by Linell Ajello
…In which I learn something people already know
When Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid, and other Republican and Democrat congress members linked arms and sang “We Shall Overcome,” their bodies were stiff and their eyes seemed to sort of scatter away from each other. I’m so used to mutual partisan derision that it seems as it could be no other way. But if politicians had committed to that song’s gesture of Fellowship, what would we have made of it? I ask because I actually long for something like that, even though I don’t think I’d believe it if I saw it. There’s a sort of fraught emptiness that comes from scrolling down divisive, deriding comments underneath a news article, or the Facebook posts that act as the social media version of a propaganda flyer—reductive, sarcastic, and scornful. If these are all instances of one extreme, what would the other be like? What would real fellowship look like in a Political place?
After spending over ten years as an academic, reading about democracy and activism, this past year I began attending community meetings and church services, and I experienced what seemed to me like the kind of rituals of fellowship that seem so lacking in other, political, spaces. During the last day of a series of panels in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights era, sponsored by the Louisiana Congress of Racial Equality, a large white candle was place in the middle of the floor. Civil Rights activist, now heading a re-entry program for people out of prison, Ronnie Moore directed people to move in a concentric circle, embracing each other as they sang “We May Not Meet Again.” At African Methodist, United Church of Christ, and Episcopalian church services, the sermons regularly stress brotherhood and sisterhood, the need to extend Love and concern to those with whom you bitterly disagree. In these meetings, it seems that, scourged from political life, the call to love across disagreement wells up in places where much agreement can actually be assumed.
Because, unlike Republican and Democrat leaders, these are predictably nondivisive groups. And while I might want this kind of rhetoric of fellowship and goodwill and rituals to foster it where it is really lacking, you can’t make it a mandatory part of political participation. Voluntary association is the term for such groups, distinguishing between the public and political, and the private and social. You can’t make people like each other, respect each other, or have goodwill towards each other, right. Dictating disposition towards others—that way lies fascism.
And this brings me to Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin’s opposing takes on love in political life, back in 1962. In a letter in response to Baldwin’s essay “The Fire Next Time,” Arendt wrote:
"What frightened me in your essay was the gospel of love which you begin to preach at the end...In love, politics is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved but hypocrisy."She saw love as maybe the ultimate in voluntary association (she strongly supported the right to marry across racial lines), and therefore not the realm of politics, which should be separated from such personal things as affiliation, intimacy, attachment. For the best argument and principals to hold sway in political life, there must be an indifference to the individual, no tenderness to their hurts, no vulnerability to their charms. That is reserved for private and social life. For Arendt, the emotion and orientation for political life is courage.
Because, in order to participate in the speech and acts of political life, not only in cases such as Little Rock where it meant literally going into battle, one had to expect to withstand harms—criticism, the shock and even shame of being told you were wrong, of having your deepest beliefs, ideas, perspectives disputed, even diminished by better argument. Anyone with a stake, anyone invested in beliefs and values risked their sense of themselves as well. Because if they came to really play hard and well, to be ardent for their own cause and views as well as open and attentive to views that challenge their own, they might actually be disoriented and changed by others who did the same. So this is something to be feared, then, this situation and one’s role in it, something to enter into with courage.
Baldwin also saw genuine engagement in political life as intensely emotionally demanding. See his statement that Americans need to take a “long hard look at themselves” (in Nobody Knows My Name). Similarly, he wrote that “everything white Americans think they believe in must now be reexamined” (in The Fire Next Time). What qualities, what orientation, could could elicit this willingness, this capacity, and constitute and sustain a space for it.
What’s love got to do with that, James Baldwin?
Lest we think his calling on love was less a philosophical and political insight than a kind of exhausted plea from someone who had seen too much willful stupidity and brutality, this passage shows how he conceived of love as both calling for a terrifying reckoning and offering solace:
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in a tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” (The Fire Next Time).The buffeting that one’s long-held ideas and self-conceptions take in the face of Baldwin’s challenge need courage to withstand. Perhaps calling from his background in Christianity, Baldwin portrays a call to a steep challenge along with the belief that each person has immeasurable value, beyond whether they are right or wrong, beyond wins and losses. Maintaining a recognition of this irreducibility, and the both unique and universal value each of us contains, is what we might call a state of grace.
If we bring them into conversation with each other more directly now, 50 years on, I think they counsel us to go forward into democratic life, into the presence of others who disagree with you, bravely and humbly, or not to go at all.
reposted from Free Black Space 21 July 2014
