the humble social activist and the humble civil servant

Social activists annoy us because they can be so full of it. They tote around their Adbusters magazines, walk in their Blackspot sneakers, wearing thrift store rags like some halo of righteousness. (Sort of like the guy who won’t stop talking about how he doesn’t own a television set)

Unfortunately, the profession naturally lends itself to pride. Being a social activist generally entails that you think you’re right and the rest of the world is not.

So how do we practice humble activism? How do we go about believing that what we stand for is true, while still acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge? How do we go on acting on issues that we care about deeply, while still being open to the possibility that we might be wrong? What would that look like? Would we be so seized with uncertainty that we could not do anything at all? Or, would a more humble spirit emerge? (One that is less concerned with being right and more concerned about loving others)

~

I wonder what happens to people as they climb up the ranks of prestige, power and wealth. In the Senate Banking Committee, it was testified that the treasury may have overpaid by $78 billion for troubled assets in its first round of investments of the TARP Program. How do you mess up $78 billion dollars? I may have overpaid for a shirt from a consignment shop, but that was $10 too much, not $78 billion. But perhaps at those amounts, the numbers cease to be real, especially when you’re sheltered within the comfort of prestige and power.

How does it feel to manage $800 billion? Do you feel confident and smart because only the best and the brightest could ever climb so high in the ranks of government? Or do you move forward with fear and trembling and much prayer?



* I use the word “we”, which seems to imply that I consider myself a social activist. However, I don’t really identify myself as a social activist because my accompanying action seems lacking. All talk, no action. However, Kalle Lasne would argue that words do matter—so perhaps I am just uncomfortable with my hypocrisy.

where’s my $100 million bonus?

Nonprofits get criticized all the time for being inefficient. Our sector is told that we must operate more like for-profits so less money gets wasted.*

So shall we go off and buy jet planes with our donor money? Citigroup did it. Or why don’t we renovate our executive offices with crystal chandeliers and mahogany furniture? Former Merill Lynch’s former CEO certainly thought that doing so would improve his productivity. Or why don’t we give our employees exuberant bonuses? It’s the only way we can make sure they will return to work.

Our sector has had its share of scandals and has not always used donor or government money responsibly, but hardly do we emulate the excesses of Wall Street even in its post-bailout days.** We may sometimes shuffle around paper and spend tons of time trying to get organized (most likely because we’re not funded sufficiently to invest in the proper infrastructure and technology!), but we do a lot with a dollar. And even if every dollar that goes to a nonprofit doesn’t go directly to paying for a bed for a homeless man, it’s at least providing a job and a salary to an employee.

There’s a fear that if more money goes towards “administrative costs”, some nonprofit employee is getting rich. Let me assure you this is rarely the case. Most employees at nonprofits are hardly paid enough for the work that they do, and almost any nonprofit organization stretches each dollar for the maximum benefit possible. Every Fed-Ex mailing, every new printer toner, every maintenance repair is questioned and cut back if possible. Nonprofits can be penny pinching extraordinaires. Buildings with broken roofs, lack of air conditioning, and old donated computers are commonplace.

Wall Street suggests far more wasteful spending and inefficiency than the nonprofit sector. Maybe Wall Street can learn some frugality from the nonprofit sector.

Done rant. (Yes, I have been ranting about Wall Street A LOT. I’ve been meaning to stop, but they just keep doing things that make me angry.)


* Lots of donor advisory articles and websites, such as Charity Navigator tell you to look at the infamous “administrative” vs. “program” expense ratios. The underlying message: Nonprofits should be spending money on program, and not on administrative expenses, because they need to be more efficient with their donor dollars.
** Though this doesn't surprise me -- I remember from my consulting days how we enjoyed food, booze, nice hotels and fancy parties on company dollars, without a thought as to whether we were using shareholder's or our client's dollars responsably. The indoctrination starts at an impressionable age.

I posted this excerpt from Walter Wink's Engaging the Powers a few weeks ago as a response to a comment on my entry on afflicting the comfortable. With Obama's inauguration coming up, it's been on my mind:

God did not create capitalism or socialism, but there must be some kind of economic system. The simultaneity of creation, fall and redemption means that God at one and the same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive of full human actualization; and presses for its transformation into a more humane order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. The Christian is expected to hold together all three.

whoever fights monsters...

... should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

~ Fredrich Nietzsche

~

Conquerors have all through history been conquered by those they conquer. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, proved either a shrewd student of history or a prophet when he reputedly said, “Even if we lose, we shall win, for our ideals will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies.”

~

World War II, many still feel, was a just, or atleast a necessary, war. Nonviolence as a means for settling international disputes is so recent—an international nonviolent movement (apart from the “peace churches”) dates only from 1914- that the means were simply not in place inside and outside Germany to mount an effective nonviolent alternative. It may well be that in ten or fifteen years we will be more prepared to respond to conflicts with an international outpouring of nonviolent resistance. So perhaps there was, tragically, no alternative at that time to war.

The point I am making is that even if a war does appear to be just, or atleast tragically necessary and unavoidable, it will inevitably require that relatively more just opponent (if there be such) to become increasingly molded into the likeness of its adversary. The greatest evils are usually perpetrated by people determined to eradicate an evil by whatever means necessary. War is not, then, a mere continuation of diplomacy by other means, as Clausewitz claimed. It marks the abject failure of diplomacy, and the adoption of means that have very little likelihood of achieving desirable ends.

~

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy”

~ Martin Luther King

~

Some of us engaged in struggles for social justice have been incredibly naïve about what has been happening to our own psyches. Our very identities are often defined by our resistance to evil. It is our way of feeling good about ourselves: if we are against evil, we must be good. The impatience of some activists with prayer, meditation and inner healing may itself represent an inchoate knowledge of what they might find if they looked within. For the struggle against evil can make us evil, and no amount of good intentions automatically prevents it from happening.

~

No wonder so many people, gentle and kind people, quiet and unaggressive people, find themselves saying at long last: “There’s only one way to deal with the Marcoses and Enriles. There’s only one way to deal with the Khmer Rouge. There’s only one language these people understand – we say it not joyfully, but reluctantly and sadly—the only thing they understand is the gun.”

To such people I say: Welcome home, welcome to the largest consensus the world has ever known: a consensus between east and west, between capitalist and communist, between mosque, church and synagogue. All agree that there comes a time when it is just to kill each other. Welcome home to the consensus on which our world is built.

Ultimately we are faced with two choices: to accept the “myth” of the just war, that as a last resort killing is moral, or to accept the ”myth” of nonviolence: we have no last resort, killing is never right. In the first case, we will come to the moment when the conditions for using violence are verified, when we reach the “last resort”. In the second case, believing in our “myth”, that violence is never justified, having no “last resort,” human beings come up with alternatives from the depths of their creativeness… We can and we will learn to live together, but only when we have closed off that escape route known as the last resort”

~ Niall O’Brien, “Making the Myth Real”

~

All of the above text, including quotes, are from the chapter “On Not Becoming What We Hate” in Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers (Published in 1992). (Is the history of the world but a narrative of violence where right and wrong is determined by the victors? I suppose the answer is not so simple.)

is this still an exercise in hope and cynicism?

Just yesterday, I rediscovered this passage from Thomas Merton tucked in between some of my old papers. A man I respected very much gave paper copies to me and two others while we were volunteering at the Woodstock Family Center in the summer of 2006. (Tim also posted it on his blog early January of this year.)

Somehow the weight and the wisdom of the passage did not quite register for me in the past, but when I read this yesterday, Merton's words were such a gentle yet truthful reminder of the futility of my half-hearted efforts and the hope that is to be had in my God.

Letter to a Young Activist

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

You are fed up with words, and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.

...[T]he big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God's love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour our your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ's truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments...

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand...

Enough of this...it is at least a gesture...I will keep you in my prayers.

All the best in Christ,
Tom

afflicting the comfortable (challenging the system)

Gramsci compared the Marxist notion of domination, by which was meant direct physical coercion by police, army, and law to political society, with that of hegemony, or ideological control though consent in civil society (unions, schools, churches, families etc.). Civil institutions, Gramsci thought, inculcated an entire system of values, beliefs and morality supportive of the established order and its dominating classes: hegemony was a worldview diffused through socialization into every area of daily life which, when internalized, became part of "common sense" (115)

~ from Theories of Development by Richard Peet with Elaine Hartwick

It’s always easy to believe in the system.* Sure, we might be critical of certain aspects of it, but overall we don’t think that much about it, because we live and function in it. We are not even aware of what the system is and how it informs the way we think and live.

But that’s to be expected, because those who are in power (and that includes those who are in power of knowledge), will work to justify their own authority. And while physical force and the threat of violence may sometimes be effective, why bother if you can compel obedience through “common sense”?

Unless we’re willing to be critical and aware of the system we inhabit—the authority structures, the institutions in place, the implicit “common sense” that we believe, we’ll just buy into the system. It just goes to show that they’ve gotten to us.

Remember that in Romans, Paul called for a renewing of the mind—that renewal must require a critical re-thinking of all our current assumptions and beliefs, even the ones that seem so deeply ingrained in us that they must just be “true” as opposed to socially constructed. We may not be able to “work outside the system” in most instances, but at the very least, we should be aware of its presence.

~

Examples:

A slaveowner over 200 years ago could feel like a ethical, upstanding human being because he treated his slaves well and did not beat or rape them.

A rich man (made rich off predatory mortgage lending) feels good about himself because he tutors once a week in a lower income community and leaves large tips at restaurants.

Wal-Mart corporate believes that they are offering a valuable service to Americans by selling stuff at low, affordable prices. Meanwhile, they are depressing wages everywhere because they pay their own “associates” so poorly.

The most celebrated way to leave poverty is to receive a good education and get a higher paying job. What about the millions of others who still must sweep the streets, clean restaurants, take care of our parents in nursing homes and sell stuff? Will they always be left out of the equation? Is our pitiful minimum wage the best we can do?

We are told the poor will always be amongst us. Are we to complacently resign to that fact and continue to bandage wounds instead of addressing the causes of their poverty? And the cause of their poverty may not just be lack of education or skills, but it may be in the actual economic system of the country they live in.

~

Working within the system is not altogether impossible but requires a high degree of integrity. You must be willing to risk losing all the benefits you may have gained in the eyes of the world. (Daniel, Esther).

~

Perhaps to change the world, one must be willing to work with a set of compromises. Is compromise bad if it is necessary to create enough cooperation to effect real change?

~

Sometimes, it may be a matter of creating alternatives or complementary systems so that others can see that another world (i.e. another system) is possible.

~

Recently, our system has been failing. Are we going to bandage up the current system and assume it is still inherently okay or do we try to build something new?

~

If it is the task of the prophet to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable and I consider myself among the comfortable, then do I need to be afflicted?



* By “the system”, I mean the set of various sub-systems or ways in which we organize and structure our life—from our companies, our government, our nonprofits, our businesses, our workplaces, our schools, our churches, our families, our property, our currency etc…

the greatest challenge of our generation

exercises in cynicism and hope (4)

~ Political cartoon by Ted Rall

Have we really arrived at the end of history? Have the great debates of ideology already ended? Is our current system of capitalism and democracy the best of all possibilities? Is our most important duty to our society now to buy and to blog? Or is another world possible? (implicit in that question: is a better world possible?)

Meanwhile, it appears that I will continue to buy and to blog. After all, I am a product of my culture.

exercises in cynicism and hope (2)

sometimes I wonder whether deep down at the core of my being, I am just cynical -- that I superficially espouse all these nice sounding platitudes about how all these all these great organizations and groups are doing all this great world in the world in order to cope with the fact that I actually believe that all these institutions are corrupt at the core and no true change will ever come of them. (we are just in survival mode. the least common denominator).

or whether I really do believe that good is possible and that hope is real and that we can create a more whole, in the sense of shalom, way of living in this world, and that anyone can be an agent of this change.