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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

fear

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Fear and projection

Photo credit: Austin Kridler (via Reddit)

I used to love the acronym definition of fear: “false evidence appearing real.”

But “false evidence” is like “fake news” and “post-fact.” There’s really no such thing, only conjecture, presumption, and deception.

Austin Kridler recently shared a drawing that has had almost 700,000 views in two days. It deserves it.

Two big cats scream at each other in the face of impending and swiftly approaching doom. One of them encourages the other to stand firm and fight to the death.

In the third panel we discover the big cats are actually house cats, and “doom” is an unplugged vacuum cleaner.

I’ve written before about growing up in an apocalyptic religious tradition. As I shared with Blake Chastain last year, that background prepared me very well for the United States post-9/11, its hyper-surveillance and its skepticism of the state’s authority.

Mostly, though, growing up in Adventism gave me practice in watching our fears of the Other morph into projected suspicion and self-aggrandizing stories about what we’d one day do when we faced persecution. Sometimes these fears would prompt us to mimic traits that we taught were part of the Other’s community.

For instance, we were quite worried about controlling, centralized religion and forced worship (see also Babylon), but we punished students who didn’t attend weekly campus chapel sessions.

We also fretted about what evangelicals might do to minority groups if ever given state power (see also imperial Rome), but over at least 20 years, the denomination has actively lobbied to restrict the civil rights of LGBTQ people and opt out of common society.

We don’t always become what we fear, but I suspect that we are always shaped by our fears. Fears morph and warp our identities and group boundaries, the way we situate ourselves in relation to the exterior world, and how we evaluate risk and danger.

In the best case, we can recognize our fear train before it runs away; we can catch ourselves and laugh.

Kridler’s cartoon is a perfect example of how.

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Imprinted with fear

Partial text from Audre Lorde's poem, "a litany for survival" (1978)
From Audre Lorde’s “a litany for survival,” in The Black Unicorn (1978)

Fear learned early can affect us life-long.

In a working paper on the topic, Harvard child psychologists explain that intense, chronic fear and anxiety hampers children’s ability to learn, and undermines their ability to correctly perceive threats. Without intervention, children raised in chronically fearful environments learn to interpret ambiguous situations in a negative way, build stress as they preemptively work to protect themselves, and adopt an “aggressive” stance toward the world.

Furthermore, “simply removing a child from a dangerous situation will not by itself undo the serious consequences or reverse the negative impacts of early fear learning.” We have to create new emotional and neurological architecture to replace the old while we also work to change the outer environments that made old fears seem reasonable.

I read the Harvard paper and couldn’t help but think about the fear-based rhetoric that’s become a normal part of political, religious, and charitable communication. Lobbyists argue for one candidate by invoking the disasters they believe a different candidate is responsible for. Religious leaders warn adherents against an interpretation by threatening community censure at best and post-mortem punishment at worst. And even nonprofits that otherwise focus on reducing harm and making society more just sometimes send out letters that are full of suspicion and full of fear.

This doesn’t work well for any of us.

Take a week or two just to notice the tenor of the communications that you receive from organizations or send to your own audiences. Where does the fallacy of argumentum in terrorem, the appeal to fear, seem to crop up most? What can you do to squeeze it out of your toolbox, and anywhere it doesn’t produce good results? And how do you find fear affecting you and the small and large life choices you make?

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Panic

Sand dunes seen from above. The sky looks almost white and the dunes are light to dark tan and brown. Via unsplash/pexel.

Nothing brakes the train of progress and learning more effectively than apocalyptic panic.

After a week at this month’s conference near Baltimore, I’m returning to Miroslav Volf’s latest book, Flourishing: Why we need religion in a globalized world. (I wrote about Flourishing briefly earlier this month, and you can still join the group that’s reading it this summer.)

Chapter 1 includes extensive quotes from Marx’ and Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto. These authors, both younger than me when they wrote, imagined that burgeoning global capitalist industrialism would so spin the world into crisis that a communist social structure could not only emerge but also be welcomed.

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” —Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in Volf, p. 30

A bit dramatic, no?

Whether the world is dissipating before our eyes and whether everything is terrible seems to depend on who we ask, which scales of time or scope we have in mind, and whether we’ll accept the facts.

Because there are still facts.

Scientist and writer Steven Pinker has reviewed international and inter-personal violence trends and announced that, headlines notwithstanding, violence is in decline around the world. Other authors concur. Of the US, Marian Tupy writes, “the homicide rate is now at a 51-year low.” Trends for terrorism are similar. Seismologists record more kinds of earthquake more often, but according to the British Geological Survey and California’s Department of Conservation, large earthquakes aren’t happening more frequently than in the past, and deadly earthquakes are becoming rarer due to a combination of better building construction and stronger disaster response and mitigation planning.

That’s not the impression anyone would get from the conventional bad-news industry or from most Christian televangelism. In the news industries’ case, a steady stream of bad news means a steady stream of nervous viewers and support from advertisers who use consumer anxiety to prime us for sales. In the televangelism industry’s case, angst about natural and human disasters makes us receptive to teachings about a better world to come and faith that can protect us during a deeply uncertain and discomforting era.

Over the last decade, I’ve done a fairly good job of not supporting media outlets that trade in social or moral panic, and I can largely avoid religious rhetoric that does the same. But because of the branch of Christianity I work with, I still sometimes catch accounts of “worse and worse.” It’s hard to know how to respond.

That anyone suffers in street, state violence, earthquake, or famine speaks to me of an urgent need to repair this world. It doesn’t inspire me to pine for an end to this world. I grant that every transformation is a sort of ending, but a transforming apocalypse is rarely the kind of apocalypse promoted around me. Instead, many of the evangelists in my tradition promote their vision of a judging, destructive apocalypse, one that morally “cleanses” the planet with mass death.

When all information is freely available at the click of a mouse, our attention naturally nosedives in the sickest and most grotesque we can find.” —Mark Manson, July 28

Direct surveillance via cellphone videos or indirect surveillance through embedded network news teams brings us all the current affairs we can stand. And in this time of attention saturation, we still get to choose the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening.

Are we spinning stories to reinforce fear, escapism, and futility? Are we using the facts to inspire constructive action for ourselves and others today?

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On #NMOS14, Ferguson, and Rooting for a New World

National Moment of Silence 2014 Banner via Facebook and @feministajones
Image via the National Moment of Silence 2014 Facebook Page and @feministajones

This post took me three weeks to prepare. There’s so much to say, and the word-containers I’m drawing together feel far too narrow and too shallow to hold that “so much.” The community of Ferguson, MO, has been in grief since August 9, and that grief, first re-presented as aggression, then analyzed from afar, and dismissed by the detached at every turn, exploded into international spectacle within a week.

From mid-August:

A few days after I began following this situation, a Jamaican friend texted me a two-minute video of two constabulary officers beating a market seller with batons and shooting their pistols into the air to ward off the crowd. I asked my friend whether the clip had already made the local news. He told me it was too common an event to make the news. “Maybe it’s time to redesign civic policing,” I told Twitter. “This is not its finest hour.”  My frustration built quickly and I didn’t see an outlet for it. So much of the epistemology of power—expressed by police forces and institutional gatekeepers worldwide—requires sustained denial of the realities of disempowered people. It requires the denial of stories. The rejection of relationship. The building of policies and customs with so narrowly defined an Ideal Human. All of the above is power without legitimacy.

"British research on policing crowds confirms the strategic need for proactive relationship building by police." —Idaho police chief Michael F. Masterson, in the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin (via Twitter) [http://1.usa.gov/1lkpS7W]
Idaho police chief Michael F. Masterson, in the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin (via Twitter)

As common as it is for Jamaican police to bully the public, it’s just as common for us not to listen to our own experts when they recommend deep change. Ferguson, MO, didn’t become what it is by accident. And the rest of our world isn’t what it is by accident either. Dartmouth’s Paul Batalden often says “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” So if we don’t like our results, we have to change our design. We’ve designed a civic system based on studied ignorance, weak listening cultures, & ahistorical context framing. We keep spinning back around to the same social crises again and again—but of course. Our system isn’t learning because we don’t design it for learning. No one can learn by blocking new information. We can’t learn without listening to others beyond ourselves or experiences beyond our own. Nor can we learn without a sense of time or space, a location in space-time that situates us in relation to other people, other eras, other worlds. Instead we’ve built a system that mocks or resists research and specialists, that elevates the echo chamber, and that pretends every crisis is brand new. I do not believe this status quo is the best we can do.

Two children hold "Hands Up Don't Shoot" protest signs in Ferguson, MO
(via @VIVARonRon on Twitter, 8/14/2014)

Despite this design, a Midwestern community has responded to the pattern that gave them a dead son, and many of us outside the city have responded to a broader system that doesn’t seem to mind recapitulating this same story line every 28 hours. The protesters in Ferguson haven’t trafficked in ignorance; they’ve consistently and relentlessly reported ahead of the professional media from the start. The community isn’t stopping its ears and yelling “LaLaLaLaLa!” It’s engaged supporters and critics in real time, received outsiders willing to tell fair stories, and adapted as things have changed. The community refers to similar situations from recent history, domestic and international, but does not collapse them into its own. It knows its own context. And it’s building a new frame supported by new activists freshly engaged because the old frame has proven incapable of bearing the community and its children. Ferguson’s residents and youth, along with all the residents and youth in solidarity with them in the US and around the world, are among America’s finest system re-designers. They’re not going to let the systemic power structure slip back to ordinary. We can’t.  

On the evening of August 14, I drove to Baltimore to stand in solidarity with Michael Brown’s family, the Ferguson, MO, community, and other victims of violent policing nationwide including Eric Garner, John Crawford, Armand Bennett, Ezell Ford, and Dante Parker. There were about 90 vigils around the country scheduled for 7 p.m. that night thanks to Feminista Jones and the #NMOS14 community on Facebook.

So I went to this local vigil to be in silence with other people who, like me, were tired and sad. I hoped that in the silence we were able to create, and in the sound we made when we spoke with one voice, we could remember that we’re not alone, that we have power as The People that we don’t exercise enough, that when one of us is cut down, it isn’t someone else’s problem, it’s ours. We have a better world to build together.

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As soon as I got into town, I noticed a higher and more visible police presence than I’ve ever seen, even during baseball games and other mass events. The police recorded everything from the sidelines; a lot of marchers took their photos and recorded them in return. A helicopter hovered throughout, and we saw snipers watching from the tops of city commercial buildings.

While I felt incredibly surveilled by the authorities, I was also grateful for the mix of people who participated and stayed engaged during the evening. I heard about a number of people who’ve died in the custody of Baltimore City police recently—these were stories I hadn’t heard before—and we told those stories until our convocation ended outside the commissioner’s building.

Overall those present with us were passionate but not aggressive. And the police, despite their surveillance posture, did assist us in moving around the streets near the Harbor without getting entangled with B’more traffic. About 200 people marched, and others joined along the way, all without bystander heckling or grumbling.

Part of what overwhelmed me as I walked was fatigue from the waning of a long, stubborn summer, from not being around many other people who were moved to act rather than simply posture or criticize, having few physical spaces to vent and build energy with, and not knowing the local landscape enough to see which groups were already working and could use my support. The news never offers this level of connection or insight into change:  rather it serves up and profits from a focus on problem-problem-problem and blood-blood-blood.

The morning after the march, I shared with my mother where I’d gone and why I cared. She listened quietly at first, but then invoked the “last days” of apocalyptic scripture: what else but the worsening of the human condition should we expect, she asked. She also reminded me of her experience in England with anti-black policing, racial protests, and riots during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I’m sure she meant to encourage me, but the prospect of repeating this narrative to my own baby cousins in 40 years doesn’t encourage me in the slightest. I don’t want them to be on the same hamster wheel that we’ve been on in the last few decades.

I want a different world for them.

A few days later I read a story about a woman in San Jose, CA, who died holding a cordless drill.

“Police and witnesses described the dramatic scene Thursday morning that ended with the fatal shooting of a mentally ill woman in front of her duplex on busy Blossom Hill Road, two blocks east of Oakridge Mall in South San Jose…”

“Police said the 911 call required a quick and strong response.

“‘We had a call, somebody with an Uzi threatening to kill family members,’ San Jose police spokesman Officer Albert Morales said. ‘It was a very serious situation, a very dangerous situation for our officers.'”

No one else was home with the woman. She was alone.

All the officers had were words, the words in the 911 call. And those words reframed completely what they might have seen in front of them. The “very dangerous situation” they believed they were part of was made so a priori by those words. And thus a drill became a gun and help became harm.

Words can so restructure reality that you will not see what is in front of you. If I find that frightening it is because of the quality of words that much of the world is shaped by. If I find it exciting it’s because I read and write words that could create a wholly different world. I only wonder if a wholly different world is the option that we’ll choose.

This post was not about a policeman or a teenager. It wasn’t even about an Uzi or a cordless drill. All of these are details that make no difference if fear has already degraded our ability to perceive accurately and investigate properly.

I don’t want to live in fear. I want to root for a new world, and I’m willing to help build it.

When I spoke to my mother that morning, I told her I believe that fatalism is corrosive. And I told her that I believe the discipline of caring regardless of outcome is good for us.

She nodded—a rare concession—and she told me she loved me.

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News: The Record Keeper’s Now Dead

The Record Keeper release date was pushed back three times, and finally suspended April 2014.
The Record Keeper release date was pushed back three times, and finally suspended April 2014.

“There are no secrets.” And now there is no Record Keeper.

The Adventist News Network and other Adventist sources report today that the General Conference will not release The Record Keeper project: The Record Keeper is dead. The GC’s April 11 press release states that the project is “suspended” and “similar creative outreach projects” might be possible in future.

Back in January I wrote about efforts to save The Record Keeper and updated my post with Williams Costa’s statement that the GC was “not considering stepping away from the Record Keeper project.” Today’s announcement to the contrary will make it hard for church advocates to deny that Seventh-day Adventism struggles to support creativity in form and complexity in thought: our fundamentalism makes us a poor ally to art.

If we have a certainty bias that makes us hostile to new forms of thinking, seeing, and understanding, then we have a massive and possibly insurmountable challenge for those Adventists in each generation who want to drink deeply from theology and philosophy thanks to their love of literature and film. Story isn’t tidy and truth has many faces—when will we learn?

I feel sad today not just for Jason Satterlund, Garrett Caldwell, and the rest of the TRK team but also for the thousands of youth at Adventist colleges and academies who’ve already screened the entire series and were looking forward to sharing it with new viewers. I also think of those baptized during evangelistic screenings of TRK last year who are now seeing a church nervously disclaiming the tools that brought them into Adventism.

I am not concerned about the money that’s been spent. The Adventist denomination isn’t short on funds and didn’t waste them by funding or developing The Record Keeper. I am concerned about the message the GC is sending by abandoning this project, the creatives behind it, and the audiences that have already responded to it.

And yet the statement claims the GC’s “strong endorsement for creative outreach.” No, no.

That The Record Keeper has become the 21st Century’s Rise of the Minions is a loss for all of us.