Everyone on the same page?

 - Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director

“We need everybody to be on the same page.”

What my former colleague meant, as we sat together at dinner some time ago, was that in order to move toward a more just and peaceful world, everyone needs to accept and resist notions of social supremacy, systemic oppression, and its historical roots.

I looked around the restaurant. I could only imagine the variations of experience, culture, and ideas in that room. “Do you mean,” I said, indicating the rest of the diners with a tilt of my head, “like, everyone?”

“I mean the whole world,” she said.

Often, I hear something similar in the organizations I work with on behalf of the ILI: if we can just get to enough people to know about identity and bias, to accept complicity by dint of privilege or power or social identity, to be aware of historical, systemic harm.

With enough of all that, the argument goes, we can beat inequity and injustice. We can create a just and equitable organization, or school – a whole just and equitable world.

 If we could just get everyone on the same page.

But there are so many pages-- so many ways of being human, and of being human together, so many experiences, histories, meanings, and beliefs.

It’s just too big a book to get us all onto the same page.  Besides, who gets to decide which ideas will win the day?  Which cultures will prevail?  Which expressions of being human? What kind of limitation, authority, and kind of force, will those decisions require?

I don’t like any of the answers to those questions, so I said to my former colleague that evening, “But if there’s only one acceptable way to understand the world, it starts to sound like fascism.”

I’ve said something like that on other occasions, especially when I speak to organizational leaders and groups, where I almost always encounter insistence that achieving ideological uniformity is the only way to create a just and equitable system.  I confess; I use the word  fascism for effect, because for the people I’m talking with, fascism is an ugly word, a thing to resist, a threat from the other side of the fight.

But, Canadian journalist Lynne Cohen writes, “Believe it or not, for a time fascism was cool.”

Cohen, describing herself as “just about the farthest right a person can be” takes issue with those who insist that her political heritage and positions align with fascism. She argues, on the contrary, that fascism’s home is the political left.

Cohen writes that after World War I, “fascism became an acceptable, popular and even desirable form of government, and not just among retrograde nationalists, power-hungry politicians and opportunist businessmen, but progressives and liberals throughout Europe and even North America. . . .It was only after the barbarities of the Holocaust were revealed that fascism became universally regarded as an ugly word.” 

Pointing out scarce agreement about what fascism means, Cohen suggests that totalitarianism more accurately describes that ugliness, citing the late philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt’s assertion that totalitarian aims to transform not only society but “human nature itself.”   “Wherever [totalitarianism] rose to power,” Arendt wrote, “it destroyed all social, legal, and political traditions of the country.”

That stopped me. I treasure my own expression of human nature, and I fear those who would repress it. Democracy and  the rule of law are flawed and vulnerable. So are public education, freedom of faith, and the pluralism that, for me, the heart of the U.S. experiment.  But as flawed as those traditions may be, I am deeply afraid of their destruction.

And  chants of “Make America Great Again” barely disguise a mirrored fear. It’s the fear the Republican primary voter meant when she told an NPR interviewer this week, “I want my country back.”  They hate my politics because they’re afraid that I and mine will require by force that they get on the same page.

Until it blew down recently, I had a  Black Lives Matter sign on my front lawn. Cohen believes that movement “is all about intimidation and violence ... borrowed (or perhaps reinvented) from 1920s fascism.”

I admit I got angry when I read that, because I believe Black lives haven’t mattered nearly enough, as evidenced in history and right-to-this-moment lives and deaths.  My gut response is to write Cohen off, to dismiss her as simply wrong, and dangerously so.

But it’s clear that she is as mad about being branded a fascist for her beliefs as I am about being branded a fascist for mine.  So, we’re both angry, and we’re both afraid, and fear doesn’t want to be told that it’s wrong.  Fear needs to believe the threat is gone before fear drops its fists or guns, or its divisive, mean-spirited rhetoric.   

I don’t want to be required by any force to get on the same page as those with whom I disagree. I will nonviolently but fiercely continue to resist all such efforts.  Why should I fault those with whom I disagree for their resistance?

Wherever you are, as you read this, on the socio-political spectrum of “Right” to “Left,” it’s almost certain that “they” are just as afraid of you as and you are of them.  

That standoff does nothing to hasten the dropping of fists. It does not advance social justice. It does nothing to fend off fascism. So I choose to do what I can to remove the threat, to allay the fear, instead of insisting that everyone get on my page.