Keisha McKenzie : Page 11 : mackenzian

April 4, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The Prime Directive

I started watching Star Trek during high school: The Original Series with Kirk, Scotty, Bones, and Spock, The Next Generation with Picard, Geordie, Crusher, and Riker, and eventually Deep Space Nine with my favorite, Commander Benjamin Sisko.

A recurring plot device is the principle of non-interference known as The Prime Directive.

The Prime Directive is based on a tenet in the United Nations’ Charter, which the US ratified more than seventy years ago:

Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.” —Article 2

A product of the idealism and liberalism of post-World War Europe, the United Nations charter assumes that national destiny is national business, and that member states have no natural right to govern one another. The exceptions in Chapter VII of the charter include war and peacekeeping: the non-intervention and non-interference principles do not apply when parties are in a violent relationship.

So the Prime Directive is an imperfect ethic, and it’s certainly not a universal standard for interacting with others. But it often guides how I engage relatives who find me a challenge because of my work, perspectives, groups, or identities.

The principle of non-interference inspires me to take relatives’ comments and actions less personally and not to push them toward new resources before they’re ready. It also prompts me to value these elders’ self-sovereignty and process even if they occasionally struggle to value mine: with them, I get to practice “presence without control,” the art of engaging without always trying to determine what the Other must do.

Finally, the principle frees me to redirect my energy and attention to items on my desk rather than peering over at what I think others are or should be doing. Applying this principle hasn’t yet made me deny cases where someone was committing violence or I needed to intervene. It has radically reduced my stress levels!

April 4, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The uses of religion

I’m only ten pages into Arundhati Roy’s 2016 book of essays, The End of Imagination, and I already have several asterisks and exclamation points in the margins.

In the introduction, Roy reviews recent Indian political history to help set the tone for the essays that follow.

The theme of India’s history is the “competing horror show of majoritarianism and religious chauvinism” as India’s religious communities jockey for national influence in their newly independent nation.

Toward the end of the the nineteenth century, the politics of representative governance (paradoxically introduced to its colony by the imperial British government) began to replace the politics of emperors and kings. The British marked the boundaries of the modern nation-state called India, divided it into territorial constituencies, and introduced the idea of elected bodies for local self-government. Gradually, subjects became citizens, citizens became voters, and voters formed constituencies that were assembled from complicated networks of old as well as new allegiances, alliances, and loyalties.” —Arundhati Roy

Roy’s accounts of a Hindu majority, marginalized Muslims, a military-enmeshed political party, and persistent scapegoating in the name of God and country reminded me immediately of the roles that Evangelicalism plays in the US today.

For the last thirty years, Evangelicals here have functioned as a political constituency: a bloc formed to advance group interests and to speak for group concerns about family, belonging, right social order, and the integrity of the law.

This Evangelical bloc isn’t primarily tied by doctrinal considerations, however. Debates last year over whether [Evangelical] Christians should line up behind the Republican nominee should have made that clear.

Instead, like the Hindu nationalists of India, Evangelical and fundamentalist Christianities are a nation-building mechanism. They identify and differentiate themselves from the usual enemies and Outcastes/outcasts, and they leverage social calamity to promote political solutions—especially exclusive ones.

I don’t know where Roy will take this background information, and further into the book, I could find my understanding way off-base. But right now I’m reflecting on the global uses of religion, and wishing that, in each of our societies, we were much, much more careful with one of the most powerful social tools we have.

April 2, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

On Truth

Truthiness, post-fact, and BS have all become jargon terms in political communication. I’m not sure any of us expected that from the new millennium seventeen years ago.

But then we lived through presidential perjury (Clinton), yellowcake uranium (Powell), and an entire decade of popular distrust for the state. We haven’t recovered.

That brings me to the successful campaign of No. 45 and the ongoing decline of a fourth estate that’s proven ill-equipped for misinformation, disinformation, or a public that sees conspiracy even in accurate statistics.

Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt has been writing about truth and BS since 2005 (I received one of his monographs as a graduation present a few years ago).

Sincerity is no measure of fact, Frankfurt argues in both of his books. It doesn’t matter whether all the crowds around the emperor sincerely imagine him clothed. What matters is whether he’s clothed or not; what matters—especially for the sake of social community—is the climate he’s created that discourages people from recognizing what’s real or speaking openly about it. That matters.

In On Truth, Frankfurt explains that maintaining a sense of reality is what allows reason and logical reasoning to stand. Without truth or fact, the process of tying premises to evidence or evidence to conclusion becomes the process of telling another story in a world of fireside stories—but without the solid ground of shared meaning that mythology usually relies on.

The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.” —Harry Frankfurt, On [BS]

Not everyone is constrained by reality in this way, but Frankfurt argues that everyone should be and we collectively suffer as long as everyone isn’t.

[The BS-er] is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

At the root of BS, then, is capriciousness and self-interest—and a healthy society can’t be built on these foundation stones.

Read more from Frankfurt on truth and its alternatives, and if you’d like to dig into related science, listen to David McRaney’s podcast with Gordon Pennycook (no transcript available).

April 1, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Knowing you don’t know best

One of my notes from February’s bystander training sticks with me all these weeks later:

Often your first intervention will not work. Try another.”

The maxim suggests to me patience and persistence with experiment. Focusing on results and using outcomes to assess people or programs won’t always make room for that. It also implies the kind of long-term relationship where parties can stay connected and mutually evolve.

As such, it speaks to me of humility: knowing you don’t already know best and leaving room to learn from life and others. Not much social learning or relationship is possible without humility, and a lot of otherwise well-intentioned projects go off-course without it.

This is a recurring theme among non-profit administrators who field volunteers’ requests.

“I once started a project to help give people what I thought they needed,” one administrator wrote recently. “Turns out they needed something different.”

What made that a good story rather than a cautionary tale is that the administrator was able to adapt with the community’s newly articulated needs rather than either shut down and stomp away because they couldn’t receive what the administrator intended as help or forge ahead and do it anyway regardless of whether it was going to be helpful.

The dynamic also applies to organizations as well as people.

As individuals, we can easily deceive ourselves into believing that we do not perpetuate global inequities and discriminatory attitudes we claim to oppose. Organizations are no different.” —Fairouz El Tom (May 26, 2015)

Remember, for example, the organization Invisible Children, which launched the viral Kony2012 video campaign five years ago? Shortly after that campaign against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Invisible Children started participating in intelligence gathering for Uganda’s government.

Rather than staying focused on the “invisible children” being kidnapped by the LRA, Invisible Children pivoted to supporting the military interests of Uganda’s 30-year president, Yoweri Museveni, and American defense contracting funders intent on destroying the LRA through more conventional means.

Reports from this year show that the organization has pulled covert human intelligence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, and other central African states into its regular programming, but not solely by foregrounding the White Americans who drove its initial marketing effort.

Today, Invisible Children equips African informants with radios and its continental staff (some of them are “volunteers”) work with private military contractors and the United Nations’ peacekeepers to report on LRA activities in the region.

That isn’t the model of change that co-founder Jason Russell aimed to get the media so excited about in 2012. It takes a lot of corporate energy to make a mission shift that significant. Perhaps it helps that, according to Russell’s bio, he still has the same philosophy he did years ago: “If you want to change the world, you have to be crazy enough to believe you can. [Jason] does, has, was, and still is.”

In Teju Cole’s more sober assessment, “The world is [still] nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.”

But enthusiasm isn’t all that’s needed. Some international development workers are beginning to explore race, power, and influence as well as personal passion: it’s a necessary, challenging industry-wide conversation, and humility opens the way.

After all, just because you change, doesn’t mean the change is good.

April 1, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Disrupting the familiar

I’ve been reading about the life and death of Jesus since I was about three years old. And I spent many Friday nights during my childhood singing my way through all six cassette tapes of Handel’s Messiah (only Hogwood’s interpretation of the 1754 Foundling Hospital version will do!).

Like the Nativity story in December, the Passion (betrayal-to-resurrection) is familiar ground for dramatists and musicians to recover at this time of year. The second half of Messiah, which many choirs perform during the Easter season, covers the betrayal, trial, murder, resurrection, and restoration of Jesus.

Composer John Adams took the well-worn Passion tale and the four-hundred-year-old tradition of the oratorio, and created something surprising and remarkable in The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2013). The St. Louis Symphony played it at New York’s Carnegie Hall tonight: a full orchestra of strings, wind, brass, and percussion, with at least 60 choir voices, a triad of countertenor narrators, and Mary (mezzo soprano), Martha (contralto), and Lazarus (tenor).

It took Adams’ postmodern, postcolonial minimalism to help me see the story in a new way. I frankly didn’t expect to experience a “third testament” that spanned millennia thanks to sources like the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the poetry of June Jordan and Rosario Castellanos, the journals of Dorothy Day, and the visions of Hildegard of Bingen.

But I did.

I recognized the tale of Lazarus’ death and resurrection in all its chilling, creepy weirdness. I felt the building amoral energy of the mob at Golgotha. I heard the gentle transformation of the resurrection of Jesus, too, and I watched that story unfold mostly from the perspective of women, both ancient and contemporary.

More than I’ve realized lately, I’ve needed some disruption to my most familiar stories; I’ve needed help to be surprised.

When was the last time you told an old story in a new way? What did that disruption do for you?

March 30, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The change at hand

“All politics is local,” pundits have said for about 80 years now.

It may not be as complete a maxim this century.

Grassroots activism has surged back as a tactic, especially on national concerns: years of action on police and state violence, increased organizing on environmental justice and climate change, and massive mobilization around gender equity.

Perhaps local incidents inspire social energy but there’s also a tipping point where local attention takes off, one case threads to others, and themes emerge.

As I listened to North Carolinian legislators debate HB2 today, I realized that many of them are still shaped by the local politics theory. During a time of thick conflict, “local politics” can be a psychological refuge from complex and intractable (wicked) problems. It’s a shield made up of simpler times.

The local theory suggests that lawmakers can get along by doing what their district or region wants, even if that diverges from what would be most effective: they’d prefer to be accountable only to their local constituency. What they mean when they invoke “what the people want” is “what the people who most frequently call my offices want; I hope they’ll re-elect me.” All of the people in an area, people whom policies might directly affect, are secondary.

By contrast, social media is influential as an agenda-setting tool today, perhaps more so that individual local authority figures. Social media depends on people who may never meet one another face to face trading information and demonstrating mutual trust and reliability over time.

Non-local interactions shape how we interpret political events and talk to one another about them: the town priest or village doctor, who once held their authority because of their direct, personal connections with parishioners and patients, is no longer the sole arbiter for how we perceive or understand controversial subjects.

For more than 24 hours now, for instance, people from professors and preachers to Hillary Clinton have volunteered stories of their experiences as professional [Black] women facing workplace bias.

Brittany Packnett launched the hashtag #BlackWomenAtWork to support Black women in telling their stories about racism and low peer or customer expectations on the job. (Some of these stories are challenging to read; fair warning.)

An entire day later, people are still story-telling and educating—two key elements of activism. And they’re doing it across platforms, not just on Facebook or Twitter, where the hashtag began. And even if their individual stories are local, their solidarity is not.

These participants have been inspired by the power of story. Their stories inspired them to breach the isolation of being marginalized and connect with others regardless of location.

The era of the parochial vision is over, and perhaps for good, but not everyone realizes it yet.