly red state in tone, but it was not the standard repartee one expects from an Uber driver. I doubt it's usual for him to be so frank (I could be wrong); he even apologized for going on to us. He had gathered, however, that it was safe for him to share, that we'd not judge him.
Cool as that was, the anecdote I mean really starts when we get to the airport, drop everyone off--and I realize I've left my computer bag (and my computer and tablet) on the curb at Washington U. Amazingly, I felt no panic--at least not the kind of panic that would consume me in just about any other context I'd left my computer somewhere. I was embarrassed, frustrated with myself. (There's always the old This is it. The rot. The early onset dementia... voice.) But I felt a bit like I had left my computer with my family. Such a hokey thing to say, that. But I felt sure that someone had my back.
The Uber driver was kind enough to take me back to the U. On the way back, I got a call. Someone had found my bag and put it somewhere safe. I fetched it. The Uber driver (so nice!) took me back to the airport (I added a huge tip). Another BA person called to make sure I'd gotten the bag.
I don't know that I've ever felt such trust at a conference.
And I'm very glad I got my computer back, lol.
More tomorrow
JF
But--a quick anecdote about Better Angels. After the last session ("Depolarizing Within" with Bill Doherty--I'll need to process that later), I got an Uber for my red friend and three other folk. We spent the ride telling the driver about Better Angels.
"We're trying to get liberals and conservatives to talk to each other respectfully," one BA (a red, I believe) explained.
"Good luck," laughed our driver. We described some of the typical BA activities. The driver then shared some of his own political frustrations: kids aren't being taught critical thinking, teachers are imposing views, etc. It was strongly red state in tone, but it was not the standard repartee one expects from an Uber driver. I doubt it's usual for him to be so frank (I could be wrong); he even apologized for going on to us. He had gathered, however, that it was safe for him to share, that we'd not judge him.
Cool as that was, the anecdote I mean really starts when we get to the airport, drop everyone off--and I realize I've left my computer bag (and my computer and tablet) on the curb at Washington U. Amazingly, I felt no panic--at least not the kind of panic that would consume me in just about any other context I'd left my computer somewhere. I was embarrassed, frustrated with myself. (There's always the old This is it. The rot. The early onset dementia... voice.) But I felt a bit like I had left my computer with my family. Such a hokey thing to say, that. But I felt sure that someone had my back.
The Uber driver was kind enough to take me back to the U. On the way back, I got a call. Someone had found my bag and put it somewhere safe. I fetched it. The Uber driver (so nice!) took me back to the airport (I added a huge tip). Another BA person called to make sure I'd gotten the bag.
I don't know that I've ever felt such trust at a conference.
And I'm very glad I got my computer back, lol.
More tomorrow
JF
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Better Angels Convention 2019 Day 3
Another long but productive day.
So, everyone attending Better Angels (the "delegates" from each state) have name badges with lanyards. Each lanyard is color-coded to the delegate's ideological side--red or blue. Various activities--breakout groups, planning sessions, feedback times--all make use of the identifiers to help us break out of echo chambers. "Find someone of the opposite color" is a common instruction.
Such IDs make every casual interaction charged with significance. You're either reaching across the aisle or talking with a coalition. There's meet and greets involved in every conference. But here we're encouraged (not even explicitly) to be extra outgoing, make ourselves known to strangers, and build some connections. You'll see plenty of blues hanging with blues and reds hanging with reds. But the red-blue interactions are really what the organizers want.
I made friends with a red from Alabama (I'll keep his exact info mum for now). We hung out a lot. As we did so, we found ourselves framed by various BA photographers on the lookout for cross-party pals. Eventually we got pulled aside for an interview. I'll post that if/when it's made public.
I've found the red/blue lanyards useful in the inevitable "so what do you do as a theatre prof with Better Angels?" question. I say I read the event through a performance lens, pointing out how so much of BA's Convention involves us performing--or suppressing our performances of--our political leanings. We perform them via lanyards and speeches. But, in fishbowl exercises and in listening more generally, we all consent to the emotional labor of schooling our expressions and responses. Thus the common complaint in red-blue workshops: it's so hard not to roll your eyes!
Such emotional labor is, like civility itself, a vexed enterprise. Marginalized groups usually are made to perform more such labor than privileged groups, so asking this labor of them is no small thing. Most everyone seems up for the challenge, though. I've met and had rewarding conversations with so many people.
Do rewarding conversations solve polarization? Of course not, not alone. But they are something other than affective polarization. They establish a modest little utopian space of realized moral imagination. That it can happen--at least on small scales--disrupts the idea that polarization is inevitable.
More tomorrow,
JF
So, everyone attending Better Angels (the "delegates" from each state) have name badges with lanyards. Each lanyard is color-coded to the delegate's ideological side--red or blue. Various activities--breakout groups, planning sessions, feedback times--all make use of the identifiers to help us break out of echo chambers. "Find someone of the opposite color" is a common instruction.
Such IDs make every casual interaction charged with significance. You're either reaching across the aisle or talking with a coalition. There's meet and greets involved in every conference. But here we're encouraged (not even explicitly) to be extra outgoing, make ourselves known to strangers, and build some connections. You'll see plenty of blues hanging with blues and reds hanging with reds. But the red-blue interactions are really what the organizers want.
I made friends with a red from Alabama (I'll keep his exact info mum for now). We hung out a lot. As we did so, we found ourselves framed by various BA photographers on the lookout for cross-party pals. Eventually we got pulled aside for an interview. I'll post that if/when it's made public.
I've found the red/blue lanyards useful in the inevitable "so what do you do as a theatre prof with Better Angels?" question. I say I read the event through a performance lens, pointing out how so much of BA's Convention involves us performing--or suppressing our performances of--our political leanings. We perform them via lanyards and speeches. But, in fishbowl exercises and in listening more generally, we all consent to the emotional labor of schooling our expressions and responses. Thus the common complaint in red-blue workshops: it's so hard not to roll your eyes!
Such emotional labor is, like civility itself, a vexed enterprise. Marginalized groups usually are made to perform more such labor than privileged groups, so asking this labor of them is no small thing. Most everyone seems up for the challenge, though. I've met and had rewarding conversations with so many people.
Do rewarding conversations solve polarization? Of course not, not alone. But they are something other than affective polarization. They establish a modest little utopian space of realized moral imagination. That it can happen--at least on small scales--disrupts the idea that polarization is inevitable.
More tomorrow,
JF
Better Angels Convention 2019 Day 2
Wuff. Full, intense day. Happily, I found a reliable source of latte-nated caffeine, so it was endurable.
Some quick take-aways:
I went to a morning session about abortion mainly to see if and how this often intractable issue might strain the civility mechanisms Better Angels prides itself on. It did, though the session was for most people still productive. One of the most pronounced tensions came from within the red group. Most of the reds were by their own account nuanced in their views of abortion (though all still seemed to the right of any of the blues). One red, though, carved out a position far more conservative than any of the others.
Basically: it was "clear" (they said) that the fertilized egg was fully human, both biologically human and a civic person possessing inalienable rights. Not recognizing that, in this person's view, threatened everyone's standing as rights-bearing citizens. Arguments for the welfare of whoever was pregnant with this full person, they said, boiled down to mere inconveniences. We asked more from young men drafted for Vietnam, this person said. Surely women can give their all. The person making this argument was tired and frustrated, simply fed up with the fact that people were still talking about this as if it were questionable.
Aside from my alarm at the Handmaid's Tale kind of vision this conjured (drafting women into forced childbirth), I came out of the session reflecting that Better Angels faces an odd tension. For some, BA is great because it enables debate on these difficult issues that require debate. For others, BA is offensive because it entertains debate on these black-and-white, morally clear issues that ought never be debated.
I also went to a training for Better Angels Debate Chairs. I'll write more about that form another time. It's pretty different from a lot of the other BA curricula.
The final event was a discussion between Ray Warrick, Cincinnati Tea Party leader, and Hawk Newsome, president of Black Lives Matter New York. This event--Newsome particularly--strained BA's civility engine. I don't mean that Newsome was uncivil; he was charming and charismatic even when delivering hard-hitting arguments. I mean that he presented some unvarnished accounts of the murders of unarmed black men like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Philando Castile. They were murdered, he said, and the people responsible (police officers in Garner's and Castile's cases) got off. "This," he said, "is just Truth." He spoke out of anger and impatience at White America's standing to one side while black people were being oppressed.
He was powerful, convincing. Even Warrick averred that the murders had happened. "It's undeniable."
Other truths Newsome delivered: Christopher Columbus perpetrated genocide. The US has concentration camps at the border. Human-caused climate change threatens the planet. These, too, he said, are simply undeniable. And, his biggest theme: white oppression of black Americans exists and persists.
He's right, of course. That's obvious to me. But most or all of those statements fall into the category of utterances that Better Angels moderators are taught to avoid for fear of alienating reds. Don't weigh in on whether climate change is caused by humans, they tell us. It's just not going to get you anywhere useful with your red participants. I think that's true enough.
But, to live in Newsome's world, to be an ally with him and BLM, affirming the truths he uttered constitutes the entry-ticket price. You can't fight systemic racism if you deny racism exists, or if you conveniently define racism as something only isolated bigots practice.
What do you do when the necessary truth alienates half the people you're working with?
More tomorrow,
JF
Some quick take-aways:
I went to a morning session about abortion mainly to see if and how this often intractable issue might strain the civility mechanisms Better Angels prides itself on. It did, though the session was for most people still productive. One of the most pronounced tensions came from within the red group. Most of the reds were by their own account nuanced in their views of abortion (though all still seemed to the right of any of the blues). One red, though, carved out a position far more conservative than any of the others.
Basically: it was "clear" (they said) that the fertilized egg was fully human, both biologically human and a civic person possessing inalienable rights. Not recognizing that, in this person's view, threatened everyone's standing as rights-bearing citizens. Arguments for the welfare of whoever was pregnant with this full person, they said, boiled down to mere inconveniences. We asked more from young men drafted for Vietnam, this person said. Surely women can give their all. The person making this argument was tired and frustrated, simply fed up with the fact that people were still talking about this as if it were questionable.
Aside from my alarm at the Handmaid's Tale kind of vision this conjured (drafting women into forced childbirth), I came out of the session reflecting that Better Angels faces an odd tension. For some, BA is great because it enables debate on these difficult issues that require debate. For others, BA is offensive because it entertains debate on these black-and-white, morally clear issues that ought never be debated.
I also went to a training for Better Angels Debate Chairs. I'll write more about that form another time. It's pretty different from a lot of the other BA curricula.
The final event was a discussion between Ray Warrick, Cincinnati Tea Party leader, and Hawk Newsome, president of Black Lives Matter New York. This event--Newsome particularly--strained BA's civility engine. I don't mean that Newsome was uncivil; he was charming and charismatic even when delivering hard-hitting arguments. I mean that he presented some unvarnished accounts of the murders of unarmed black men like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Philando Castile. They were murdered, he said, and the people responsible (police officers in Garner's and Castile's cases) got off. "This," he said, "is just Truth." He spoke out of anger and impatience at White America's standing to one side while black people were being oppressed.
He was powerful, convincing. Even Warrick averred that the murders had happened. "It's undeniable."
Other truths Newsome delivered: Christopher Columbus perpetrated genocide. The US has concentration camps at the border. Human-caused climate change threatens the planet. These, too, he said, are simply undeniable. And, his biggest theme: white oppression of black Americans exists and persists.
He's right, of course. That's obvious to me. But most or all of those statements fall into the category of utterances that Better Angels moderators are taught to avoid for fear of alienating reds. Don't weigh in on whether climate change is caused by humans, they tell us. It's just not going to get you anywhere useful with your red participants. I think that's true enough.
But, to live in Newsome's world, to be an ally with him and BLM, affirming the truths he uttered constitutes the entry-ticket price. You can't fight systemic racism if you deny racism exists, or if you conveniently define racism as something only isolated bigots practice.
What do you do when the necessary truth alienates half the people you're working with?
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, June 20, 2019
Better Angels Convention 2019 Day 1
I'm in St. Louis--in a dorm room at Washington U--the night after the first half-day of the Better Angels 2019 Convention.
Better Angels is a national, secular group led by David Blankenhorn aiming at depolarizing America. They specialize in facilitated interactions between "reds" and "blues." The "red-blue workshop," their signature activity, consists of a day of structured activities. Reds and blues (about 7 each), led by two moderators, go through a series of exercises designed to get them honest, get them thinking self-critically, get them listening to their ideological opposites, and finally to get them talking to the other side.
I've been researching Better Angels for about a year. Last fall I went to several red-blue workshops in different parts of the country as an observer. Earlier this year I completed training to become a moderator myself (I have yet to moderate a workshop).
When I tell people about Better Angels, I get one of two reactions. Either the enterprise seems self-evidently praiseworthy or transparently unethical.
The praisers tend to align with Better Angels' own rationale for acting. Political polarization is tearing America apart. BA can help make these disagreements less toxic, more productive. The goal, BA insists, is not finding a "happy medium" where disagreement evaporates, nor is it embracing some stress-free nirvana of puppies and rainbows. Rather, as Blankenhorn has clarified, the goals involve "accurate disagreement" (making sure the disagreements aren't based on false stereotypes) and face-to-face (rather than distanced/digitized) interactions that make dehumanization difficult. Those who find BA laudable affirm these goals.
The condemners hear a bit about BA and read a glaring subtext: can't you be a little less angry? And usually, the "you" equals some kind of marginalized or structurally oppressed group. Can't you be less angry, black people? Women? LGBTQ folk? Immigrants? Native Americans? and so forth. Such movements have to do work overtime simply to make their plights known and noticed by the powers that be. To get there, they have to generate tons of energy, passion, and outrage/anger. No one cares about a problem no one's upset about.
Yet the majority's initial reaction to criticism/outrage tends to take the form of anger at the outrage--that is, anger at those saying stop killing/hurting/exploiting/mistreating us--rather than attention to the cause of the outrage. This shoot-the-messenger mentality often fuels a kind of patronizing call to civility: Maybe people would listen to you more if you wouldn't yell or block highways or sit at lunch counters or have die-ins? Or even: I wonder if it isn't your attitude that's creating a lot of the problems for you rather than this supposed mistreatment you keep screeching about?
Mind you, I don't think BA endorses anything of the sort. But, if you're a front-line activist for a marginalized group who spends twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours fighting the majority's apathy or skepticism about the life-and-death struggle you're going through... Well, a call to love thine enemy and approach each other on equal grounds can seem like the majority's same old willful ignorance repackaged and rebranded as the solution for what ails America today.
It's hard to care about depolarization, in other words, when unarmed black men are being shot/mass incarcerated, when children are taken from their parents at the border, when the planet is burning, etc.
The hope of Better Angels is that it can get people to value a kind of civility alongside their political convictions. The audacity of Better Angels is that it asks people to value a kind of civility alongside their political convictions.
More tomorrow
JF
Better Angels is a national, secular group led by David Blankenhorn aiming at depolarizing America. They specialize in facilitated interactions between "reds" and "blues." The "red-blue workshop," their signature activity, consists of a day of structured activities. Reds and blues (about 7 each), led by two moderators, go through a series of exercises designed to get them honest, get them thinking self-critically, get them listening to their ideological opposites, and finally to get them talking to the other side.
I've been researching Better Angels for about a year. Last fall I went to several red-blue workshops in different parts of the country as an observer. Earlier this year I completed training to become a moderator myself (I have yet to moderate a workshop).
When I tell people about Better Angels, I get one of two reactions. Either the enterprise seems self-evidently praiseworthy or transparently unethical.
The praisers tend to align with Better Angels' own rationale for acting. Political polarization is tearing America apart. BA can help make these disagreements less toxic, more productive. The goal, BA insists, is not finding a "happy medium" where disagreement evaporates, nor is it embracing some stress-free nirvana of puppies and rainbows. Rather, as Blankenhorn has clarified, the goals involve "accurate disagreement" (making sure the disagreements aren't based on false stereotypes) and face-to-face (rather than distanced/digitized) interactions that make dehumanization difficult. Those who find BA laudable affirm these goals.
The condemners hear a bit about BA and read a glaring subtext: can't you be a little less angry? And usually, the "you" equals some kind of marginalized or structurally oppressed group. Can't you be less angry, black people? Women? LGBTQ folk? Immigrants? Native Americans? and so forth. Such movements have to do work overtime simply to make their plights known and noticed by the powers that be. To get there, they have to generate tons of energy, passion, and outrage/anger. No one cares about a problem no one's upset about.
Yet the majority's initial reaction to criticism/outrage tends to take the form of anger at the outrage--that is, anger at those saying stop killing/hurting/exploiting/mistreating us--rather than attention to the cause of the outrage. This shoot-the-messenger mentality often fuels a kind of patronizing call to civility: Maybe people would listen to you more if you wouldn't yell or block highways or sit at lunch counters or have die-ins? Or even: I wonder if it isn't your attitude that's creating a lot of the problems for you rather than this supposed mistreatment you keep screeching about?
Mind you, I don't think BA endorses anything of the sort. But, if you're a front-line activist for a marginalized group who spends twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours fighting the majority's apathy or skepticism about the life-and-death struggle you're going through... Well, a call to love thine enemy and approach each other on equal grounds can seem like the majority's same old willful ignorance repackaged and rebranded as the solution for what ails America today.
It's hard to care about depolarization, in other words, when unarmed black men are being shot/mass incarcerated, when children are taken from their parents at the border, when the planet is burning, etc.
The hope of Better Angels is that it can get people to value a kind of civility alongside their political convictions. The audacity of Better Angels is that it asks people to value a kind of civility alongside their political convictions.
More tomorrow
JF
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Battles, Wars, and the Kingdom of God
A friend of mine sent me a blog post today from a group called Mainstream UMC, a coalition of Methodists invested (pre-February 2019) in passing the One Church Plan and now (post-February 2019) in exploring What's Next for centrists and progressives in the UMC.
In the post, "A Texas-Sized Wakeup Call for the WCA," the the group's Exec Director Mark Holland cheers the election of mostly (68%) centrist/progressive General Conference 2020 delegates in Texas's four annual conferences. "Thanks to the Wesleyan Covenant Association for freely publishing their slate of preferred candidates in most conferences," he writes, "so we can see how they did: they…were…crushed.: These conferences also elected majority centrist/progressive delegates for the Jurisdictional Conference in 2020. With those results, the South Central Jurisdiction (eight states, twelve annual conferences) looks like it will be at least 2/3 stocked with people who oppose the Traditional Plan. The Rev. Dr. Holland is understandably pleased with this result, noting the disappointed reactions of WCA leaders in some ostensibly super-conservative Texas conferences.
I'm pleased about these results, too. I've heard indications that other US Jurisdictions have mirrored this trend (with the possible exception of the Southeastern Jurisdiction). It's heartening to see how the odiousness of the Traditional Plan has prodded centrists and progressives into (re)action. Electoral and legislative strategizing on our part helped translate that reaction into results.
But I'm wary of cheering too much for three reasons.
First, although I don't think these results are false or meaningless, they're still only the latest news in a long-term, ongoing struggle. Politics--especially democratic politics--change constantly. Instability defines the game. Results from one struggle get overturned in the next one. That's the scary thing about ostensibly immutable, eternal values in democratic systems: they're only as stable as the support they're given from vote to vote, legislature to legislature.
As Stanley Fish once quipped, democracies all have a self-destruct button installed in them in that they can always vote to un-democratize themselves. Dystopian worlds--or, less melodramatically, schisms--always lie only a couple of votes away. We voted in the Traditional Plan. We can vote it out (conceivably), but nothing really stops us from voting it or something worse right back in again. So the killjoy in me responds to electoral good news with a bit of, "That's great! What's next, though?"
Second, I note that our victories here aren't all that sweeping. Progressives and centrists like me were quick to point out how the margin of victory for the Traditional Plan was, by any standard, pretty thin (55%ish). As William Willimon noted in the wake of St. Louis, "Every pastor knows not to go into a building program with less than 60 percent of the vote." When 40% of your membership is dead-set against the plan you adopted, you have to wonder about the viability of the plan. I'm not sure that advice changes with the 70% progressive/centrist victory in Texas.
I'm curious about the extent to which splits like this in Methodism occur between churches (70% of churches are anti-Traditional Plan, 30% are pro-) or within congregations, between parishioners. Are we sorted into red churches versus blue churches, in other words, or or are we more a denomination of purple churches? Is it more the case that 3 in 10 churches in the US want the Traditional Plan or 3 in 10 members? Is resistance to the Traditional Plan proof that we're mostly blue or that we're mostly, stubbornly purple? (Perhaps these results indicate that the Traditional Plan foists an all-or-nothing redness on purple congregations that they viewed as a step too far?) These are vital questions, I think, and not ones that surface results from Annual Conference votes necessarily illuminate.
Finally, cheering too triumphantly (and I'm not suggesting that Rev. Holland does this) can shift our attention away from our ultimate concerns as Christians. Research on polarization suggests that humans fall very easily into a kind of "teamism" in which we get more invested in winning for our team (or, really, defeating the other team) than in realizing our goals. At the UMC Next meeting, many of my colleagues from other Annual Conferences expressed their weariness at constantly having to fight for their dignity and standing in the Methodist Church. Someone at my table (from New Jersey, I think?) mentioned that the struggle isn't merely tiring but addictive. The danger, she said, is that we come to view fighting and struggle as a permanent posture rather than as one means to get to who and where and what we want to be.
What we want to be, of course, is the kingdom of God, the beloved community. When the world sees our community, Jesus warns us, it should say, See how they love one another! "By this shall all know that you are my disciples..." My pastor father used to tell his parishioners that this was the most dangerous verse in scripture. Christ grants to the world--to non-Christians--the ability to measure our discipleship. They get to hold us accountable, to judge whether we're practicing what we preach. And the ruler they use to measure us isn't our good intentions. It's not our rationalizations for how loving we're really being no matter what the appearance. The criteria rests in how they see us engaging with each other.
Whenever I find myself cheering a win on "our side" or lamenting a win for "their side," I have to pause for a little Christlike killjoy reality check. What does the world see when I cheer or jeer the results of our latest struggle? Where is the Kingdom of God in how I respond to victory or defeat? Where is Christ manifested in the ways I talk about my siblings in the Wesleyan Covenant Association?
Don't get me wrong. I think my "side" does move us closer to the Kingdom. I think the world is already judging Christians harshly for how shoddily we treat LGBTQ+ people (to say nothing of how it treats other marginalized groups). We must repair that witness. I'm by no means saying this struggle is unimportant or that we can simply cease arguing, agree to disagree, etc.
But how I live out this struggle matters: how I strategize, how I describe the "other side,"--and how I cheer.
More tomorrow,
JF
In the post, "A Texas-Sized Wakeup Call for the WCA," the the group's Exec Director Mark Holland cheers the election of mostly (68%) centrist/progressive General Conference 2020 delegates in Texas's four annual conferences. "Thanks to the Wesleyan Covenant Association for freely publishing their slate of preferred candidates in most conferences," he writes, "so we can see how they did: they…were…crushed.: These conferences also elected majority centrist/progressive delegates for the Jurisdictional Conference in 2020. With those results, the South Central Jurisdiction (eight states, twelve annual conferences) looks like it will be at least 2/3 stocked with people who oppose the Traditional Plan. The Rev. Dr. Holland is understandably pleased with this result, noting the disappointed reactions of WCA leaders in some ostensibly super-conservative Texas conferences.
I'm pleased about these results, too. I've heard indications that other US Jurisdictions have mirrored this trend (with the possible exception of the Southeastern Jurisdiction). It's heartening to see how the odiousness of the Traditional Plan has prodded centrists and progressives into (re)action. Electoral and legislative strategizing on our part helped translate that reaction into results.
But I'm wary of cheering too much for three reasons.
First, although I don't think these results are false or meaningless, they're still only the latest news in a long-term, ongoing struggle. Politics--especially democratic politics--change constantly. Instability defines the game. Results from one struggle get overturned in the next one. That's the scary thing about ostensibly immutable, eternal values in democratic systems: they're only as stable as the support they're given from vote to vote, legislature to legislature.
As Stanley Fish once quipped, democracies all have a self-destruct button installed in them in that they can always vote to un-democratize themselves. Dystopian worlds--or, less melodramatically, schisms--always lie only a couple of votes away. We voted in the Traditional Plan. We can vote it out (conceivably), but nothing really stops us from voting it or something worse right back in again. So the killjoy in me responds to electoral good news with a bit of, "That's great! What's next, though?"
Second, I note that our victories here aren't all that sweeping. Progressives and centrists like me were quick to point out how the margin of victory for the Traditional Plan was, by any standard, pretty thin (55%ish). As William Willimon noted in the wake of St. Louis, "Every pastor knows not to go into a building program with less than 60 percent of the vote." When 40% of your membership is dead-set against the plan you adopted, you have to wonder about the viability of the plan. I'm not sure that advice changes with the 70% progressive/centrist victory in Texas.
I'm curious about the extent to which splits like this in Methodism occur between churches (70% of churches are anti-Traditional Plan, 30% are pro-) or within congregations, between parishioners. Are we sorted into red churches versus blue churches, in other words, or or are we more a denomination of purple churches? Is it more the case that 3 in 10 churches in the US want the Traditional Plan or 3 in 10 members? Is resistance to the Traditional Plan proof that we're mostly blue or that we're mostly, stubbornly purple? (Perhaps these results indicate that the Traditional Plan foists an all-or-nothing redness on purple congregations that they viewed as a step too far?) These are vital questions, I think, and not ones that surface results from Annual Conference votes necessarily illuminate.
Finally, cheering too triumphantly (and I'm not suggesting that Rev. Holland does this) can shift our attention away from our ultimate concerns as Christians. Research on polarization suggests that humans fall very easily into a kind of "teamism" in which we get more invested in winning for our team (or, really, defeating the other team) than in realizing our goals. At the UMC Next meeting, many of my colleagues from other Annual Conferences expressed their weariness at constantly having to fight for their dignity and standing in the Methodist Church. Someone at my table (from New Jersey, I think?) mentioned that the struggle isn't merely tiring but addictive. The danger, she said, is that we come to view fighting and struggle as a permanent posture rather than as one means to get to who and where and what we want to be.
What we want to be, of course, is the kingdom of God, the beloved community. When the world sees our community, Jesus warns us, it should say, See how they love one another! "By this shall all know that you are my disciples..." My pastor father used to tell his parishioners that this was the most dangerous verse in scripture. Christ grants to the world--to non-Christians--the ability to measure our discipleship. They get to hold us accountable, to judge whether we're practicing what we preach. And the ruler they use to measure us isn't our good intentions. It's not our rationalizations for how loving we're really being no matter what the appearance. The criteria rests in how they see us engaging with each other.
Whenever I find myself cheering a win on "our side" or lamenting a win for "their side," I have to pause for a little Christlike killjoy reality check. What does the world see when I cheer or jeer the results of our latest struggle? Where is the Kingdom of God in how I respond to victory or defeat? Where is Christ manifested in the ways I talk about my siblings in the Wesleyan Covenant Association?
Don't get me wrong. I think my "side" does move us closer to the Kingdom. I think the world is already judging Christians harshly for how shoddily we treat LGBTQ+ people (to say nothing of how it treats other marginalized groups). We must repair that witness. I'm by no means saying this struggle is unimportant or that we can simply cease arguing, agree to disagree, etc.
But how I live out this struggle matters: how I strategize, how I describe the "other side,"--and how I cheer.
More tomorrow,
JF
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Progressive Coalitions and Facts of Life Strategies.
One takeaway from the otherwise disastrous (for LGBTQ+-inclusive folk) 2019 General Conference of the United Methodist Church: the anti-inclusion folk just plain out-strategized us progressives.
I'll leave to one side the possibility of improper shenanigans that may have helped traditionalists win the day. I have Thoughts and Feelings about that matter, but I'll save those for another day.
Even apart from any illegalities, though, it's undeniable that the traditionalists, mainly through mechanisms like the Wesley Covenant Association (WCA) or Good News do politics very, very well. They cultivate delegates, finesse legislation, and organize voting with a great deal of foresight and tactical sophistication. They think about who will speak for what motion/measure, what identity or rhetoric would prove most persuasive. They rank and promote slates of candidates and causes. They know how to discipline their coalition into adopting a following a strategy from above.
And it gets them results.
Now, progressives in the UMC such as the Reconciling Ministries Network strategize as well, as we in Louisiana did last week at Annual Conference. But left-leaning organizations generally prefer a "let 1,000 flowers bloom" approach. We value diversity and try (imperfectly) to avoid silencing or marginalizing minority perspectives. We encourage speaking and listening, even and especially when what we have to listen to involves criticism from below or from the margins.
Our diversity of backgrounds, identities, views, and causes makes the effort to organize around a single expression, a single strategy, painfully difficult. Who gets to speak right now? Who has to stay silent for that speaker to be heard? How can we translate the complexity of who we are into messages that compete well in an online attention economy? This is tricky and uncomfortable. We're hyper-aware of how focusing efforts for gay and lesbian inclusion, for example, can leave other sexualities (like bisexuality) conveniently on the back burner.
Issues get even more complicated the more intersectional we try to be. An ideal Church responds equally to racism, sexism, trans*phobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, and all the rest. But in reality it often feels like addressing one problem means sidelining concerns about others. The conversation veers awkwardly in to a matter of immediate priorities--which cause do we unify around right now?
And when each of these causes is a life-or-death matter, when each has a long history of being ignored or sidelined, when each is full of veteran activists and survivors who are just plain sick and tired of being put off--well, it's just a nasty, unhappy game where even winning can feel like defeat.
I'd like to think another way is possible, that we can find ways of celebrating partial victories (Louisiana Methodists elected a slate of delegates that comes close to matching state gender and racial demographics! We elected our first openly gay delegate!) even as we acknowledge exclusions and shortcomings (Methodists have yet to broach the subject of trans* people in Louisiana. Talking about systemic racism in any real way--as it pertains to Louisiana--seems verboten. And we're still split on questions of basic LGBTQ+ rights).
Call it a facts-of-life strategy: you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have...a survival ethos for long-term progressive activism? (Not just progressives; non-progressive movements practice something similar.) Certain questions then get critical: how much good do you need to keep going? How much bad can you take, and for how long?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)