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Politics

2 May 2023

7 min read

What’s up with activism and what it is missing

As local elections occur in England, Councillor Elizabeth Wainwright is stepping down. Finding herself increasingly distant from activism, she asks if there’s any room for love.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A protestor hold a megaphone up at a demonstration outside a building

A 2017 protest against London Fashion Week.

During my term as a Green Party District Councillor, I was once publicly congratulated by the local Extinction Rebellion (XR) group for taking on the new role of ‘Cabinet Member for Climate Change’.

A week or two later, I was questioned at a Council meeting about whether I was part of XR – opposition Councillors wanted to know if I’d be using their “extreme rent-a-mob tactics” in my role.

The local XR group are kind and knowledgeable and are making things happen. But to my Council questioners, this seemed to matter less than the fear of the ‘other’ – in this case, what they perceived to be a mob of environmental extremists that might do harm to the Council. It works both ways – I’ve also seen activist groups paint all elected Councillors with the same brush, assuming none of us care. It feels like there is little grace and a lot of judgement going round.

I’ve been curious why local non-activist residents and Councillors might not be keen to engage with activist groups (the term ‘activist’ is a broad one, and this article isn’t long enough to analyse it, but activist groups are generally engaged in activities to bring about social, environmental or political change).

Some tell me that they’re put off by what they perceive to be self-righteousness, judgement, anger, and the ‘hippy’ identity. I am put off by some of these things too, however much the media might falsely amplify these qualities – but still, perceptions close down relationship and possibility, and this is one of the things that keeps me at arm’s length from the ‘activist’ label, particularly when it gets caught up in group identity and expectation too. At a time when we need to see change in so many things – the state of the environment, politics, social equality – I’ve been wondering why I feel a distance from the ‘activist’ identity.

As well as getting elected, I’ve taken part in marches, signed petitions, joined social and environmental action groups. I want to walk alongside others who are doing something about the things that matter. But I have struggled to find the in-between of ‘slacktivism’ on the one hand (supporting causes largely online with little commitment), and intense commitment to a particular group or tribe on the other. And I am tired, because despite the protests, volunteering, and organising, the challenges seem bigger than ever. These efforts are important, but protesting the status quo isn’t enough.

I look at the NGOs, political groups, roles, funding proposals, slogans, meetings and glossy branding that are often part of activism and civil society more broadly – and are tools I’ve used myself – and I find myself doubting that these things can really bring about the change we need in our relationship with each other and the planet. We need more than better branding, or more funding, or more campaigns. As Audre Lorde said, the “master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I find myself distancing from the urgency of activism, volunteerism, and campaigning in their current forms.

I’ve felt public discourse and action become less patient, more certain, more fragmented, with little room for curiosity and open conversations.

As well as form, I also feel a disconnection from engagement with and discussion of the issues of our time. In my involvement in social and environmental action over 20 years, I’ve sensed the shift brought about by rapidly evolving technology and media, which mean social and moral norms are evolving too. I’ve felt public discourse and action become less patient, more certain, more fragmented, with little room for curiosity and open conversations – sometimes explicitly through cancel culture or more subtly through othering and unintentional judgement. I think of a song by Sam Fender called White Privilege which includes the lines

“Everybody's offended… I'm not entirely sure the nitpicking can count as progression… Nobody talks to each other for fear of different opinions…”

Perhaps that closing down of conversation is in part down to social media and its algorithms which respond well to noise, performance, and oversimplification – it is not a space designed to help us relate across difference and understand each other, yet this is vital if we are to create the change needed in ourselves and in the world.

I want to be part of meaningfully and wisely addressing the world’s sickness, not desperately and loudly treating its symptoms. I have been wondering if there’s another way I might think about creating change.

Author, educator and social critic bell hooks (who prefers her name written in lowercase) wrote her book All About Love because she was

“thinking about how we love and what is needed for ours to become a culture where love’s sacred presence can be felt everywhere”.

She laments the lovelessness that is pervasive in our society. She goes on to say,

“profound changes in the way we think and act must take place if we are to create a loving culture”.

Sometimes, the issues at stake demand that we weep, raise our voices, get angry. Jesus turned over trading tables in the temple when he saw the sacred space had been turned into a marketplace – he got angry. But ultimately, he asks that we love our neighbours, including our enemies.

And yet sometimes I wonder whether we know how to love in the world as it is today. hooks says,

“In the realm of the political, amongst the religious, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of community, or keeps us together.”

In her lectures on ending racism and sexism, she notices that her audiences, especially the young,

“become agitated when I speak about the place of love in any movement for social justice”

despite the great movements for social justice having emphasised love. Her listeners seem

“reluctant to embrace the idea of love as a transformative force.”

We need to see love as a transformative force though. We say we believe in it; we make films and write poetry about it, we see it guide communities during collective experiences like global pandemics, we turn our faces towards it, we seem to want it. Perhaps this is where the hope is – that we want love in its various forms, even if we are embarrassed to say so. Love is not naïve, it does not ask us to be nice and polite, or eternally optimistic. Its presence does not remove negativity, disagreement, people who let us down. But I think it gives us the eyes and tools to work together, and to stand in compassion before judgement.

If we take love and affection for our neighbour and places seriously, understanding what it looks like in practice, then movements for change can begin right where we are – in our language, in our community, in relationships that ripple out. In a placeless and disconnected age, perhaps this is the kind of activism that would help us heal ourselves as well as the world. Author Simone Weil said that

“the gospel makes no distinction between the love of neighbour and justice.”

I am becoming drawn to a love-led activism, an activism that is made from the hard day-to-day work of listening, and patience, and loving what’s sometimes hard to love. It might mean taking time to build relationships with people who aren’t like us. It might mean breaking out of our institutions and tribal groups, hearing each other across difference, and imagining new possibilities together rather than form ever-tighter clubs. It might mean getting soil not screens between our fingers, rooting in relationship, slowing down, paying attention. Whatever it looks like, it must appeal to both activists and non-activists, because we must all be involved in calling forth new worlds.

The Bible is full of calls to love justice, to defend the weak, to provide for the poor and hungry, to defy the authorities when we need to – but to do all this, as Paul says, “rooted and grounded in love”. Micah says,

“what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

As bell hooks knew, justice goes hand-in-hand with love. It is hard for one to exist without the other.

We can choose to open up conversations or shut them down, to walk with others or retreat behind ideological lines, to stand in judgement or relationship, fear or love.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether we’re catalysed by anger, indignation, love, or care – but it matters what we go on to do with that spark. We can choose to open up conversations or shut them down, to walk with others or retreat behind ideological lines, to stand in judgement or relationship, fear or love. I think about what might come next when I stand down as a District Councillor at the next election, following a pull to do justice, and to love kindness more than belong to a political tribe. If we choose, we could build a loving culture, weaving a social fabric where activists and non-activists can see past current paradigms and feel able to work together, holding each other up as neighbours whilst nurturing beauty, hope and the becoming world. It may have no clear identity, it may not suit the noise of social media, but this is work that I want to be a part of.

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Politics

8 November 2024

10 min read

How to respond when politicians talk about “our way of life”

Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking helps us understand what we share across society.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Four men in suits, sit next to each other smiling, in the House of Commons.

Reform MPs in the House of Commons.

House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia.

What is “our way of life”? It’s a phrase which slides easily into the rhetoric of politicians of every stripe. It’s what the Reform Party says is threatened by multiculturalism, but what do they mean by it? What kind of politics is sustained by talk of “our way of life” and is there a better way of thinking about such politics?

This summer, we made an exception to the time limit rule for television in my house, mainly so that I could have the Olympics on from morning to night. It’s a habit I acquired growing up in the United States, where an obsession over the quadrennial medal count is one of the few remaining things which bridges political and regional divides. During the Cold War, the Olympics were a way for Americans to proudly affirm the superiority of our way of life over the rigid training schedules and alien ways of the rival Soviet Union.

Although my memories begin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, old habits die hard, and so the Olympics, to me, was endless coverage of plucky underdog Americans overcoming the odds to defeat the machine-like discipline of a new set of rivals–now Russia and China

I moved to Britain just before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics at which Britain won exactly one medal. At first I was bemused by the BBC’s coverage, which, of necessity, had to focus on British Olympians with little chance of winning. I was invited to cheer on eighth or ninth place finishers who had committed their life to a craft which would never bring the rewards of lasting fame or financial security. For them the reward was the Olympics themselves, the chance to compete amongst peers, to push themselves to their highest level, enjoying their sport and their performance for what it was, not for any external reward. In the terms of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, what these Olympians displayed was dedication to the internal goods of their sport–those goods that make a particular activity worth doing for its own sake. The Olympics were not about medals for them, but about showing what could be achieved if, as Olympians must do, they made their sport their way of life, dedicating themselves to its unique forms of excellence.

Sports, for MacIntyre, are but one example of a broader category he labels ‘practices’. Although MacIntyre has a technical definition of what counts as a ‘practice’, the general idea can be conveyed through examples he gives such as farming, researching history, architecture, chess, and chemistry. Practices are human activities which are worth doing for their own sake, which require a degree of skill and excellence, and in which what counts as that skill and excellence is, in part, defined and discerned by the people who participate in the practice. This last criterion points at something important about practices for MacIntyre: they are inherently social.

This is obvious in the case of sport. For an individual athlete to compete in a race they need not just other competitors to race against, but also trainers and coaches to prepare them for it, governing bodies to organise it, and, hopefully, spectators to cheer them on. It is, perhaps, less obvious in the case of individual farmer, but even here, one has to be taught to farm and, if one is wise, continues to learn and adapt through consulting with other farmers. A different way of putting this is that practices are the kinds of things which it’s not absurd to call “a way of life”. For an Olympic curler, curling is a way of life, just as much as farming is for a farmer.

There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth.

However, this seems to offer little help in defining “our way of life” if it is being used in the way our politicians like to talk about it. If there’s one thing that I learned from all those BBC features of British Olympians way back in 2010, it was that aside from geographic proximity, there was not much that their way of life had in common with mine. I may be within driving distance of the rink where Winter Olympian Eve Muirhead learned to curl, but my workdays of wrestling spreadsheets and answering emails have little in common with ones spent lifting weights, studying strategy with coaches, and perfecting the just right spin on a stone as it’s released.

And, of course that’s not just true of Olympic athletes. The investment banker who attends our church shares a way of life with his colleagues in Edinburgh, London, and Tokyo, that is completely opaque to my wife and I, immersed as we are in the worlds of ministry and academia. I glimpse some of the internal goods of the practices of our dentist watching her check my daughters’ teeth and our plumber as he fixes our leaking radiators, but their way of life, the rhythms of their days, and what gives them satisfaction in their work as they move from appointment to appointment, eludes my understanding.

Where does this leave the search for a British way of life? If practices are as important to forming us as MacIntyre thinks, then the quest for any singular British way of life will ultimately be fruitless. There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth. And even this characterisation does not go quite far enough, because all of these practices have a way of bursting the boundaries of Britishness if they really are worthwhile. A century and a half ago, football, rugby, and cricket were quintessentially British sports. Now they belong to the world.

Similarly, valuing these practices well within Britain has a tendency to open us to accepting those from outside our borders who can help develop them. The best footballer in Britain is Norwegian. Many of the doctors who ensured my daughters arrived safely after complicated pregnancies were originally from India and Pakistan.

Still, one might wonder if thinking about community through the lens of practices, as MacIntyre does, is too much of a solvent. Isn’t it a way of imagining us living near each other, but not with each other; siloed in our practices, in each of our communities, not understanding what our neighbours are up to? Not necessarily. For MacIntyre, the familiarity that arise from living near someone, hearing their worries at planning permission hearings, arguing with them at the local school’s parent council meetings, organising a community fundraiser together, or, even, being part of a family with them, can help develop an understanding of the internal goods of practices which we do not take part in. I haven’t lifted a brush to paper to since my secondary school art class, but my mother-in-law’s virtuosity with acrylics has led me to acquire an increasing appreciation for painting. Part of what helps facilitate this recognition is that, as MacIntyre argues, although the internal goods and the skills required to achieve them tend to be different for each practice, the virtues which we develop while pursuing them–patience, honesty, courage, self-control–are universal. Part of what helps us recognise others’ activities as practices, as worth doing for their own sake, are the virtues we see them develop as they do them.

This sort of recognition requires familiarity, the sort I might have with my neighbours in our corner of rural Aberdeenshire, but that I am unlikely to have with fellow citizens in Cornwall, Cardiff, London, or Glasgow. How then are we to respond to national politicians talking about “our way of life”? One answer might be: with extreme scepticism. This is MacIntyre’s approach. He rejects the nation-state, which he calls “a dangerous and unmanageable institution”, as a potential channel of communal unity. Instead, he calls on us to admit that modern nation-states exist as a contradiction, being both “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services” and yet also something treated as sacred, which we are asked, on occasion, to surrender our lives to preserve. He notes with characteristic acerbity, “it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

However, here I’d temper MacIntyre’s rhetoric somewhat. While my attachment to bankers in Canary Wharf is largely a happenstance of history, a contingent fact generated by long forgotten necessities of eighteenth century geopolitics, it has nevertheless resulted in both of us being issued the same passport, governed by the same tax regime, and having the same set of regulatory agencies to complain to when things go wrong. Those may be manifestations of what MacIntyre disparages as “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services”, but they nevertheless do bind us together. As such we both have an interest in making sure this bureaucracy acts as justly as it can, not because it is the embodiment of all that is British, Britain is much too diverse and interesting to be fully embodied in our political institutions, but because we all have an interest in the institutions in which we are enmeshed, British or otherwise, being run as justly as possible.

Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life”

Because we find ourselves tied together by these institutions to a diverse collection of people, we have an interest in learning about those with whom we live. Even those who are far away. And to also celebrate when goods and services delivered by our institutions result in success to which we, in a remote way, have contributed. I may not share a way of life with Adam Peaty, but, thanks to the BBC, I can have a glimpse into what his way of life is and can be happy that through my taxes I have contributed, in a small way, to helping him win another medal. Since that 2010 Winter Olympics Britain has come quite a long way and there is nothing wrong with a little vicarious pride in our athlete’s accomplishments.

But I can also be proud of athletes who didn’t win. Ones like BMX rider Beth Shriever who handled her unexpected last place finish in her final with a kind of grace and maturity, the kind of virtue, which someone more dedicated to her practice than to just winning can demonstrate. It is the facilitating of this kind of moral achievement which is more valuable than any medal.

Similarly, I can rejoice when a new hospital gets built in a neglected area in London, or more council housing is supplied to people in need in Edinburgh, hopeful that these lead to my fellow citizens achieving the kind of flourishing lives they deserve. I can be angry, when I discover that the money I’ve paid towards postage has been used to prosecute innocent victims of a computer glitch, and pleased when the opening of a new rail line eases the otherwise stressful commute of tens of thousands in London. The state may be a bit like a telephone company, but a well-run utility can do a lot to supply people with the goods they need to make their lives. As long as I’m a subscriber, as long as I’m tied to people through national institutions like the state, I have a moral duty to ensure that they’re run as well as possible.

This way of thinking about politics may strike some as idealistic, the kind of view only a naive Christian ethicist could endorse. Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” is deployed and why so much coalition building in our politics turns on finding a convenient other against which to define “our” similarity. Take your pick: immigrants, the EU, woke elites, the Tories, or Westminster (among a certain brand of politician here in Scotland).--. Growing up in the USA, the Soviets, and then the Chinese, and now, depending whether one lives in a Republican or Democratic district, the other political party, have served the same purpose. The problem is that we aren’t that similar, we are and always have been a diverse lot with diverse needs. Every nation is. There is no one British way of life and to allow our politicians to try to sustain the fiction that there is lets them off the hook. Solving deep seated economic and social inequality is hard. Blaming immigrants for not embracing our way of life is easy.

So, perhaps the sort of politics that I am talking about here is idealistic, nevertheless it is the only kind that can sustain a just government in the long term. Without acknowledging the importance of goods we only partly understand which are pursued by people whose ways of life are different from our own, we cannot hope to sustain the minor miracle of coordination and mutual aid that history has gifted us with in our united kingdom.