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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

engagement

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More on connecting values and action

Close-up of two open hands, holding each other.
Photo: Rémi Walle

Lately I’ve been meditating on the relationship between personal convictions and social action. Between Believe Out Loud mobilizing Christians and others to express their values during the electoral cycle and my other work with faith-based organizations, I’m not seeing any way to dodge the real-world impacts of our most closely-held values.

What we believe matters.

What we do because we believe, and how we allow what we do to reflect what we believe also matters. How we spend our voluntary time demonstrates our priorities. And who we choose to devote our working time to does as well.

It wouldn’t make much sense if our values, intentions, speech, and action are framed with clarity and awareness and our livelihood is out of sync… To be truly responsible, we must express our value of life with what we contribute to as much as with what we personally do and say.” —Angel Kyodo Williams

Building an ethically coherent life means each one of us paying attention to the people, groups, and causes that we support with our time, funds, or network connections. Wittingly or unwittingly, we’re fueling a world of some sort with all of these forms of energy, and it’s a world that we and those who follow us will have to live in.

When I evaluate my contributions to, say, my denomination, I simply want to know that what I bring to the table goes to good ends. I don’t want to participate in my own or others’ oppression. I don’t want to fund lobbying for the right to discriminate. I’m happy to give time to serve people in my community. I enjoy supporting my local church’s budget: a congregation that can afford to fix plumbing or paint multi-purpose rooms is going to be in a decent position to do what other good work it’s called to do.

And so these considerations affect the way I give, what I donate, and how I serve. That’s as it should be: there should be a connection between my motives and my actions, between my core values and my contributions.

It’s not about purity, though: as I’ve said before, there are no clean hands in this world where we’re all one or two or three degrees removed from each other. But it’s precisely because of our connectedness that we need to practice awareness of our relationships and entanglements.

A few weeks ago, Native people critiquing the Dakota Access Pipeline circulated articles about the banks funding the companies behind the project. “Send them a message,” the activists told us. “Put your money somewhere else.”

These banks are investing $3.8 billion in a vision of the world where continued oil dependence is not only necessary but something to be sought out.

Williams puts that dynamic in stark terms:

There are companies that dump toxic waste and sludge into our oceans or hide it beneath the ground in inner cities. That same ground may eventually be the site of buildings that some of our children will live in. How can we support and participate in the choking of our resources and a disregard for the health and well-being of poorer people?

… You have to think of what it means to work for [a company] that molests whole communities and the world by tearing down rain forests that provide balance for our ecosystems and nourish life.” —Angel Kyodo Williams

We may not work directly for companies like these, but we’re not otherwise that distant from them. We can’t escape our fundamental connectedness, even when we want to!

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Reader Review 10

Fewer than 36 hours before the People’s Climate March in NYC!
But between that and the Scottish independence referendum (#indyref), there’s a lot of good writing to look over. Let this week’s long and short reads help you catch up.

Watch Disruption and inform yourself, but leave the fear behind

Climate Stew: Disruption Film and Review (Keisha McKenzie | @mackenzian)
I updated my review of 350.org’s documentary Disruption for the Climate Stew blog! Disruption is neither dispassionate nor impartial: it’s an issue film and includes several calls to action. During my first viewing, I made a list of over 25 organizations and researchers who I’m looking forward to following up with. I’ll share that list with you next week after the March.

City Lab: A Major Accounting Firm Just Ran the Numbers on Climate Change (James West | @jameswest2010)

The world’s major economies are increasingly failing to do what’s needed to to limit global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. That was the target agreed to by countries attending the United Nations’ 2009 climate summit… at current rates, we’re headed towards 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century—twice the agreed upon rate.

West points out that some countries have leaped into responsiveness and others (like the US) have lagged.

As the question of global climate is transnational, our responses must be transnational as well. But so far, political solutions continue to be floated as discrete national solutions, and so results vary widely as the PWC report shows. That’s not going to work: nature does not respect geopolitics.

We should have absorbed that insight back in the early days of acid rain. In the 1970s, researchers started to track acid deposits across the US and Canadian borders and the two nations began to negotiate a common policy. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway tell that story in their book on the denial industry, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Worth reading and asking yourself how much has changed.

Geopolitics and the referendum of the year

Politics.co.uk: Scottish Referendum: We have witnessed a total breakdown in political legitimacy (Ian Dunt | @iandunt)

The sharpest comment on the systemic implications of the referendum that I’ve seen so far. Dunt writes from the left political aisle, and directly addresses what happens when one political ideology (in this case, neoliberalism) overwhelms both the political proposals made by mainstream parties and also the media’s ability to ask the questions that the people need them to.

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The turnout at #indyref—over 84%—has amazed those observers who’ve bought into the “Citizens Of Today Are So Apathetic” story line.

Scotland Decides: 84.6% is the highest turnout in the UK since women won equal voting rights in 1928.
(c) BBC News, via Twitter

My conclusion is simply this:

If you ask the People questions that matter to them in language they understand; if you support the People in grasping the stakes; and if you make their shared investment in outcomes clear, they will respond.

Is there any social change issue for which this isn’t true?

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Engagement and Apathy

Sometimes we don’t care because we don’t have to care.

At other times we care not because we wish to, but because questions sprang up around us and our lives were pre-enrolled as evidence; because if we do not speak our own words, who can speak them?

It’s a privilege to participate in a constructive conversation. It’s a separate privilege to be able to throw up deuces and move on whether the conversation is resolved or not.

It’s a privilege to be ignorant, and a greater privilege to stay so. Indifference is more powerful than both states.

Ignorance concedes to new information. Bigotry entrenches against it.

To learn, we open to new facets of reality, more experiences, more souls, integrating them into the knowledge we already have, allowing old and new truths to illuminate each other, and letting the obsolete fall away. Without these cycles of learning, engagement becomes more fury than sound, more self-reinforcing than system-improving.

The OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act.
John Boyd’s OODA loop.

A friend once taught me a military strategic process called the OODA loop: Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action.

Apathy and indifference camp in the Observation zone where information waxes and ignorance wanes. With indifference we can scan a world’s features as if we’re removed from the worlds we watch.

We can stand on the ground in this place, yet imagine our place as the Master Position. In so imagining, we fail to orient, and our decided course moves way off.

To orient, we must de-center ourselves and sense ourselves as part of the field, not beyond it. “You are all notes in the Celestial Symphony,” Neale Walsch has said. “Shall we decline to play the music because one note is no more crucial than another?”

Through apathy and indifference we most often answer “Yes. Yes, if we aren’t the keynote, we’ll decline to play, and we’ll devalue the song.”

I may never understand why this is so.