Stories that run deep within a culture arise out of the basic and unquestioned metaphors and archetypes that provide the foundation for a culture. This is true in all kinds of communities, including nation-states and villages, organizations and families. You can discover some of those foundational metaphors in your own communities by asking yourself “We are a community and that means…”
As someone who has been working with the cultural narratives of the United States over the past few years, Rob Paterson has cast his eye on the way out of the rhetorical tennis match that passes for conversation on immigration in the US. In this great post, he finds a better metaphor for the conversation about immigration in the United States:
For our debates about immigration and all important aspects of life today are rooted in beliefs and not in knowledge. Two great tribes struggle for power. Their ideology affects everything.
“Secure the Border” is a cultural and tribal battle cry as is “Racists”.
Neither side can hear the truth in the other. Both sides make the other angry. The result is that America is splitting apart. Civic discourse is dying and it is nearly impossible to get anything done anymore.
So how do we escape this trap?
I think that we need to change the rules of the game entirely. What might help is to shift the underlying metaphor.
The metaphor we use today is “Fortress America”.
In the Fortress you are in or out. There is a wall. All that matters is the wall. You make it perfect or you leave holes in it. Motive or the circumstances for people outside the wall or inside the wall mean nothing. This is a mechanical and a simple model that is not suited to a complex and organic problem.
Being simple, such a metaphor insists on a right or a wrong answer and so can never produce what is demanded in a complex problem.
It is like 14th century Catholicism when confronted by Galileo. Facts mean nothing. Only dogma and tribal loyalty count.
You can’t argue with dogma. Facts mean nothing.
Competing dogmas can only fight.
Don’t we have to find another way of seeing the issue that does not trigger a tribal response?
I think that a better metaphor might allow this. I think that a better metaphor might enable us to keep our tribal beliefs but to agree with others about things that do not need beliefs to understand and agree on.
A better metaphor is our body and our immune system. It represents the dynamic reality of America and Immigration much better than a wall. It can show us ways of seeing our response that are not in the realm of ethics but in the realm of system dynamics.
For our body, like all real systems has not a sealed but a porous border. It has open portals such as our nose and mouth and a porous skin.
The most important line of defence that we have is inside the body is our immune system. It is our immune system that regulates our body and that reacts to “newcomers”. It is our immune system that allows the familiar and rejects the unknown.
The healthier it is, the more it can defend you against real threats and the less it will overreact to small threats or even to good things. A Balanced immune system will protect you from flu and will not over react and kill you from toxic shock if you eat a peanut.
The Immune System is also affected by the scale and the power of the newcomer. Large scale and sudden intrusions will cause a reaction. Small and slow will tend not to.
Newcomers who want to enter our body have their own dynamics too. They have pathways, life cycles, reasons to get inside and reasons to leave where they were.
Our bodies are a dynamic system that interacts inside and with the outside. So is America.
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Chimamanda Adichie explains in a beautiful talk about how we construct single stories about people and cultures. This happens all the time with indigenous communities. People often hear one native person say something and attribute that quote or idea to a whole culture or even worse, to “Native Americans.”
Adichie goes deeply into how the flattening of stories results in power shifts that lead to marginalization. Spend the time watching…
And then just like that, you hop a plane from Johannesburg, stop after 8 hours in Dakar for refuelling. Take another 9 hours to arrive in New York, take a cab into the city with a great driver who hails from Guinea and is going back there to work on the democratic elections this spring, and you get dropped in front of a small boutique hotel on Madison Avenue. The air is cold and crisp and the city seems to be in a good mood.
The woman at the check in counter at The MAve Hotel directs me to Penelope, a great little breakfast place at E 30th and Lexington Ave, where I have just downed a great tasting egg and pesto sandwich on a croissant, surrounded by people talking about real estate deals, high blodd pressure medication and book promotion tours.
It’s a huge difference in some ways and just another city in other ways. I am reminded how much I love being in New York City, and how much I love eastern North American cities in general in the winter – New York, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa. All places I have some lingering presence in, some impression left on me from the dark and blustery days of winter, the days when, as a young man, I crept away to late night coffee shops to read and write poetry, or out to hear jazz and blues muted behind closed doors and windows dripping with condensation.
Just as languishing over the weekend in the leafy northern suburbs of Johannesburg brought me to my childhood growing up in Toronto – and to my partner’s childhood in South Africa – being here in new York this morning evokes a kind of nostalgia and a kind of energy for exploration. I feel like a young man again, half my age, a free day in New York, bracing air and bright eyed people. Somehow cleansed from my trip. Clear eyed.
It’s Groundhog Day in the United States, a strange holiday. The day in which one solitary animal in Pennsylvania awakes from his winter hibernation, takes a look out of his burrow and gauges what he sees. If he sees his shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter.
Somehow this captures what it is like to have arrived here in the United States from Africa. Today is a good day to wake up and see our shadows. Can we see the connection between the the crime and poverty and disparity of wealth and the apartheid-by-another-name of South Africa and daily life on the streets of midtown Manhattan? A cab driver dreams of returning to Africa to work for a democratic solution to the turmoil in Guinea, a country that hasn’t known the ethnic conflicts and civil wars of its neighbours. he worries that unless people get to work, that might change and Guinea could descend into bloodshed because the bigger powers in the world, some of them in the office buildings above us, may decide to act ruthlessly for the oil and resources that the country is endowed with.
North America and Europe has a nearly trillion dollar arms industry, much of which, in the form of small arms, ends up in Africa. the hands of despotic leaders, paramilitary death squads, gang leaders and petty criminals are filled with this deadly engineering that generates huge amounts of wealth for the North. The oil and precious metals that power our economies are extracted from the coastal platforms of Senegal, the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the diamond mines of Kimberly. Whatever we want in North America we can have. Cross some palms with dollars and ammunition and turn away from the shadow. A bright day dawns.
Our shadows are all around us, and to see them this clearly means two things. First, it means more winter – that the hard times are not yet done that weeks complicated and mindful living still lie between now and the promise and ease of spring. Second, it means that the sun is shining, something is warming my back, throwing my silhouette on the ground. And that the winter continues.
What a complicated world! What an untidy conclusion! What a way to try and capture the truth of this strange trip I’ve been on!
On the way into Manhattan today my cab driver, Bubu, asked me what my impression of Africa was. I admitted that it was limited – I had only spent a week there, most of it in a middle class suburb or on a safari ranch and all of it in the company of middle class people. But I said that the overwhelming impression was that Africa differed from North America in a key way: in Africa, the truth is valued above everything else. Here in North America we are quick to sacrifice truth at the alter of a happy ending but African stories would never do that. To do so is the ultimate betrayal of promise. To tell the story of South Africa as a successful miracle of transition to democracy would be to betray the promise of what the struggle was all about. It was about truth. Clear, shiny, complicated, messy, dark truth.
Bubu, my driver, smiled widely. “Exactly,” he said.
I’m off to Estonia on Saturday to run an Art of Hosting workshop with Toke Moeller and Piret Jeedas. To say I’m excited is an understatement.
First, this is only the second trip to Europe I have made since I left the UK in 1981 after living there for three years. It’s interesting to see how things have changed in Europe over 30 years. On this trip I am intending to connect in London, during a brief stopover at Heathrow, with one of my school buddies from those days, who I last saw when I was just 13 years old.
But the real highlight of the trip will be the time spent in Estonia, a nation that has one of the largest traditional repertoires of folk songs. Only a million people live there but there are tens of thousands of songs that are shared and sung by everyone. So important are these songs that it was through music that a cultural movement was born in the 1980s that led to Estonian independence from the Soviet Union without a single drop of blood being shed. There is a terrific new eponymous movie about The Singing Revolution which we watched last night as a family. The essence of the film was that Estonian culture, language and tradition formed the basis for a slow and patient awakening of cultural sovereignty and pride that led to mass meetings and gatherings, and the singing of traditional songs of affection for the nation. From that current flowed the courage and will to establish political sovereignty that resulted in the self-liberation of Estonia from more that 50 years of occupation by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
To offer a workshop on the Art of Hosting powerful conversations in a nation that has done that seems a trifle hubristic. But the Estonian story is one that lauds the power of vision, courageous commitment and self-government and it provides both a tremendous ground for our work and inspiring lessons for those of us whose nations are still labouring under colonial administrations. With so many First Nations in Canada clinging to language, culture and music, what I am about to learn in Estonia can provide me with some important lessons about how cultural expression, skillful dialogue and courageous participatory leadership can result in profound social and community transformation.
Why conversation for reconciliation is important: this story about neighbourhood dialogue in a gentrifying Portland, Oregon neighbourhood contains this sheer nugget of wisdom:
“The one who strikes the blow doesn’t know the force of the blow,” Mowry says. “Only the one who has received the blow knows its force.”
That quote serves to me to point out why reconciliation efforts led by the striker don’t really heal. I think a little about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission here in Canada which is supposed to look at the residential school experience in a way that hears the story. But it is a Commission that has been set up by the federal government as a part of a legal settlement. It is not the aggreived forgiving the oppressors, as it was in South Africa. It is – or has the clear potential to be – simply the government feeling good about itself, as it did with teh Royal Commission in the early 1990s.
The one who received the blow has a story to tell in this country. A powerful story that needs to be heard and collectively owned before we can truly move to justice for First Nations in Canada.
via Speak. Listen. Heal. | Special Coverage – – OregonLive.com.