Outside in

Adding light to the sum of light

When a true leader’s work is accomplished…it leaves no trace and the people say, We did it ourselves (ziran). —George Woods

I’ve been struck recently by the number of people I know who are doing different sorts of volunteering. It’s partly a factor of age—people I know who at or near retirement—but I think it goes deeper than that. Deeper than just trying to be good neighbours because they might suddenly have more free time. It’s about engaging in politics in a different way. And it interests me a lot.

Peter van Lint, Saint Teresa of Avila Meets the Angel (17th century) — Source.

A notion that comes up often in comments here is a version of: “but what can I do?” When my response is along the lines of join a local community organisation of some sort—of any sort—I don’t think the suggestion lands as either sage or practical advice. But the more I think through these things, the more I think that, at the very least, it is a good place to start.

Politics isn’t just about matters electoral. That was the main thing I took away from talking with Cathy McGowan last year about her current work in communities, and it’s something activist George Woods wrote about recently too: “By politics I mean the syntax of our common public life and how matters of collective concern are arranged – what forms we give to power, material production, cultural transmission, and the relationship of the individual to the collective….[B]y political, I do not mean championing one team or another within modernity’s established arrangements, but experimenting with the forms of everyday public life itself and developing a different syntax altogether.”

All together.

Too much of what we call politics, and the ideologies that underpin it, treat individuality and collectivity as opposite ends of a straight line, when in fact each is implicit in the other. We talk about politics being downstream from values, but it is better to think of them as existing in overlapping plots of the same garden. We live in webs of interconnection, not on a unidirectional strip of bitumen.

I heard a story the other day that illustrated all this for me.

A friend was telling me about a project that happened in Shepparton. It was called I Wish I’d Asked and it brings people from different generations together to speak with each other. As they say on their ‘About’ page: “I Wish I'd Asked have developed an innovative program to tackle the issue of loneliness in our communities. Our activities are designed to foster intergenerational connectedness, bring back the art of conversation for our young people and allow our older generations to share their wisdom and experience.”

By all accounts, the Shepparton project was successful and one unexpected measure of this was that a number of the young guys involved approached the organisers afterwards and asked how they might go about getting a job in the aged care sector once they left school. On its own I guess it doesn’t sound like a lot, but given the barriers usually involved in getting young guys to interact with that older generation, it seemed to me a remarkable breakthrough. Not only did these young men enjoy the project, it actually made them think it was something they would like to do as a job. It was a great illustration of what this sort of interaction can achieve that no number of, say, career counselling sessions could ever achieve.

Not to oversell the concept, but there really is no substitute for human contact as a way of at least opening up the possibility of mutual understanding and letting people see options that might otherwise be hidden.

In a age of Hanson-like politics, where people’s views are being driven by various forms of algorithmic manipulation, such local interaction is likely the only way to build the resilience to resist it. There is an increasing literature on this, and this US project is an example of what might be possible. It sought to use “a relational organizing approach in building community resilience to disinformation,” and it had some success. The report makes for an interesting read, along with this brief accompanying essay.

Too many of our key institutions have lost touch with this sort of local engagement and it means they atrophy into influence peddling and self-preservation. I was really struck by this account by unionist Godfrey Moase on not renewing his Labor Party membership. He writes that “I had been a member for over twenty years, and I was treated as an outsider. I witnessed the cartel within the party, and unless you play by its rules of patronage you are nothing. And if you accept the cartel, you sacrifice your humanity to it.”

Moase, too, has come to the conclusion that transformative politics takes place elsewhere, arguing that “the state itself is nested within a broader range of social relations. Any transformative social project must be rooted in the everyday lives of the people, in their workplaces, their neighbourhoods and social circles. For without the working-class daily exercising its power any political project to hold on state authority will be short-lived or devolve into a cult of personality.”

It is worth reading all of his article. As it is Tim Hollo’s piece coming to a similar conclusion from a different political perspective:

It took me a while, years ago, to come to grips with Audre Lorde’s famous dictum that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”.

Investing so much of my life, my time, my emotional energy, in a theory of change that says there is no alternative to working in, with and through the system as it currently exists in order to change it, it was incredibly hard to acknowledge the truth Lorde points to - that it’s the system itself that binds us. Using the tools of control, of separation and domination, of extraction, of oppression, can never create justice.

Hollo’s piece includes suggestions for further reading that are useful too.

My own approach to politics has been, until the last few years anyway, pretty bloodless, in that I’ve concentrated on things like political theory as a way of understanding what might be possible. Or what could be done. I think it’s useful up to a point, but I am increasingly of the view that you can’t just theorise your way to a better politics, you have to walk the walk. Theory was increasingly leading to me practice, and my work looking at community independents campaigns and things like citizens’ assemblies has shown me the value people get from working together. Over the coming months, I am going to shift focus, taking a lead from friends, family and acquaintances who are finding value in things as various as community kitchens and teaching English to immigrants. Stay tuned.

British writer and commentator Grace Blakely is way ahead of me on this stuff and I like her transformation of the question I began with: “[I]t’s time we stopped looking at the world’s problems and asking ‘what can I do?’ Instead, we need to get organised, realize the scale of our collective power, and start asking ‘what can WE do?’”

As ever, curious to hear other people’s thinking on this and any experiences you’ve had in moving in this direction. I think it might be one of the great untold stories of the current political moment.