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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

individualism

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The virtue you don’t want tested

At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can. —Frida Kahlo

Endurance. Perseverance. Persistence. Inner strength.

Each of these virtues draws praise in an era that worships the rugged individual who conquers circumstance with dogged will and fortune (but mostly dogged will).

Three months after the US presidential inauguration, the shine of “resistance” has dulled. So has the popular hope that we can abbreviate the next four to eight years; that we might not have to keep feeling the chaos, the uncertainty, the confusion, the ambiguity; that we might not have to keep watching headlines like the ones we’ve seen this week.

It may be true that “we can endure much more than we think we can.”

It certainly isn’t true for everyone.

And it’s an idea that, even under the aegis of common penal rhetoric like “no pain, no gain,” we don’t really want to test.

I have limits, and I’m sure Kahlo’s right that I’m more limited by what I think my limits are than by what they actually are.

But I don’t want to know how much we can endure, not when I watch what my siblings in Syria and Egypt and Myanmar and Michigan and South Dakota are enduring already.

Perhaps the reassurance that we can endure trauma motivates some people to hold their courage through it all. I’m hoping instead that it doesn’t give the rest of us cover to stand aside and merely look.

We need one another to do more than that. Much, much more.

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Normalization is normal after all

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel! —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Two words I’ve heard plenty of in the last few months: resistance and normalization.

Advocates advise the public to resist the agenda of the new administration. Commentators worry that the administration’s unusual tactics (and more overt expressions of the same old tactics) might reset the typical center and become the US’ new normal.

But humans are nothing if we’re not adaptable. We can adjust to almost anything, and usually do. I came across Dostoyevsky’s line about the adaptable scoundrel today. According to Umair Muhammad, this society reveres “freedom of choice” but rarely encourages people to question the range of choices available. We typically won’t request biscuits if offered banana or an apple. Instead, we usually adjust to the terms provided—in that case, fruit.

US politics demonstrates this because it is currently structured as a debate between two options. Rather than seriously questioning why televised debates only include those two options and seeking to change that custom, we instead focus years of our time on which representatives of those two options should participate. One party offers a policy proposal; the other rebuts with its own ideological alternative; and there’s no room in the public square for options outside that range. We’ve normalized those binaries.

Having been conditioned with a certain set of expectations, individuals may be quite happy with meeting them. —Umair Muhammad, Confronting Injustice

Our unjust and consumptive society is an edifice that needs restructuring, but millions of dissatisfied people marching in major cities aren’t the proof. Our adaptability means that we’ll adapt to evil as well as to good: society would still need restructuring even if all those people were content with the status quo.

The conditions that society continually produces—the poverty, the violence, the hoarded resources—these are what prove it needs restructuring.

What we can count on is that if there are humans around, we will normalize the conditions available. We will normalize this next administration, and inasmuch as any of us lose our capacity to be surprised about what the new government does, we’ll know that we’ve finally adjusted.

But if we can’t avoid adjusting altogether, we can still do some good. Through independent media and beyond the A vs. B cable news issue format, we can keep working to keep the options broad: exploring kinship structures and not just marriages; life-long cooperative communities, not just a year or two of civil or military service after college; broad-based programs of education, training, and labor, not just unpaid internships and unemployment benefits.

The best thing we can ask at this time, then, is not “Is this normal?” but “Are there more options?”

Because the answer to that is always “Yes.”

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A poetic break

Low golden sunlight washes over a rocky and grassy mountainous landscape. A solitary figure stands on a rocky outcrop on the bottom right of the image. They are facing away from the camera.
Photo credit: David Marcu

My latest literary companion, Umair Muhammad’s Confronting Injustice, features a sentence that was so arresting that I had to look up both the source and its author. (Get Confronting Injustice the way I did, via Haymarket Books.)

Eduardo Galeano wrote through the second half of the 20th Century about the political struggles of his native Uruguay. Celebrated across South America, Galeano appears in Muhammad’s book on individualism, neoliberalism, and climate change:

Our system is one of detachment: to keep silenced people from asking questions, to keep the judged from judging, to keep solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces.” —Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces

I wrote last fall about growing up in two subcultures in which no one around me spoke of or taught about non-heterosexual people. I therefore got through my first two decades with an unfinished map of myself and all of the people I lived with and went to school and church with: a culture’s symbolic blackouts affect everyone in that culture, not just the people they target.

It’s because of my experience that Galeano’s phrase “keep solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces” stood out to me today. The entire sentence is striking.

Perhaps more than 20th Century Uruguayan culture did, US culture thrives on the myth of the intrepid individual who forges alone into the wildness of life, or, in extreme cases, the actual wilderness.

As feminist writers pointed out in the 1980s, this culture’s success myths typically don’t include the network of people around the Great and Inventive Ones. In media profiles, we might learn about an entrepreneur’s favorite teacher, or a librarian who took extra time to nurture a budding scientist’s interests while they were in elementary school, or parents who doted and sacrificed to pay for a prodigy’s piano lessons.

But the rest of the genius’s support system—spouses and partners, training colleagues, secretaries and assistants, house staff and those delegated or relegated to tasks like laundry and cooking, let alone all who fund the public services that make unusual individual advancement possible—this support system remains background material. We’re used to phrases like “social construction” but they haven’t changed how we perceive the individual self. Confronting Injustice is a book-length objection to that.

I’m slowly cracking open this weekend and thinking about how my social networks have crafted my sense of who I am and the symbolic languages I use as I interact with the world. I’m also thinking about how my social networks have “kept silenced people from asking questions” about the philosophical foundations of our world and the spaces we allow for ourselves and others.

How might human culture be otherwise? What are the impacts of not changing? These are the questions Muhammed believes activists should be asking. We should be working to manifest our answers too, because without manifest alternatives to the way things are, we’re resigning ourselves to continuing generations of people silenced, judged, and solitary who have no inkling that what is isn’t all that can be.

The Book of Embraces is now on my wishlist.

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Pluralism and Individualism: Links and Videos

Just in time for your weekend viewing: links and videos on leadership, space negotiation, and consumerism in contemporary plural societies.

1.

Inset from Carrol Grady's "Baby Quilt for Samuel Joseph" (2009)
Inset from Carrol Grady’s “Baby Quilt for Samuel Joseph” (2009)

Nilofer Merchant, in Time and Gawker columns on board-level diversity at social technology companies:

Innovation is a direct result of openness to new ideas. The key is to design for differences of perspective and world views so you can have a better chance at new ideas.

“All innovation is a derivative of ideas and especially new ideas,” added Merchant, who serves on the boards of both public and private companies. “What [the companies are] saying is I’m gonna work under my same old, same old. And same thinking leads to parrot ideas, which ultimately leads to failure.” 

2.

Aryeh Cohen explains why he’s conflicted about Israel’s Women of the Wall, a group of observant Jewish women who’ve been protesting their sometimes forcible exclusion from prayer at the Western Wall of the Temple Mount (the Kotel ha-Ma’aravi):

This is the beginning of the story of the modern Kotel, out of which grows the story of the women of Women of the Wall, who demand equal ritual access to it. The silences in that historic story prevent me from praying at the Wall and from supporting the women who want to wear tallit and tefillin when they pray there. —Aryeh Cohen

Cohen’s concern reminds me of Native American/Indian and immigrant activists in Canada and the US who argue that new immigrants inherit the settlers’ burden to reckon with the cultures that the emergent United States displaced and that remain marginal here.

3.

Image via Nomad Nation
Image via Nomad Nation

Adam Curtis’ four-part documentary, The Century of the Self (2002), charts the evolution of individualism through the 20th Century by describing the influence of Freudian psychology on modern public relations and politics.

Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew led PR to shift toward correlating commercial products and symbols representing consumers’ emotions, desires, and irrational beliefs about themselves.

Adam Curtis: What Bernays had created was the idea that if a woman smoked, it made her more powerful and independent, an idea that still persists today… It meant that irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols of how you wanted to be seen by others.

Peter Strauss: Eddie Bernays saw the way to sell product was not to sell it to your intellect, that you ought to buy an automobile, but that you will feel better about it if you have this automobile. I think he originated that idea, that they weren’t just purchasing something, but they were engaging themselves emotionally or personally in the product or service… That was his contribution.

This Vimeo link contains all four fascinating episodes, “Happiness Machines,” “The Engineering of Consent,” “There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed,” and “Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering.”

Run-time is just under four hours, so budget about an hour for each.