Collective action beyond tribalism
Between the general election and Christmas, in this dark point of the year, it’s a time of reflection.
My social echochamber is full of pain and dismal outrage at the election result, and fear for what the societal impact of five years of a Conservative majority will be. And there are plenty of people who are re-committing with a sense of long-sighted hope to the work of grassroots community building, and seeking to understand those who are different from us.
In my own reflection, I have just rewatched artist Jeremy Deller’s excellent documentary Everybody in the Place, about the history of rave culture in Britain in the 80s and 90s. It looks at its origins in gay clubs in Chicago in the early-1980s, comparing the community it grew in to church (“where people support each other and share common values”), and the impact of the miners’ strike on British industrial towns. The idea that drew me to rewatch it is the way that it showed how rave took British nightclub culture out of the hands of wealthy record producers, and put it into the hands of the people. (The documentary features Jeremy Deller teaching Karl Marx’s Theory of Alienation to a classroom of teenagers, explaining how the originators of house music were taking control of the means of production.) In a time of uncertainty, young people created their own communities and opportunities for connection, and had a sense of agency outside of the established systems of power. The documentary also shows the support that ravers had from unlikely quarters — from the then middle aged men who had fought in the Second World War, and were very happy to stand up for the young people’s right to freedom (as well, inevitably, as many who were concerned about the all night parties springing up in their neighbourhoods).
Watching the election results come in, I felt a sense of shock in former mining communities like Blyth moving from Labour to Conservative; it made me wonder what life there must be like for people to now be voting for the party that played such a big role in the removal of its industry and with it the sense of community.
I won’t pretend to understand Blyth Valley from my home constituency of Islington North, but it made me think of work I’ve done in the past exploring the links between community, power, and health. There has been a lot of public health research into the impact of the loss of industry in British towns in the 1980s, and particularly the unequal impact it has had in places like Glasgow. The impact of the collapse of the industrial economy took time — those who were of working age in the 1980s had a higher rate of suicide and drug related deaths ten or twenty years later, correlated to the long term impact of the loss of jobs, community, meaning, and power.
The role that community, connection and meaning play in addiction are explored in Russell Brand’s excellent book, Recovery, which explores the 12-step programme pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous and now used by many more groups. With the idea that addiction is closely linked to a lack of connection, it’s not surprising that addiction takes hold in places that have lost their sense of community.
I wonder about how these themes have influenced voting decisions in the many towns that lost their industry and work-based community 35 years ago. It isn’t too hard to draw the link between a loss in a community’s sense of agency, and the promises of ‘taking back control’ made around Brexit.
A research project that I did for Guy’s & St Thomas’ Charity in 2015 was looking at the role that a sense of agency has on people’s health, and how that relates to community. The outcome of the project was to recommend that this health charity invested in helping local people to believe that they can affect their circumstances — seeing that this would be the step that would make the biggest impact in people’s health.
So this is where I see the links between the story of rave culture shown in Jeremy Deller’s documentary, the health benefits of communities in touch with their own power, and the role that churches can play.
What I understand spiritual health to be has a lot to do with having a sense of our own power, and the ability to use it in a way that aligns to our values. This is why taking part in a congregation is so rewarding, and so different to being a passive consumer — just as co-creating a rave was presumably more rewarding and meaningful than turning up as a passive consumer of a commercial nightclub experience.
I love this article about how ‘volunteering’ is not what we do at church, just as you don’t ‘babysit’ your own kids. As it says, “to volunteer means that you are an outside resource, stepping in to help an organization in need”, and suggests that ‘volunteering’ is rooted in consumer culture, rather than reflecting that we are tending to something that is ours.
The creative expression that’s possible in co-creating community initiatives is good for us. Our congregations are places that offer these opportunities to people, whether it’s in helping to pack up the hymn books, or lead a service, or give a listening ear over a cup of tea.
In our secular culture, where so few people are active in a faith community, there are few opportunities to contribute in this way. We are all much more used to consumer culture, where we pay our money and turn up and someone does something for us — no personal agency needed, beyond choosing to consume. Our relationship with public services and politics might be the same — it is ours, and we get the chance to make it, collectively. Somehow it often doesn’t feel like that, though, with Westminster feeling very far from the rest of the country, and so many public services operating in the impossible circumstances of reduced budgets and target-driven processes that are out of the hands of most workers.
I’ve been fascinated by the Dutch community nursing organisation, Buurtzorg, that has no targets, next to no managers, and puts the budget directly into the hands of the small teams of nurses who work together to manage the care of their patients. The care can include sitting with patients with a cup of tea as well as changing their dressings. The clinical results are better than any other nursing organisations, as is the patient satisfaction, and the staff satisfaction. The nurses have genuine power to judge how to treat their patients, and they hold real responsibility rather than having a manager control their work indirectly. It seems more similar to the real ownership that’s possible in a congregation.
So with this general election turning our eyes to how our politics and public services might operate in the coming years, this idea of collective agency feels important. Many have already been exploring these, from The Alternative looking at what a more co-created politics might look like, “where people up and down the country can, through their individual and shared creativity, work out what “being human”, “being social and “being global” means to them”; to Nesta bringing together local councils who are taking an upstream approach to addressing social problems; to Participatory City in Barking and Dagenham, a collaborative way of working together in a post-industrial borough of London. As their Co-production Lab Director, Nina Timmers says “I believe that for people to be happy, they need to have a sense of agency: we need to have a say in the decisions and the design of things that affect us.”
I see the non-hierarchical, decentralised model of the Unitarian church as part of the same way of doing things. Spiritual growth is, I think, part and parcel of building our own sense of agency, and by doing this in congregation, rather than individually, we build power in our communities as well. Our ethos or theology means that we can genuinely throw open our doors to everyone around us, and this feels like more important than ever — we need these places where people can gather, building community where difference in religious or political beliefs can be an opportunity for our own growth, rather than a reason to keep people out.
It was a relief this weekend to know that I had a congregation to go to (and invite others to, who I knew were also seeking a bit of togetherness), where I could belong, and be reminded of how belonging doesn’t rely on sameness, that community is not the same as tribalism. Rev Andy Pakula’s closing words are worth repeating here.
“In this time of division and polarisation
We must remember that every person has similar motivations — how we address them is where we differ
It is time to put aside fighting in favour of listening
Time to focus on persuasion rather than conquest
Time to listen instead of shouting
Time to acknowledge the inherent worth and dignity of each person
To welcome them in and hold them close”
