Like many folks, I’m drawn to the much-quoted phrase by author, speaker and teacher, Bayo Akomolafe: “the time is very urgent – we must slow down”. (This piece by Bayo and co-author Marta Benavides, from which the phrase originates, is so wonderful and I implore you to read it!).
This phrase encompasses a quiet but powerful call to those seeking a ‘better world’ to reflect deeply on the choices we make and the strategies we pursue in our activism. It contains a calm provocation that what we have tried before and what we continue to centre, has not worked – cannot work – and so we need to transmogrify our efforts to be what is needed in these days of pain and horror; to break the ouroboros and welcome in new possibilities.
Today, our collective responses to the anguish of people, other animals and the Earth itself, tends to embody an ontological preoccupation with segmentation, one rooted in a scientific interest in dissection in order to know, and therefore to conquer. We look at issues of gender and racial violence, of slavery, of animal servitude, of climate breakdown, of poverty, under the microscope one at a time in the hope that through a detailed analysis we’ll be able to identify what should be done. We adopt the logic of ‘one thing at a time’ and apply it to the complex and inherently interconnected nature of the crises we face, unintentionally creating an environment of competition (“climate change is the most important challenge of our time”, “no, poverty is the most important” etc etc) and missing the truth found in the convergence.
As many Indigenous thinkers have diagnosed, in the West, and Western-influenced (indoctrinated?) cultures, we have lost the embodied capacity to see the entanglement of everything. And so, perhaps this division of oppression, into ever smaller and smaller manifestations, is predictable.
Mainstream responses to crises today also tend to fall foul of a fatal flaw. We often hold a well-intentioned, but unexamined belief that by ridding the system of its broken parts and replacing them with shiny (more progressively-oriented) new ones, we will create tangible positive change for people and planet and unveil a perfectly viable system which is free to bumble along until its next part needs replacing.
Throughout 2024, I spent considerable time with the writings of Vanessa Andreotti and the research collective of which she is a part, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. Vanessa’s incredible book, Hospicing Modernity, claims that modernity (the collective of systems we currently exist within, that have their founding in Enlightenment rationalism) will collapse, and was always destined to collapse. Modernity itself is predicated on unending expansiveness, fixated on a story of continuous ‘progress’, all while residing on a finite planet with finite resources. It also is completely dependent on violence (see this great Bluesky thread from economic anthropologist, Jason Hickel, which expands on this point).
With this understanding of quite the depth of the shit that we are in, no amount of tweaks at the surface level will ever amount to a world where all life on Earth is considered and treated as worthy simply by the fact that it exists. This is true at the very same time that tweaks to the system as it stands now are completely necessary in order to alleviate suffering in the present.
Much of the work being designed and funded in the broad field of social and environmental justice is work that exists at the surface; tackling experiences of oppression in the here and now (obviously extremely necessary!) or triangulating with the interests and needs of current power holders (arguably a strategic decision made in error). This poses a real challenge to activists. How can we do what is best for all life in today’s world, operating within the logic systems, values and social norms of now, whilst not unintentionally reinforcing (either unintentionally or otherwise) these same ways of seeing and understanding the world for the future that we want to see come to fruition? It strikes me that the common success metrics and data-proven strategies found in the campaigning of today could very much be a poisoned chalice, undercutting our efforts in the long term.
To give an example from Common Cause Foundation’s work with values, let’s consider how campaigners sometimes try to motivate concern for the climate crisis. It is all too common to try to encourage people to engage in climate action through reference to the ‘fact’ that environmentally-friendly behaviour will make us all, individually and collectively, wealthier. The business or economic case for climate action as it is known is championed by a wide array of actors, from energy companies to environmental NGOs, and recently by Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, on her podcast. The justification being that to see action on climate change we need to speak to dominant concerns, namely that of GDP growth and social mobility.
But what happens when it no longer makes ‘financial sense’ to protect our one and only home? When acting in such a way as to honour planet Earth does not grow our bank accounts or bolster our country’s economic stability? Centring an economic argument not only sets us up to fail, but more than this it is corrosive to strengthening the values on which pro-environmental actions and attitudes depend.
I’m sure that doubling down on the value of wealth as a means of increasing public support for climate action today can be a successful strategy, if by ‘successful’ we mean able to motivate people to take immediate or short term actions. We would simply be asking people to make a judgement based on the dominant logic of our current capitalist, modern system. (For what it’s worth, it is also not the only strategy able to cut through in today’s world). But I am also sure that by doing so, we add further fuel to the fire of the current cultural imaginary that money and status is king and that there is no alternative. We rob ourselves of the opportunity to divert from the capitalistic ‘growth at all costs’ trajectory in the present, and weaken our chances in the future of building from the ashes of modernity’s inevitable collapse something new, founded on different ideals. To paraphrase George Monbiot, like the ouroboros, we will have gone full circle and begun swallowing our own tail. By utilising arguments that echo the priorities and ways of seeing the world which abound today in our attempts to undermine the system, what we end up doing is further reinforcing those same priorities and faulty logics that have led to the problems we wish to solve in the first place. To quote another powerhouse activist, Audre Lorde: “For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
The time is very urgent – we must slow down.
When folks active in the social and environmental justice space allow ourselves a moment to reflect (and we listen to people and communities holding different perceptions of reality) we can see how rising authoritarianism, climate breakdown, species extinction, gender violence, white supremacy etc have a shared origin. As human beings alive during modernity we suffer a deep schism, a separation from the much larger web of life – not least demonstrated by the way we perceive and describe the world around us as a ‘resource’. Vanessa Andreotti talks about this separation as leading to a multitude of hierarchies – seeing some life as more worthwhile than other life – because of a seismic disconnection from our inherent worth as beings in an interrelated cosmos. As an idea, I find much here to align with what we talk about at Common Cause as being a ‘crisis of values’.
At the personal level, we each experience deep feelings of not being enough, fuelled by the advertising and celebrity, consumerist culture in which we are immersed. The lie that we are told says that if we wear the latest fashions, do our make-up in particular ways, listen to the ‘right’ music, force our bodies into particular shapes, obtain the impressive-sounding job title, accrue money and fame, we will belong and be seen as valuable.
At the cultural level, societies have built systems and structures which worship money, possession and power. We speak a language of competitive economic individualism. Talk of connection to nature or community is deemed ‘hippy’, ‘woke’, somehow untethered from the harsh ‘realities’ of the real-world. As if these towers of babel were not constructed by our own hands. We fill our skylines with shining skyscrapers and ‘give’ land to the highest bidder. We have taken this separation from nature and manifested it in the very ways we have constructed our world. Of course, this means that every time we step out of the door we are experientially reminded that our worth is wrapped up in what we produce and what we consume, further entrenching the idea that the values we should prioritise are those that centre on our own status, wealth and power.
To work to make the world better is to unpick the harms found at the deepest levels, all while being complicit in those same harms. We can do this through becoming conscious of the underlying values and logics we are reinforcing in our work today – simultaneously, having an eye on the present and an eye to the future.
More crucially, we need to create together different work which intentionally and explicitly has, as its focus, the need to respond to the crisis of values and the deep separation between human beings and nature.
When we speak of slowing down, it is to regulate in a world of increasing speed and uncertainty. To take a moment before jumping in so that we’re not only acting from a place of fear and scarcity, but tapping into the entanglement of all. We slow down to ensure that, to the best of our ability, we’re not reinforcing the deep logics and patterns of today’s broken world in which we are all seeped; to break the ouroboros and to create space for a different relationality with life itself to emerge.
Photo by Andreas Gücklhorn on Unsplash