progress : mackenzian

February 26, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Products of our time

Part of the 20th Century’s progress myth was an assumption that recency means improvement and therefore old age means “fixed in early developmental stage.”

The argument goes that it’s unjust to measure ancients by the morality of this society rather than by the morals of their own culture. It’s wrong, some say, to judge grandparents by their grandchildren’s standards.

But this approach to history flattens out the variations within each era and minimizes options that’s each of us has no matter when we live.

General Lee and General Grant were both products of their time, and they fought on different sides of the U.S. Civil War.

Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery were also products of their time, and their shared story is legendary.

We’re all products of our time. Every soul in history was a product of their time. And because our era is something each generation shares, it isn’t a strong explainer for why people take the ethical paths they do. Whatever our common factors, they affect people who are similar to us and those who have different beliefs.

There were people living during Lee’s and Grant’s era who were much further along than both men on the novel ideal that enslavement was wrong. (There were also ancient Greeks who’d figured this out—before the era of Christ.)

Some people in the 1900s made safe homes for their trans children; others worked to explain the relationship between coal burning and greenhouse gases. These innovations aren’t all new and contemporaries aren’t necessarily that much further ahead than our ancestors on maintaining open-hearted welcome or brainstorming about climate action.

I’ve befriended enough grandparents now to recognize that whether they learn or grow isn’t an exclusive function of their age or generation. It’s also related to their choices and how motivated they are to see an oppressive environment that negatively impacts us change.

We can choose to stay open to new ideas, new people, and old responsibilities to them all. Our ethical choices are up to us, not simply when we happened to be born.

February 3, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

A second look at failure

One of the tools I’ve been using this week to cope with the steady stream of chaotic political news is playing with scales of distance and time:

How many light-years between Earth and—oh, I don’t know—Pegasus.

How long human history is.

How short recorded history is in relation to the age of the Earth.

How much public discourse about marriage has changed since 2007.

How little public discourse about race has changed since 1957.

How the US electorate swings between major parties about every eight years.

How the last four years of my life have rushed by.

How the last two weeks feel like a lot longer than four years.

I get it when historians review the modulations of social change: slavery, then Reconstruction, then Jim Crow, then desegregation, then the dismantling of the commons and the public services that have been part of it.

Reviewing these moments and movements from a safe temporal distance, even if only for a little while, lets me zoom out from the people, whole people with textured lives whose experiences—and suffering—lie behind each neat era label.

At the same time, I also get the reminder that there is no linear progress.

Even when conditions are ideal, there’ll be gains and losses and plateaus and breakthroughs and none of them will be regular. “Scaling back” when a trainee meets their limit means giving their body time to reset and their trainer time to plan a new approach to their goals.

Perhaps turn-taking through time is also part of the social change process.

The US electorate’s latest swing has already meant suffering for many, many people. It also brings four to eight years in which we, if we survive, can plan new approaches to our goals, new ways to describe them to people who don’t share them yet, new ways to express our values, new coalitions to build, and new strategies for taking action together.

If we can’t avoid the moment, we might as well use it. What will we do with this time?

December 30, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Your cloud of witnesses

A young light-skinned man leans toward the camera. He is out of focus. In sharp focus is his baseball cap, which reads 'Love your neighbour.' — Photo credit: Nina Strehl

As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created [the 20th Century Black freedom movement], that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride…

[King] transformed in his relationship with that movement, He did not see himself as a single individual who was going to bring freedom to the masses.” —Angela Y. Davis

As I’m going through my 2016 calendar and noting the major events and experiences I had, I’m noticing just how many of them involved other people.

So far, all of them involved other people. My work experiences. My relationships. My interactions with relatives. Even my insights won in the quiet of the Arizona desert.

All of life happens with other people. How smoothly we progress in life also depends on other people.

The 20th Century freedom movements that Davis addresses in Freedom is a Constant Struggle depended on people acting in cooperation with others, not acting unilaterally as if lone heroes.

Learn from them by taking another look at the dreams and goals you have in mind for 2017.

Who are the people you’ll need to work with this coming year? Which communities will you need to grow with? Which collective resources will you draw from and contribute to?

There’s always a cloud of witnesses that co-creates with us. Factor them in as you plan.

November 17, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Dialogue in hard times

Your intentions are great, but you have to deal with your impacts, and you have to be accountable for that. People are dying. We don’t have time for every single police officer to maybe realize that their humanity is being sacrificed. Structural changes are things we can do now.

[In the meantime] raise your tolerance for discomfort: there’s nothing comfortable about what’s happening.” —Merle McGee, YWCA of the City of New York

This week I sat with about 65 people at Middle Collegiate Church to talk about race, privilege, policing, and politics. It was a mixed group: my coworkers, congregants, members of the public, artists. and actors.

They shared their concerns about the nation’s direction, about state violence and protesting people; they shared their stories and their hopes; and they imagined what it might take to order society differently.

And even in that group of people all holding in common a concern for a just society, these were difficult conversations to have. A panelist shared his process of releasing the racism his job had trained into him. Another challenged the catharsis of focusing on the exceptional individual and leaving the system unchanged.

The statement I’m still mulling over is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. At the heart of a society that doesn’t consume those in it is our mutual ability to perceive one another as we are: connected, related, one people.

If we can’t bake that basic awareness into our culture, every superficial and substantive change will be a band-aid. We’ll be tempted to snipe at our neighbors for not living or engaging the system in the same ways we do. We’ll wonder where “the youth” are, even if they’re entirely busy with direct action elsewhere.

It’s the fundamental belief that the so-called Other is also part of “me” and “mine” that frees us up to live like it.

October 22, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Resisting conventional waste

Imagine the power of entire teams of people who know who they are and bring their whole selves into collaborative relationships. Imagine communities filled with people who reach out to other people they respect and whose work they love enough to amplify without drama, score-keeping, or the hope of extra credit. Relationships win the race!

“These are counter-cultural priorities, yes. But they yield innovative, financial, and relational results that are far better long-term than living small-hearted, grasping, isolated, and suspicious.” —Me, in June

I’m preparing to move a few states north (details soon, I promise). So I spent several hours this weekend walking around my next work city, reviewing housing options, and learning more than I ever expected about urban apartments.

I also had thoughts how this culture structures itself around plenty, but in so doing, often produces wastefulness.

The first all-you-can-eat buffet I went to in this country was a chain diner in Texas. For so many dollars per meal, one could have as many entrees as one had fingers, and as many different kinds of food as one had toes.

That first time, I piled plates as high as I wanted, and it seemed cost effective until I realized that my wide eyes weren’t soundly judging my actual hunger. The structure of the restaurant made it easy to overestimate how much fuel I could spoon into my body and how much value an all-I-could-eat meal ticket could reasonably give me. I eventually grew disgusted about the meal scraps that restaurant staffers later threw away.

I thought of that diner recently while exploring a 60 year old high-rise with a mandatory heating plan. The building’s management company administers the heat. Residents automatically receive central heat, but can’t customize or modulate it. So, physics being what it is, the top of the building swelters, only the mid-level floors get reasonable temperatures, and no one can opt out.

This sort of plan is attractive to people trying to save cash: how sweet not to have to worry about heat. But I balked quite hard when our tour guide recommended opening windows to let excess heat out. It assumes that waste is normal. Energy conservation, apparently, is not.

Focusing on the micro picture, i.e. how an apartment’s chosen approach allows individuals to rebalance their budget, can sometimes undermine the macro picture: that we are where we are because of both individual and collective choices, that we can stand to be more careful with each other, that we can be more conscious of how whatever works for some of us might nevertheless impact others of us downstream.

“I’m having a really strong reaction to this heat,” I said, sweating.

But the macro picture of collective wastefulness remains whatever I do or don’t do. There’s a structure operating in this and other complex scenarios that is much greater than my own scruples. That structure doesn’t bend because of individual components. We have to learn to deal well anyway.

June 20, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

The next doable thing

I learned a new term today: the adjacent possible.

This term comes from Stuart Kauffman’s 2002 theory of biological development and has run the usual distance from hard science to technology and theories of social change. (See Wired‘s 2010 feature with Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on creativity and innovation.)

The adjacent possible is the space just next-door to our present cognitive location, the space where, from our current vantage point, we can perceive and understand something that’s new, but not so unfamiliar we read it as foreign and worth resisting.

The *adjacent possible.* Image via Paul Hasselbeck.

If you have no history of budgeting and prefer to wing your way through the month’s spending, the adjacent possible might be writing down the amount of a bill right after you pay it. If you can do that next doable thing with each bill through the month, then by the end of the month, you’ll have the start of a budget.

If, like I did earlier this year, you’ve stalled on your writing process, the adjacent possible might be committing to at least 10 minutes of writing per day after something you already do, and celebrating your achievement every time you complete 10 minutes.

The question isn’t the quality of writing. What’s important is that you write as intended. So the next doable thing creates momentum: over the last month, I’ve found it hard to stop at 10 minutes, and if I must, I want to come back to it.

This concept may apply to learning and social change too. When I’m explaining an unfamiliar idea to someone in a tutorial or a presentation, the adjacent possible holds ideas that are related to their current area of mastery and just a stretch or two beyond that. It can be a dance to avoid pushing too far, and it’s always clear when I have!

But in social systems that are based on the continuing oppression of any minoritized group (i.e. all of them?), it can seem that any stretch leaps beyond the adjacent possible and sends the status quo into violent resistance.

We hear moderate appeals “not to rush progress” and to “give the leaders the benefit of the doubt” because, though tied to the way things are, and in some cases financially invested, “they’re doing their best to make changes that will stick!”

It’s hard to square these theories of learning with the human costs that patience exacts from real people. And tonight I can’t square them, even if I realize they’re probably right.