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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

denial

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A timely example: denial at work

At sunset, a purple-orange sky hangs over several large smokestcks and a lit industrial complex. Smoke billows left from them all..
Photo credit: Viktor Kiryanov

The merchants of doubt are back in business.

Just as I wrote about denial in public controversies this weekend, London’s Daily Mail charged yet another climate science data conspiracy. The Daily Mail isn’t new to the game of “If you can’t lie, obfuscate,” but the public’s comprehension of and trust in climate science isn’t a game. The stakes include the survival of millions.

Some in the press have rushed to play chart-tennis with the newspaper and its Congressional allies’ latest accusations. But the facts really aren’t at issue here: if the critical spotlight weren’t on one data point it would be on another. As Lipstadt found of Holocaust deniers, at issue is the underlying ideology that fuels denial and shunts conspiracists from one obstructive criticism to another.

Umair Muhammad puts it bluntly when he writes, “The point is to make sure we do not in fact start to do what needs to be done.” It doesn’t matter how much mass confusion and diversions are needed to block action, so long as action is indeed blocked.

Muhammad refocuses on five specific actions that are worth taking:

  1. Directly tax carbon to discourage its use
  2. Kill the car and redesign residential and work areas to support other forms of transit
  3. Reduce general consumption, including the resources used in manufacturing—not just individual, private consumption
  4. Transform agricultural and cattle-raising
  5. Modify energy-inefficient buildings and end outright the use of coal

Depending on how much sleep I’ve had, even I could feel a little overwhelmed by these action items. I can imagine why Members of Congress funded by the oil and gas industries might be more inclined to look for reasons not to accept human responsibility for climate change than to accept that “climate change is fundamentally a social problem and it requires a social solution.”

In real time, this is what denial does to us.

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Denial and opinions

Freedom of speech means you can say whatever you want. What you can't do is lie and expect not to be held accountable for it. Not all opinions are equal. --Deborah E. LipstadtThere are two films called “Denial” out this year.

One, a documentary, features climate change and the US energy system. I watched the other, a quiet drama based on a book about Emory professor Deborah Lipstadt’s legal confrontation with Holocaust denier David Irving.

In 1994, Lipstadt was traveling around the US speaking about her recent book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. This is where the movie begins: with Lipstadt in religion classrooms and university lecture halls explaining the components of Holocaust denial, why denialism persists, and why she chooses not to debate deniers on the facts.

Denying the Holocaust mentioned Irving by name and also sharply criticized his historical arguments. Two years after Lipstadt’s press and book tour, Irving launched a libel suit against her in British courts. British law requires the person accused of libel to prove that their claims are justified or true, and so Lipstadt was forced to disrupt her teaching schedule and go to England to persuade a judge that she’d been right, that Irving had distorted the historical facts to prop up his anti-Jewish ideology.

I came across Irving’s work around the time of this case. In the early-to-mid 1990s, I was in high school and I was an avid history student. World War II cast such a shadow over British education and the UK’s orientation to mainland Europe that I couldn’t fathom anyone intentionally declaring that the Third Reich had never committed genocide.

But within a few more years, I came across people who took a similar approach to denialism about the trans-Atlantic slave trade: the Europeans didn’t enslave and export that many African people, or when they did they didn’t treat them so badly, or even if they did, what about the Irish?

Still later, I learned about those who believe that LGBTQ people don’t really face homo-, bi-, or transphobic antagonism or violence and that, in the name of tolerance, LGBTQ people conspire to corrupt and confuse children… all of whom are heterosexual, of course.

People are serious about these opinions, too.

Lipstadt recently told the LA Times that she didn’t think of Denial or her research as a volley in the game of changing made-up minds—not Irving’s and not others’. Instead she said, “What this [film] can do is confront the people who think that it’s ok to change facts as long as you call them ‘opinions’… We’ll never do away with racism,” she continued. “All we can control is how we answer it.”

Much of my work these days includes opportunities to answer people who would like me to debate them on gender, sexuality, and religion. Typically, like Lipstadt, I choose not to. I choose not to, not because I can’t, but because I’m not willing to presume any moral parity between, say, “I’m a child of God; neither my gender nor my sexuality diminish me; and I deserve to live a whole life free from violence, discrimination, and abuse” and “LGBTQ people should not live openly as heterosexuals do; should have no expectation of loving, supportive relationships in this life; and will not exist in the afterlife.”

I don’t find these opinions comparable at all. So I don’t argue about them.

Not everyone in our community declines debate, but I’m happy to leave it to those who feel called. And I take this approach to so-called controversies about several issues: orientation, slavery, sexism, climate change, and all of the scientific and technical controversies addressed in Oreskes’ and Conway’s book Merchants of Doubt.

As a person of conscience, I accept that respectful conversation has standards that include the principles of “no fraud” and “no harm.” It does minoritized people no good to spend most of our energy swatting at malicious fables as Lipstadt had to do. Our collective time is far better spent exploring how to build and maintain an equitable, plural society, not arguing about whether we should have one.

Does this mean foreclosing some debates before all parties are satisfied? Perhaps in some cases it does.

If those parties are a David Irving, a Russell Moore, or No. 45’s latest cabinet nominee, I have to believe they’ll live: their minds are already made up and we have plenty of work to do whether their denial’s resolved or not. The more social power a denier has, the more important it is that the rest of us not build our lives on legitimized lies about each other or the history we share.

We owe ourselves reality, and denial can’t get us there no matter who its purveyors are.

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The Movement Moment: Change, Denial, and the Fall of Empire

A director at one of the organizations I support recently asked me what I thought “the movement moment” was.
What’s the spirit of this time? What’s rising up?

The movement, I said, is life.

The system demands we assimilate, and teaches us resistance is futile.
The movement is not about the right to assimilate.

The system calls us to worship the lone star. “Pull yourself up,” the system says. “Pull your pants up too.”
But the movement is not about rugged, respectable, individual survival.

The movement is far more expansive than the American Dream.
The movement is about justice.

It’s about quality of life in a diverse society.
Thriving as oneself in community.
The beauty of who you are. The richness of who we are.
Life beyond survival.

The movement is about race.
Poverty and wealth acquisition.
Freedom from violence and a criminal legal system.
Incarceration and voting access.

The movement is about housing.
Black lesbians with children in the South. Will not migrate. Shouldn’t have to.

The movement is about freedom.
Freedom of worship. Freedom of conscience. Freedom of conscience in houses of worship.
It’s freedom from abuse. And it’s freedom to find love and belonging in a place called home.

The movement is about meaningful work and meaningful wages.
Gender expression, access to education, and professional mobility.
Food justice. Humane business.
Innovation. Climate action.

The movement is about the diversity of family.
The healing of faith. The focus of reason.
It’s fidelity to the human nation. Integrity. Hope.

The movement is about life dimensions beyond subsistence.
It’s opening to the full spectrum of life and full presence in life.
The movement is thriving. The movement is whole.

This is the movement and energy that inspires me, that I’m aligned with, and that I co-build with my clients and colleagues. This is the world that I want to live in: space for all people to be and create and progress and transform.

I’d like faith communities to be part of this movement, engaged as co-laborers and not as bystanders, and certainly not as obstacles that laborers have to work around. I’d especially like the faith community I grew up in to be part of the team I’m yoked with: can we really not just pull together?

What social change takes: change.

“Hope” and “change” and “movement” all easily lose their gloss with time. It’s not because leadership teams necessarily adopt reserved or centrist approaches to their work. It’s not even because movements hatching into institutions naturally become cautious. Ultimately, it’s because “hope” requires little disturbance in the Force, but “change” destabilizes everything. And more want change than want to change.

Who wants change? Who wants to change? via ChangeActivation.com
Who wants change? Who wants to change? via ChangeActivation.com

Every deep change in the last 10,000 years has inspired a counter-campaign of folks sure that the change they resisted would usher in the end of the world. The mass adoption of writing prompted philosophers to fret that children would lose intelligence, memory, and oral delivery skills. In Phaedrus (275), a Socratic dialogue, Plato has Socrates insist that writing is “an elixir not of memory, but of reminding”: it’s an inferior tool that encourages writers to ape wisdom rather than practice it through dialogue, discussion, and feedback.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, UK slaveholders warned the country that abolition would irreparably harm the nation’s standing in global trade. “Our West-Indian and African Trades,” slave-holders wrote in 1749, “are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on… the extensive Employment of our other Shipping in, to and from America, the great Brood of Seamen consequent thereupon, and the daily bread of the most considerable of our British Manufactures [sic], are owing primarily to the Labour of Negroes.”

And in the US, critics of the suffragettes accused the women’s movement of wrecking homes and undermining marriage. Campaign posters framed lobbyists as too ugly to be married, or man-eaters who dominated their husbands, or the kind of mothers who would abandon their toddlers to wash, clean, and fend for themselves.

The doomsday prophecies are valid in a way: the old worlds did fall. But that’s the whole point. We don’t promote change for Colossus to stay on his pedestal. We promote change to bring him and Rhodes down. So much labeled “innovation” is just dusting the pedestal of the status quo. If an initiative is genuinely innovative, it will summon the World’s Last Chance crowd and all the hand-wringing that humanity can drum up. And if it doesn’t, we’re doing it wrong.

Deep change means the end of the known world—and for the segment of mankind not nurtured by the present order, the end of the known world is way overdue! If we’re wise about what my colleague Peterson Toscano calls The Great Transition, we’ll survive it ready to rebuild. If we’re foolish about the opportunities we have, we’ll stop short, crying about the good old days and writing them into our revisions.

I may snark about this, but there’s a reasonable root under much fear around social change. Just this week, would-be presidential nominee Jeb Bush verbalized it when he told his base, “Thousands of years of culture and history is just being changed at warp speed.” Speaking specifically about civil marriage, Bush said he found it “hard to imagine” what society might look like when people’s civil standing no longer rests on their maintaining “traditional” lifestyles. Change changes things, and our imaginations don’t always keep pace.

It’s also true that the rational reluctance to change can express irrationally. If we’re no longer trading in superiority complexes, it’s irrational to trade humane inclusion for familiar exclusion, and it’s irrational to fret about the pace of change when the status quo harms. The impulse to encourage slow tweaks has showed up in every justice movement I can name. It’s incurred stony glares from change-makers for just as long.

Even from those as sanitized as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Line caricature of Cecil John Rhodes, in a victorious wide-stance on a tilted African continent. Rhodes has one foot near Egypt and the other near South Africa. The cartoon mocks the traditional myth that the ancient Colossus of Rhodes was so large it had a foot on either side of the Rhodes port.
Cecil John Rhodes, colonialist. Artist: Edward Linley Sambourne (1892) in Punch, a British satirical weekly magazine. (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

To his White Christian and Jewish colleagues, King once wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.'”

Some of us feel called to walk alongside people as they press through their discomfort. We can’t do that work effectively by encouraging people to live in denial about what yielding to that discomfort would mean for others. Earlier this year, I and my co-panelists at Creating Change reframed denial as a sign that someone has accurately judged how much is at stake. As such, denial’s a completely appropriate stage to start a journey in. It’s just no foundation for a life.

As change-makers, we know the stakes are high. And that’s why we press for substantive change in this world. We have no assurances that results will come in our lifetimes and we acknowledge there’s no inevitability in play. Yet we still work for good.

We know this world pets some lives and consumes others. We know it will do so as long as we permit it. And we’re saying enough: the end is nigh. Mourn the old parasitic order if you must: it will pass. It must pass.

Then, when you have mourned, help to topple Colossus.

Topple Colossus in your home.
Topple Colossus in your labor.
Topple Colossus in your faith community.
Topple Colossus in the town square.
Topple Colossus in city hall.
Topple Colossus in the chamber of commerce.
Topple Colossus in every sphere of life.
And from the rubble, build.

The first line in my Twitter bio is “for public good, social change.” It’s a simple, intentional phrase that represents my contributions to social justice, communal good, and the third sector—the voluntary, not-for-profit realm of action that’s neither primarily governmental nor primarily commercial. Even limited work in this sphere and small, consistent action in our interpersonal relationships can contribute to the emergence of a more whole and more just world.

If you’d like to add my professional energy to the work you’re doing in this area, please email me and let’s talk.

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Embracing Denial and Starting Again

The first stage of grief and the first step toward health are both denial. Yet if we’re to heal, however long it takes, we can’t live in either.

I’m reclaiming denial as a stage that honors the stakes of our situation. Perhaps we risk physical death. Perhaps we risk losing our sense of common identity with someone we’ve loved or a group we’ve cherished.

Denial testifies that Yes, we love being alive and don’t want to stop; yes, we care for that person and their well-being; yes, we believe in that group and what it has the potential to offer the world.

But we can’t live there.

A bowl lies on its side, open top pointing toward us. Tiny colored folded papers are aflame inside.
The classic burning bowl. Let your stuff go. Photo credit: Julie Jeske

The minute we know more than we once did, the old is gone, and we have to release it. Really, it was gone before we realized it was, and what hung back was our own projection of it. It is gone. And we can’t call it back by wishing.

In the end, it’s worse to lose the old and then also lose the new through rejecting it for an old projection that no longer matches reality. Better to simply lose what was. And better still to cede the old to the passage of time and seek to re-encounter what stands in its place. The re-encounter means we don’t have to lose everything.

For leaving the stage of denial, then, the most important virtue isn’t equanimity or indifference. You don’t have to stop caring. You don’t have to become a higher order of human, if such a thing exists. The most important value is simple humility.

There are fewer than 8 days left in the year, and lots of people will participate in “burning bowl” ceremonies around New Years’ that ritualize this lesson. But you don’t have to wait that long if there’s an old thoughtform or belief or memory or relationship or approach to life that no longer serves you well.

Get a metal bucket with sand at the bottom or a mini-grill outside. Follow the instructions for fire safety, and write down your thing(s), and let that stuff go.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year when it comes.