Skip to main content

How can we do activism if we don't have community?

This week I went to a climate action meeting. Over fifty people gathered and there was an organised conversation for two hours about the climate crisis and environmental issues. The discussion covered so many different things: food waste, recycling, vegetarianism, nuclear weapons, education.

But what does it add up to? A list of things that "we" could do, or that "someone" could do. The trouble is I come out of such meetings thinking "we" haven't really committed to take any definite action, because no one said "I will do this (with some help)." I didn't say that either. So there's just a list of things "we" could do, and no one to do them. The meeting ended and we all went home. So what was the point? My cynicism is partly due to the fact that I went to a very similar meeting about two months ago, organised by a different organisation, that did almost exactly the same thing. Again, without any actual outcome.

And it's not so much that it's ineffective that's my problem. It's that I'm not sure it's good for us. I wonder if such things just add to a sense of guilt and paralysing despair, as they just create a list of things that need doing, without them getting done.

I feel like we should be both more ambitious and less ambitious in what such a meeting could achieve. More ambitious in the sense that dealing with the climate crisis will need something close to a revolution, and less ambitious in a sense that the first step of that might be just breaking bread together and saying, "How are you doing?"

I'm starting to believe that what prevents effective activism is an absence of community. Without community I think that activism can lack both coherent structures and a deeper sense of trust in working together to achieve things. We can gather and be opinionated about the kinds of things that could happen. But we lack both the emotional and the organisational capacity to do them.

On reflection I wish what could have happened in the meeting was just a meal and a chance for a conversation about what we're doing and how we're feeling. I feel like I would have preferred to have seen at the end of the night, not a list of things on a flipchart that "we could do" (but we won't). But just the beginning of a process of loving and trusting each other. A chance to grieve, and be angry, and share and be supported. Although this might seem wishy-washy I actually think it will eventually lead to more effective action that is rooted in trust, in friendship, in community, in a deeper sense of responsibility to each other. I think it's that that effective movements are actually made of.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Radical?

When I started this blog nearly 4 years and nearly 300 posts ago one of the labels I used for it/me was "radical." Perhaps I used it a little unreflectively. Recently I've been pondering what radical means. A couple of things have made me think of this. Firstly this blog series from my friend Jeremy, which explores a distinction between "radical progressives" and "rational progressives." There is also this definition of radical, liberal and conservative from Terry Eagleton quoted at Young Anabaptist Radicals : “Radicals are those who believe that things are extremely bad with us, but they could feasibly be much improved. Conservatives believe that things are pretty bad, but that’s just the way the human animal is. And liberals believe that there’s a little bit of good and bad in all of us.” What interests me is finding a way to express the tension I feel sometimes between myself and the wider Unitarian movement. One way to express this is to say I tend

What does it mean to be non-creedal?

Steve Caldwell says "The problem here isn't humanism vs. theism for theist Unitarian Universalists -- it's the non-creedal nature of Unitarian Universalism" This is a good point. We need to think much more deeply about what it means to be a non-creedal religion. The first thing I want to say is that there is more than one possible understanding of non-creedalism. The Disciples of Christ are a non-creedal church, they say here : " Freedom of belief. Disciples are called together around one essential of faith: belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Persons are free to follow their consciences guided by the Bible, the Holy Spirit study and prayer, and are expected to extend that freedom to others." Quakers are also non-creedal and say here : Quakers have no set creed or dogma - that means we do not have any declared statements which you have to believe to be a Quaker. There are, however, some commonly held views which unite us. One accepted view is that th

What is Radical Christianity?

Radical Christianity is about encountering the God of love . It is first and foremost rooted in the discovery of a universal and unconditional source of love at the heart of reality and within each person. God is the name we give to this source of love. It is possible to have a direct and real personal encounter with this God through spiritual practice. We encounter God, and are nourished by God, through the regular practice of prayer, or contemplation.  Radical Christianity is about following a man called Jesus . It is rooted in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish prophet living under occupation of the Roman Empire two thousand years ago. It understands that's Jesus' message was the message of liberation. His message was that when we truly encounter God, and let God's love flow through us, we begin to be liberated from the powers of empire and violence and encounter the  "realm of God" - an alternative spiritual and social reality rooted in love rather th