My neighbour Raghavendra Rao Karkala has a show up at The Hearth on Bowen these next couple of weeks that is a captivating look at the images of dissent in the world. Spanning movements from around the world and from the late 20th century right up to the present day, Raghu has captured images of dissent, many of them portraits of dissenters in action. It is an unusual show for Bowen Island, in that it is explicitly political. I’m sure folks will resonate with some of the dissenters and not others. Maybe none at all.
The show portrays named and unnamed people, and while the political leaning is undeniably progressive, the longing that these images portray transcends partisan politics and points us toward dignity and self-determination in the face of power that dehumanizes and uses its monopoly of force and violence to enforce arbitrary laws and create dehumanizing situations. I think Raghu’s perspective is captured best by a pair of images of anonymous women. One shows an Iranian woman clasping a lock of her hair which she has cut and is holding above her head in defiance of the Iranian state’s enforcement of hijab. The other shows a woman in a near similar pose wearing a hijab which originates from protests in India in favour of the right to wear a hijab. The issue is self-determination and choice.
Many of these images show the dissenter’s head or face and their arms. The arms are raised or outstretched, sometimes in a fist, sometimes pointing, sometimes open-palmed. They are reaching for, pointing at, or demanding something that lies just outside their grasp. A future, a right, a shred of the dignity that has been stripped from them. It is the hands I most identify with. They are an invitation to join in the struggle from wherever we are, to do whatever we can to fully support the right of human beings to determine their futures and choose lives of fulfillment and peace.
For a privileged community like ours, I think the show poses the question of whether we can reach out to those in the portraits and join them in their struggle and dissent against the brutal use of power that dispossesses and dehumanizes them. The answer is not an easy yes. Who are these folks? Who am I in relation to them? What is the real cost of my support for them? And, hey, are some of these images directed at me?
Raghu’s show runs until November 3.
One of the hallmarks of a complex problem is the fact that we are confronted by paradox and polarity everywhere we turn. When a situation has a both/and in it, it is dynamic and unresolvable to one choice or the other. It needs to be managed, lived with, coaxed into a place where the positive aspects of both can coexist.
These polarities exist everywhere in human systems. On my home island right now we are going through one of our periodic confrontations of the polarities that define our place. Fundamentally this polarity comes down to an age old struggle between change and stability.
It is well captured by my friend Ron Woodall, our local cartoonist who never fails to hit issues like this square on the nose.
In island communities, there is a palpable sense of identity liked to the boundaries that encompass us, the history and culture that unfolds in a small, tightly connected community, and the state of the place when we first arrived and formed our earliest, most idealistic, and most lasting impressions. From that moment on, change continues, and longing for what was intensifies. It may grow so strong that one no longer recognizes the place and disappointment, sadness and despair takes over. “This is not the Bowen I knew.” That realization makes some changes feel existential in nature, and they are. They are a kind of evaporation of the identity that we construct and cling to. Over time, one needs to seek meaning in the changes, helping to shape them or surrendering to them so that one’s connection to the place remains meaningful. Or one leaves, either physically or emotionally.
We have many polarities active on Bowen Island. Some of the ones we live with include:
- Affordable housing and high property values
- Attracting visitors and managing the crowds
- Isloation from Vancouver and proximity to Vancouver
- Public access and private property.
- Individual and community
- Accessibility and privacy.
Polarization in communities happens when people get locked in to one side or another of a polarity and try to influence policy in their favour. Populism can easily play on this sentiment. “Vote for me and I will protect you from those people who want everything to change. Stability. Tradition. Security.” versus “It’s time to do away with the old guard. Vote for me and I will drain the swamp, get rid of the deadwood and bring us into a shiny new world.”
The reality of governance is something like “Vote for me and I will aim to preserve what’s working for us while considering changes to the way our community works that may be hard to swallow, but might take us in a positive direction, while still preserving everything we’ve been that makes us unique.” Good luck running on that platform in this age. And yet the reality of governance, and especially local governance, is that this is actually the job.
Managing polarities is a critical aspect of leadership in a community. Local government folks and the other stewards of our community have to manage these polarities constantly. The change versus stability polarity is an important case in point..Change happens and we need to respond to it so that it is beneficial as a whole, to the land, to the local economy, to the citizens and residents. But preserving traditions and identity is important too, especially in small communities where social connections are important, and where a shared sense of who we are is helpful for doing shared things, like building infrastructure, helping those in need, and fostering good relationships that can be relied upon in a crisis such as a fire or an earthquake.
There are ways of working with polarities that help folks become nuanced and strategic and adaptable to the changing nature of the environment in which the polarity exists. Barry Johnson’s Polarity Management tool is one of those tried and true frameworks that I use to help folks think through the polarities that they face. It’s a very accessible tool too, and using it allows you to see a fuller picture of what is happening. Here are some steps to follow:
- Begin by identifying a polarity. Often if there is a conflict with two sides in a community, there is a polarity at its heart. Sometimes several positions can be concentrated into an overall polarity. If you have a Ron Woodall in your community, get them to capture it in a diabolical cartoon. Lay these out on a map like the one I depict below.
- Start with identifying the highest ideal or state that both sides of the pole are trying to reach. Then identify the biggest fear or the pit of despair that both are trying to avoid. These should be broad and abstract states, captured only in a few words.
- Identify the upsides of both pole. What’s GOOD and positive about making changes? What is the benefit of stability? You are looking to identify a positive direction of travel. If you are working with a group of people who carry different opinions but are willing to consider other positions, you can even have them identify the positive aspects of the OTHER side.
- Next, identify the downsides that will happen if we tip to one side or another. It can be valuable here if people championing one side are able to identify the downsides to their position. But if they can’t, have no fear. Those who disagree with them will have lots to offer!
- Once you’ve filled out the map, the next step is to find indicators for the down sides that you can use as early warning signs of a situation that is falling too far to one side or the other. These indicators should be fairly obvious and they can be used to monitor the situation. An important skill to managing in complexity is rigorously looking for the early signs of failure. A bias towards positive outcomes will almost always create a situation of inattentional blindness, whereby the early signs of failure are ignored because mostly things are going well. With a co-created polarity map, you can put everyone’s attention to use looking for these early signs.
- Finally, identify strategies to maximize the UPSIDES of each pole. What are things we could do today that would take us in THAT direction. Deliberately focus on each upside separately. You will find that these simple strategies help right the ship when the early signs point to you tipping too far to one side or the other.
Here is the polarity map I completed around the change versus stability polarity. Click here to see a higher res version on miro.
It’s easy for local governments, committees and even citizens to complete polarity maps on their own. A completed polarity map gives you a broad strategic canvas on which to operate. For volatile situations, it’s worth reviewing the map frequently and making sure that indicators and strategies remain relevant to the context. The process of making a map can also be a very valuable exercise to build your team and enlist everyone in helping to manage the polarity. It can also be used as a process to put conflict to work for a community. For those whose job it is to actually govern, polarity maps can make visible the challenge they face as they try to meet everyone’s needs well. They can provide a degree of transparency and complexity that helps keep populism at bay and enlists more people in the very real, very thorny and very political realities of policy and governance.
I’m curious if you have used this tool in local governance and what you have learned.
The entrance to the Bowen Island Municipal Hall
A good and powerful rant by Dave Pollard on what government should do. I agree with all of it, which isn’t usual for me with Dave’s stuff because he challenges me and confounds me often. But I am aligned with this vision.
Read his thoughts on housing:
I believe the government should authorize and control the construction and maintenance of millions of units of safe, comfortable, ecologically sound housing, and offer them at subsidized prices that enable all citizens to afford decent housing without spending more than 30% of their income on them. That would drive down the prices of units currently being built and rented by private developers. Maximum rental prices based on home size and local costs of living should be instituted to make more units affordable, and homes other than principal residences that are not rented out should be heavily taxed to bring them into the rental market or encourage the owner to sell them.
And then follow on as he lays out a similar polemic for food, energy, health care, infrastructure, education, debt and universal income.
It’s really no surprise that these initiatives have a flavour of leftism about them. The left in Canada generally sees that government has an important role in society, along the lines of what Dave lays out. As a result when they get elected they tend to be good stewards of government, because they know that government matters and good governance matters.
I have very little time for the current flavour of conservatism which has been hijacked by the long journey of Libertarianism from the margins to the mainstream. In the past, I have worked with Libertarian philanthropists who are very interesting because they tend to want to develop solutions to social problems that are not dependent on government. But crucially, they are not cruel. They honestly and meaningfully engage with the real issues of our time, and they earnestly seek non-governmental approaches to these issues. With folks like this, I can have endless interesting conversations.
But I tend to seek out folks who understand governance and policy. Those people are almost exclusively NOT conservatives these days. Present-day Conservatives as embodied by the populists in Canada, the US and the UK mostly farm outrage to cover the massive theft of wealth and the commons propagated in the name of the “free market” and private interest.
Prove me wrong. Please introduce me to thoughtful conservatives who are working on policy solutions that acknowledge the reality of the biggest issues for our times and are working for a society in which all can be well, and our planet can sustain us. I’ve asked before over the years, and I’m still asking.
In Those Years
In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I -- Adrienne Rich, 1992, hat tip to Jim
My favourite scene from the Life of Brian starts with Brian appearing at a window, trying to get his crowd of misinformed followers to leave him alone. He is, in fact, not the Messiah, and exasperated, he tries to tell them that they have it all wrong.
“You’re all individuals!” he cries, to which the crowd responds, in unison, “Yes! We’re all individuals!”
“You’re all different!” cries Brian. “Yes! We are all different!” the crowd replies again.
And then a single voice, with a slightly melancholy edge, quietly says, “I’m not.”
He is shushed.
This diabolical twisting of the Individual — Collective polarity has been on my mind over the past few years. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had the briefest moment of hope that the world would suddenly wake up to pulling together and looking after our public good. We created universal basic incomes, which made the most significant difference in poverty alleviation in my lifetime. We undertook mass public health campaigns to keep vulnerable people safe and not allow our medical and health systems to get too overwhelmed. We even briefly saw our planet’s health rebound as cars and airplanes, and industry generally slowed down or stopped, and the skies cleared.
But it wasn’t sustainable. It was a temporary fix to a global problem and didn’t address the underlying causes of poverty, public health crises and climate change. Within a year, we had splintered and fractured. “We lost track of the meaning of we,” as Adrienne Rich wrote in 1992, “we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible.”
I have been on holiday these past two weeks, on Maui, and I’ve had time to read and think and rest. One of the books I took with me is Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, a recent book that traces how our attention has been stolen by social media, schooling and the workplace. Deirdre, who recommended it to me at Jessica’s Book Store in Thornbury, Ontario, last month, said it made her quit social media.
The book isn’t entirely about social media – it’s much more extensive than that – but the history of social media’s colonization of our attention forms a big part of the book. Hari traces the rise of surveillance capitalism, delivered through the toxic and amoral algorithms that drive us into deeper and deeper echo chambers at a pace and a way that steals our attention before we are aware of it. The need to keep eyeballs on the app instead of the world around us drives us apart. At one point, he asks the provocative question about why Facebook can’t help us connect physically with friends and like-minded folks nearby so that we can make something together or enjoy an evening together. Why does it not recommend amazing projects and activities we could do with friends? It could easily do all of this. It could quickly help us build community, have a good time together, and make a lasting impact. But it doesn’t, and it won’t because the idea is to keep eyes on the app and keep people out of the physical world, which requires them to put down their phones and play.
Hari traces the origins of the psychology of social media back to the behaviouralist researchers and teachers who taught the cabal of engineer-capitalists that built this world in Silicon Valley. Nothing new there, perhaps, but what is different is that one can see how it works on one’s own mind. It is a chilling read because it lays bare capitalism’s unapologetic agenda that uses everything it can to generate wealth regardless of the impact.
Our attention is a battleground and a landscape that surveillance capitalists will exploit as readily as an oil company will exploit a shale play. The difference is that oil companies are subject to government regulation about what they can and cannot do, and surveillance capitalists are not. There is no environmental protection for the pristine nature of our creative minds. The predators have been given free rein to exploit it all.
The result is that we have become radically disconnected from each other. And the pandemic made it much worse as we retreated into our bubbles and became more reliant on social media for connection while at the same time being fed a steady stream of the stuff that is guaranteed to keep us engaged with apps and not each other. I think I first heard the term “doom scroll” in 2020. I recognize it in myself as the embarrassing desire to read one more stupid thread of misinformed comments. It makes me feel self-righteous. I can take on a few transphobes or racists from the safety of my own house. But that doesn’t make a change in the world. Half the time, I might even be arguing with robots.
But of course, this is precisely the cognitive-chemical loop that creates deep attractor basins that keeps us at home, on our devices, facing a massive barrier of inertia to get up and do something. Hari points out that this is not simply a problem that can be addressed by individual actions and habits, like putting away the phone at night in another room. While those are essential strategies for reclaiming attention, Hari clearly points out how attention-stealing is systemically enabled.
I can feel it in my work with TSS Rovers FC as we build this football club and enlist volunteers, spectators, and fans. To try to make a culture around something positive that requires people to come out and participate is to buck the forces of the entire world of surveillance capitalism that wants us on our phones and not in the stands singing and supporting young men and women, co-creating community, having fun together.
A couple of weeks ago, I was having dinner with a friend, and we discussed the crisis of belonging in our world. This has been an important concern in her research and advocacy work over several decades, which has led to all manner of crises, including mental health, development for young people, and our general tenor of social relations at the moment. I think it even contributes to the most significant issues like climate change, which arise from disconnection from each other, our natural world and the community of living things threatened by the actions of our species.
This affects all of us. Our phones and laptops have handy apps that can tell us how much time we spend on our screens, particularly on our social media apps. It is way more than you think. Thinking about places where you spend MORE time than on your social media apps is helpful. To which community do you really belong? WHOSE community do you really belong to? And, do you REALLY belong?
At the moment, I have a few activities outside of work that activates flow in my life: playing music, cooking, volunteering with both TSS Rovers FC and the Rivendell Retreat Centre, writing, gardening, and hanging out with my beloved and my kids. And altogether, I wonder if I STILL spend more time on my phone than doing these things, WHICH GIVE ME JOY. Even as I am typing this, my little tracker tells me that, on holiday, I averaged almost 4 hours of screen time daily.
These past two weeks, combined with Lent, have given me a welcome respite to reconsider my relationship with the thieves of attention who rule my life. Social media is an important part of my life and is probably how you and I are connected.
But Hari points out that the stealing of attention has existential impacts. It might be what prevents us from concentrating enough and spending the time we need together to address and move past existential crises like climate change, populism, and the threat of nuclear war. Suppose we cannot give more time to the collective problems of now because we are instead tilting at the AI-generated windmills of Facebook and Twitter. In that case, we will not be able to find one another, collaborate and perform out of our skins in the service of a viable future for this planet, its creatures, and its people.
For years Peter Levine, a moral/political philosopher who teaches at Tufts University, has been a must-read for me for his musings on civic engagement, democracy, policy, history and philosophy. Today he celebrates 20 years of blogging with the release of “Cuttings: a book about happiness” that is a collection of his collected blog posts on “Happiness” which is so much more than that title implies. The book is a set of reflections on philosophical texts, religious scriptures, and poetry, Buried in the text is a little observation that I suspect says something about who he is:
So we have a model of the humane and sensitive educated person as one who has been
— Peter Levine, Cuttings: A book about happiness v1.0, p. 20
habituated by the reading of moving stories to be empathetic and thus to show mercy or
otherwise depart from harsh decisions.
I have never met this person in real life, but his character shines through his deep and considered blog posts, and this collection is a lovely gift to savour.