Last week I had the pleasure of addressing the Presqu’ile Probus Club, and what follows here is my talk. It’s considerably longer than my usual blog posts; the talk lasted 50 minutes. It was well received there, and I hope it’s useful here as well.
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Today I want to talk about agency and identity. Agency is our ability to have an effect on the world around us, to express ourselves and our values in a way that influences others and effects change. Identity is how we see ourselves, and each other, and is the basis for how we relate to each other and society. We don’t talk about these concepts much, but I think they are some of the key issues that are causing so much social unrest and upheaval, and addressing them just might save the world, and ourselves. This talk is going to start off dark, looking at the problems we currently face; but I promise we’ll end on a more inspiring note, with paths forward for action and hope. And I’m going to talk about politics, and ways that politics is being shaped and in turn shaping our society; I’m not a member of any political party at this point, so if you hear partisanship in my talk I encourage you to think on it and ask questions, because I’m here to talk about systems and ideas much more than people or parties. The systems and the things that shape them, and us, are the point today, and people or parties only serve as recent examples of systems and how they’re changing. We’ll start with a look at two types of agency, one that we seem to have less and less of and another that we might actually have too much of. Then we’ll cover that same territory again through the lens of identity, and then review a little further as we talk about how the internet changes these things; anything that’s repeated today bears repeating, and all of these perspectives are important. So you get a package deal today, three talks for the price of one. Let’s start with agency, powerlessness, and democracy.
Democracy depends on the concept of agency, the idea that as citizens we are not passive free riders on society. We are deciders. We collectively decide the best way forward for our society, expressing our own interests and perspectives and influencing one another. In the ideal democracy we make careful decisions based on the best possible information, after we’ve engaged in debate and reflection in which we are actually open to being convinced or changing our minds. We respect the outcome even if it doesn’t go exactly our way because we have the satisfaction of having participated in something greater than ourselves and in which our best interests are mostly reflected, even when it doesn’t always turn out the way we wanted it to.
But what does it mean to live in a democracy when you’re just one voice among 35 million?
What does it mean to make an informed vote when we’re facing issues as complex as climate science, artificial intelligence, and other topics you’d need a PhD to truly understand the implications of, where the real impacts of our policy decisions probably won’t be felt until generations after we’re gone?
What does it matter if we’re informed on those things, if the political positions in public discourse are dumbed down to a level that doesn’t actually address those implications, if they’re even mentioned at all?
How can one engage in careful deliberation, being open to changing our minds, when political rhetoric is reduced to “you’re either with us or against us”, personal attacks, and virtue signalling to a polarized base?
What is debate when the answer you get from your fellow voters is “wake up sheeple, do your own research?!”
What does democracy mean when the laws enacted by elected representatives can be overturned by courts whose members were appointed by the other party? What’s the value of a vote if the election itself is questioned, or its results are not respected? What’s the point of having an election when, even though the parties seem like polar opposites during the campaign, they govern largely the same?
We see these things happen every day. We’re inundated with them, mostly from the US but almost as much from Canada, the UK, and around the world. I was going to point to the current situation in the US with their returning president, Donald Trump, with numerous examples about how he campaigns in ways that defies reality and logic and dignity, governs in ways that undermine the very institutions he serves, and in almost every respect represents the exact opposite of deliberative democracy as I’ve described it above. But you already know all of that, and we wouldn’t have time for anything else, and I’d hate to have this talk subverted by charges of partisanship. But one salient point that I want to make is that, in spite of his illiberal ways, his disdain for the institutions that structure his own country and in large part the world, and his proclamation that he intends to govern like a dictator on day one (which was yesterday), plenty of people voted for him…and even more people didn’t vote at all.
Can we blame people for not voting?
Agency and Performativity
It seems clear that our democratic institutions are not up for the challenge of democracy in the 21st century. They seem to be in a state of existential crisis, with everything we thought was settled about governance such as the victory of democracy over communist dictatorships and the small-L liberal norms and institutions we’ve long taken for granted now suddenly in question. When these institutions don’t work – or aren’t seen to be working – it erodes our sense of agency. People stop voting, giving up what little agency they have because it doesn’t seem like it’s enough to make a difference. Instead, we resort to other ways of feeling like we have agency – something called performative agency.
Performative agency is about expressing ourselves, telling the world that we’re here, that we believe certain things, that we have a certain vision for society, and that we belong to a certain group. Self-expression absolutely is a form of agency, a power that resides solely within ourselves, and it feels very strong because we tend to get instant feedback — often in the form of likes and shares on Facebook or Twitter. But the thing about performative actions is that they are, almost by definition, not actually doing anything: we do them to be seen doing them, because the actual aim of performing is to connect with a certain audience. Some performative actions are aimed at our in-group, the people we identify with, to gain or maintain their acceptance: things like taking a public oath, being baptized, or even wearing a sports jersey from your favourite team, are performative ways to show that we belong to a certain group.
Some performative actions are aimed at our out-group, the groups we oppose, allowing us to define ourselves by what or who we’re against. We do that when we protest, when we change our profile picture on Facebook to demand justice for something, when we rebel against our parents or peers by dyeing our hair or getting a piercing.
Sometimes it’s both at once: making a political statement on the internet about a wedge issue pleases the in-group, outrages the out-group, and gives us a sense of identity and self-expression, all at the same time. Plus, it only takes a few seconds and potentially reaches millions of people! That feels so good, so much more effective than secretly marking an X on a ballot at the community centre on election day, not knowing if it will make a difference.
I want to stress that a performative action is not inherently a bad thing. I’ve engaged in advocacy campaigns for most of my adult life: if you can see that there’s something wrong, sometimes the best thing you can do is stand up and say something, even if you know that nothing will change yet. Even on council, we frequently pass advocacy motions, asking other levels of government to do something, largely just so we can be on record as having asked for it. We have advocacy groups, like the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, that exist almost entirely for this purpose. Advocacy is a form of performativity, standing up to be counted. I would argue that the difference between advocacy and virtue signalling is the “yet” I said a moment ago: advocacy is done with the hope that change is actually possible and will someday come, while virtue signalling is a performative act or statement done purely for the sake of being seen doing it, making it about the person doing it rather than the change they want to see. That’s maybe a fine line, but I think it’s important. Performativity only really becomes problematic when it’s used to divide us, and when it lacks substance and replaces real action, because it’s the complete opposite of deliberative democracy.
Elected officials are some of the few in our society who have enough influence and agency to really engage in deliberative democracy, but they’re under pressure to engage in performative actions too. They get their sense of legitimacy from their voter base, and increasingly voters are looking for candidates who are in their in-group more than candidates who think carefully and are open to changing their minds. In fact, in a politically polarized climate like ours, a politician who is open to changing their mind is called a “flip-flopper” or even “traitor” and tends to lose elections. What many of us want as a representative is someone who is willing to die on MY hill, and those people tend to be the ones who will yell the loudest and donate the most money and time to a campaign, which makes it very attractive to politicians even when they have good intentions of, say, staying in office long enough to enact needed reforms: it’s gotta be frustrating to leave things half-finished, and with the assumption that anything you’ve built will be torn down by whoever replaces you. But as soon as a candidate decides to engage in performative politics in order to secure that committed voter base, they lose their ability to deliberate: instead, they can only perform the scripts given to them by their base, and heaven help them if they diverge from it.
Powerlessness
Believe it or not, elected officials feel just as powerless as the rest of us most of the time. That’s true in Canada too.
At the municipal level, we’re governed almost entirely by the province – and we depend on them for a huge amount of our resources. Almost everything a municipality does is shaped by the Municipal Act and other provincial legislation, and that often includes granting the Minister power to override the decisions of Council. For the past twenty years or more, municipalities have been growing in responsibility but we still rely on the same funding formulas, which means that whenever the province gives us new jobs to do if they don’t give us money to go along with it we need to raise property taxes. That’s our only stable revenue. Recently the provincial government passed changes to the Planning Act that overruled zoning by-laws in every municipality in Ontario, and even more recently they banned new bike lanes in cities across the province. In 2018, immediately following the provincial election and in the middle of municipal elections, they changed the whole electoral map of Toronto. There’s virtually nothing that a municipality can do that the province cannot overrule, or simply defund. Likewise for Conservation Authorities, which have been systematically defunded and disempowered. As a municipal councillor who sits on the Lower Trent board, I very often feel powerless.
But at the provincial level, they have all sorts of reasons why they won’t fund municipalities or Conservation Authorities more; and they depend in turn on the federal government. The province is responsible for organizing and funding massive programs, like healthcare and education and the courts and environmental protection, some of which is entirely dependent on federal funding through transfer payments. Every time the First Ministers meet, they talk about the need for increasing transfer payments from the federal government to provincial governments. There’s never enough money, and the money often comes with requirements that amount to the federal government shaping provincial policy. While the feds don’t have as much power over the province as the province has over municipalities, the province is still very much constrained by the federal government, and individual MPPs — especially in the opposition — often feel powerless.
The feds are themselves constrained by international treaties and relations, economics, and most of all by the fear that if they do anything significant it will shock the voting public so much that they’ll lose the next election and see all of their policies undone. We’re watching that now: the federal Liberals have always somewhat deliberately watered down their climate policies, for example, on the assumption that ambitious policies would be easy targets for Conservatives who might just overturn everything if given the chance. It turns out that even policies that are watered down can still be painted as radical and expensive, and the Conservatives are likely to get their chance this year, riding a wave of outrage. So the federal government, the most powerful people in the country, are constrained by the ideologies and campaign rhetoric of others. They cling to power, and feel powerless.
Perhaps the best example of just how powerless we all feel is how frequently we hear people, including elected leaders, tell small children that their generation will solve the massive problems we experience today. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it myself, and have no doubt that it’s well-intentioned, but it’s become a massive pet peeve for me in the past few years: seeing someone with money, time, and political agency, telling a seven year old with none of those things that it will be up to them to solve climate change. What a burden to put on a child! Surely if anyone can solve climate change it would be those of us who have the ability to make change today, right? But we don’t feel that we can make the changes we know we need, so we invest our hope in the next generation instead of daring to change things today. That allows us to talk the talk, without having to walk the walk around all of the barriers that block the path. Talking about solving climate change, even if only to pass the problem on to the next generation, feels better than admitting that we feel powerless. I remember people saying it to me when I was a kid; can you imagine of leaders at that time had implemented the Kyoto Accords, how different the world would be today? My generation didn’t solve it though, and we’re already pawning it off on our kids while Los Angeles burns. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but it’s true. Even at the top of the political world, and maybe especially at the top, we reach for performative actions when it feels like we have no other real agency.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. And locally, it mostly isn’t.
It’s ironic that we tend to focus on federal and international politics, sometimes paying attention to provincial politics, but rarely paying any mind to local politics or the ways that our personal actions and associations can make a difference in the world. I sometimes wonder if this is a function of how media informs our sense of place in the world: when we’re constantly aware of the biggest problems in the world, the little things in our neighbourhoods don’t seem that important by comparison. But the whole world is made up of little neighbourhoods, and it’s at the neighbourhood level that we have true, deliberative agency. Because scale matters.
We get our understanding of democracy from the ancient Greeks and Romans, and our system is based on a thousand years of British governments. In all of those systems, the scale was so much smaller than our federal or provincial politics are today. Not only were the Greek and Roman democracies city-states, smaller in every respect than our country or province, but their pool of voters was tiny compared to the number of people in their society too. Democracy in ancient Greece was for a few dozen or hundred wealthy men who would draw lots on a given day to determine which of them would be in charge. British decision making started as lords of the land casting votes for representation, an idea that they and the Greeks and Romans before them understood to be an aristocracy, not a democracy. But in both of these cases, it was a small group of people who knew each other well, and whose interests were mostly aligned. They were all in the same boat, so to speak; or in other words, they were from the same neighbourhood.
In municipal governance we are much closer to the notion of democracy, or even functional aristocracy, than our federal or provincial governments could ever be. Locally, you are able to know your elected representatives personally. We’re generally easy to find, we shop where you do, we might even be in your club or live on your street, and we love to get a coffee (we’ll even buy!). And the things that we decide on are generally things that we all have in common, because our issues are rooted in this place, as are our identities. We are tied together by being neighbours, by being Brightonians, in ways that a vague Canadian or Ontarian identity can’t match. What do I have in common with someone from Markham, or Sault St Marie, compared with someone from two streets over, or up in Codrington, or down on Bayshore?
That place-based identity gives us something in common that we simply don’t have online. On the internet, it’s very easy to reduce one another (and ourselves) to the comments we post. Our performative comments give us a sense of identity and connection with an in-group, but there’s no common tie with the out-group that can withstand our differences of opinion. But in even the most polarizing argument over coffees at Kailey’s or Frank’s, we have our common, local identity to fall back on. We all know we’ll be back tomorrow morning, or next week, and that even if we disagree about one thing or another we still have more in common than not. We’ll talk more about identity in a minute, but for now the point is that we have more in common at the local level than we usually do online.
This means that we’re capable of deliberative agency at the local level. You can talk to your neighbours without alienating each other, and maybe even be open to discussion and changing your mind. You’re one of hundreds or thousands, not millions; you have nearly direct access not just to local information, but to your elected officials, and even to public office yourself. At this level, running for office takes a hundred bucks and twenty-five signatures; if you show up, there’s a good chance you’ll get elected. And if you show up to any council meeting, you’re likely to be one of two or three residents present, allowing you to ask questions and make comments directly – something you could never do in Parliament. And we can hear you out: we have the time to respond to every email we get, and usually do.
As an elected official at this level, I know that I can actually accomplish things. Almost everything that I campaigned on has more or less been achieved at this point: we’re in the process of getting a Climate Action Plan, we’ve invested millions into affordable housing, we’re working on new protocols for public engagement, and we’ve started an Inter-Municipal Task Force on Housing and Homelessness. Each of those are things that I have contributed to, influenced, or initiated, often with just a comment or question that eventually turned into a policy or program.
Some of these things are supported or initiated through residents, too. Residents on municipal committees can write resolutions that get brought to council for endorsement; and residents who contact councillors or the clerks with concerns or ideas, or bring a delegation to council, often end up initiating good things! I brought a delegation to council last term, which ended up initiating the Environmental Sustainability Committee, which I now chair as a councillor. Pamela serves on that committee with me, and that’s how she ended up connecting me with you all here.
I’m perhaps even more proud of the things that residents do without council’s influence or say-so. As a former Rotarian I’m still on their mailing list, and was excited to see that they supported planting trees in Brighton, working with clubs across the county who are also planting trees in their municipalities. Our municipal staff here came out to support the Rotarians, choosing locations in our parks for more trees and helping them plant, but it wasn’t a municipal initiative. Similarly, the Brian Todd Memorial Fund initiated a children’s art contest, which this year will feature pollinators; and while it uses municipally-owned lampposts and has council’s endorsement, it wasn’t a municipal initiative. Thinking about the legacy of my term on council, I will perhaps be most proud of the ways that we supported resident-led initiatives, rather than the ways that we took charge and did things on your behalf. The committees I serve on have taken this as a strategy: rather than looking to start things, these committees look for what people like you are already doing, and ask how we can empower you.
Does planting a few dozen trees in Brighton make a difference in a world of mass deforestation? Maybe not, or not much – much like being one vote among millions. But we’re not responsible for the whole world; there’s only one Brighton Ontario, and it’s our responsibility. We CAN make a difference, here. We CAN collectively deliberate about the best interests of our community, with people who might disagree with us on how but are nonetheless equally invested in our future. We CAN make a difference as an individual on this scale, or as someone participating in a group like this one. Thank you for participating in a group like this one; it might not feel like you’re changing the world, but you ARE changing the future of Brighton through the choices you’re making together today. And if you want to engage more with the municipality so that we can help facilitate and amplify your efforts, let me buy you a coffee or two and we’ll figure out how.
Why Localism Matters
I’ve talked about how our systems are changing, and how the solution seems to be to refocus our efforts locally. But why does this work? What is it about a local community that works better for us than society at larger scales? Let’s dip a toe into social psychology, and start part 2 of this talk, looking at the concept of identity and how that informs our notions of, and relationship to, community. This is a bit conceptual, so please stick with me, but don’t be afraid to ask questions if I start to get bogged down.
Sociologists have defined different approaches to living together, and we’re all familiar with the two major approaches that shaped the 20th century: Collectivism and Individualism. Let’s break those down.
In general, the “West” is individualistic, and Eastern cultures are much more collectivist. We in the west see ourselves as individuals, who associate with others by choice. We make our own choices and regulate our own behaviour (unless our choices put others at risk in which case someone else steps in to do it for us). We don’t always love hierarchies, and we make plans and goals for ourselves. We value being different, and self-sufficient. We are often lonely, at odds with our families, and our connection to our in-groups can be tenuous. We feel guilt, the bad feeling of not living up to our own standards.
In a more collectivist society, people tend to see themselves as part of a larger whole. Their behaviour is regulated by social expectations reinforced by everyone else in the family or community, and sameness is emphasized over individuality. The whole is more important than its parts, and the community is deeply interdependent; lives are shaped by the needs of the community. They tend to feel shame more than guilt, the bad feeling of not living up to the standards of others.
I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, when every action movie was really about the culture clash between east and west. Rocky and Top Gun made sure we knew that Russians were the bad guys, but also that they were just…different, they didn’t value the same things we did. Madeline L’Engle’s award-winning book A Wrinkle in Time painted a horrifying picture of uniformity and sameness overriding the very humanity of people who lived in an oppressive hierarchical collectivist society, a thinly veiled allusion to the USSR; and to this day, the fastest way to undermine a progressive idea is to call it “socialist” or “communist”. Martial arts movies — well, any movie about east Asia — inevitably featured a white guy trying to navigate a collectivist culture like a fish out of water, before showing that he was the hero and ultimately their saviour. Even today, stories about the immigrant experience in North America emphasize the distinction between collectivist cultures and individualistic ones, as the children of immigrants try to fit in with the world around them and cultivate dreams of their own while at the same time buckling under the weight of their parents’ expectations.
While both of these approaches to living with other people have their pluses and minuses, something they have in common is how easily either can become a way of disregarding other people. Collectivist societies can easily disregard or suppress the dreams and qualities of the individual; individualistic societies can easily disregard the needs of the whole. Both are vulnerable to the human tendency to separate people into in-groups and out-groups, with western individualist societies usually doing so along lines of race, gender, religion, or sexuality, while collectivist societies tend to emphasize that family, clan, and nation come first.
The middle ground between these philosophies that define us either as individuals or as a people is an approach called communitarianism. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it: “Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. Its overriding philosophy is based on the belief that a person’s social identity and personality are largely molded by community relationships, with a smaller degree of development being placed on individualism. Although the community might be a family, communitarianism usually is understood, in the wider, philosophical sense, as a collection of interactions, among a community of people in a given place (geographical location), or among a community who share an interest or who share a history.” Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is a noted communitarian.
There are many different types of communitarians, but the basic concept here is that we are defined not just as individuals, or as community, but as individuals who are in relation to the community. It’s in the context of that relationship to one another and to a given place or story that we become who we are as individuals and are able to build inter-dependency. Communitarians make space for both individuality and interdependency by emphasizing how to be and see individual people in relation to the community.
So you are you, not just because you are Jeff or Doug or Anne or Pamela, but also because you are here right now. You are a member or guest of the Probus club, in Brighton Ontario Canada, and you are surrounded by friends. While an extreme individualist might suggest that you are who you are in spite of the rest of us, and while an extreme collectivist might hold that you are a Canadian first and foremost and everything else is subordinated to that, as a communitarian you get to acknowledge the whole web of your relationships as contributing to who you are while still not solely defining you. You lovely people are part of who I am, and I daresay you make me better than I would otherwise be. This is, I think, part of what is meant by the Lakota phrase “all my relations,” which refers to the interrelatedness of all things.
Bringing it Together, Online and In Person
So what does this talk of identity have to do with everything I said earlier about how our democratic institutions cannot keep up with the demands of living in the 21st century? Let’s review a bit, and go deeper, about the internet. This is where it all comes together.
Most of us have a device like this, a mobile phone or tablet that is in fact a small computer that gives us access to numerous digital tools to help us in our everyday lives. Pocket calculator? Check. Music player? I have four! The vast majority of human knowledge and creative endeavour in digital format? You bet. If these wonderful tools were just tools, our relationship with them would be much different.
But these are not just tools. This object is a portal that can take me to a place that exists outside of space and time. In that place I can meet and engage with people from anywhere on Earth, or maybe beyond; and I can do so in real time, or I can reply to something that was said ten years ago. And because I engage with these people in a placeless place and at any given timeless time, everything is anywhere and anytime is now. And the only thing that I know about these people in this placeless place and timeless time is whatever they’ve posted, most likely an opinion. Living in an individualistic society, I value opinions — or rather, I value my ability to hold and share and broadcast my opinions, and often wish that I heard less of other people’s opinions. For a collectivist who places national identity above their very sense of self, what would it mean to transcend place to engage with people you cannot definitively identify by their membership in your in-group? (And is that why China and North Korea restrict the internet so much?) And as a budding communitarian, what does it mean for me if I am defined by my relationships to people of whom I only know certain opinions, and to places that are everywhere and nowhere? The basis of identity, however we slice it, doesn’t quite fit in the internet age.
That’s why, no matter which way we see the world, a great many of us are deeply insecure in the internet age. Our categories for people are breaking down as we transcend space and time. We live in a constant state of crisis, as we consume a constant flow of news from war zones on the other side of the planet or political fiascoes in other nations, all things that we cannot resolve because they often don’t actually impact us in the first place and more importantly we have no agency in relation to them. We feel impotent and insecure, despite the world in many ways being the most prosperous and safe that it has ever been. But our sense of agency and our very sense of self are challenged by the portals in our pockets to the timeless time and placeless place where most of us, increasingly, live our lives.
What do we do when we’re insecure and looking for a stronger sense of self? We look for belonging in an in-group. And since we’re mostly in the placeless place of the internet, we find an in-group with people whose opinions sound good to us. We used to say that opinions are like assholes, everybody has one and should keep it to themselves; now we spend much of our time in a place where opinions are our defining features, and how we find online community. We seek out opportunities for performative action, voicing opinions about matters on the other side of the world or in the upper echelons of governments because that’s the only kind of agency we can have about those things, and telling the world what we think of that is a way to tell ourselves who we are and find the community that we need. And of course, if we find an in-group to belong in, we also necessarily find an out-group to define ourselves against. This increases political polarization. For a time we thought that social media algorithms were sorting us too well into “echo chambers” where we only ever heard opinions we agreed with; that has since been disproven, and newer studies have shown that people are not radicalized by going too far down the rabbit hole of one particular viewpoint, but rather by constantly being shown the worst of the out-group, seeing too much of the opinions we not only disagree with but increasingly that disgust or enrage us. We are not radicalized toward anything, but against something or someone.
While the internet might give us access to the latest scientific literature and official information, it’s also a context where we’ve learned not to trust one another; the people we’ve learned to define by their opinions might actually be bots intending to manipulate us, and that scientific breakthrough we just read about might have been reported by a blog site that’s misrepresenting the findings to try to sell us supplements that may or may not be healthy. At least at the coffee shop, we know that Steve likes to hear himself talk and that Lisa likes to be provocative, we can take their comments with a grain of salt. But more than that, we can ground their comments in the person and place and context that we know. And we can stick it out, spending real time together in a particular place, getting past an offensive or disagreeable comment and continuing the conversation. Awkward pauses only take a moment, but those don’t exist online; in that timeless place the offensive comment is made in the eternal now, so the awkward pause can only be resolved by us changing our minds about it or deciding not to engage with it anymore; and when a person is just their posted opinion, removing the comment often means removing the person. But at the coffee shop, we get to sit in an awkward silence for a moment and then change the subject.
But let’s apply our notion of communitarianism in a local context: if we are defined in part by our relationships with the community, then the things we do to enhance and support the community ultimately also enhance and support our very selves. Planting a tree with Rotarians and municipal staff didn’t just make my community nicer, providing shade for others to enjoy for decades to come; it didn’t just provide shade for me when I want it; it made me into the kind of person who plants trees, and the kind of person who helps out, and the kind of person who has a stronger relationship with my municipality and a local club and the people who make up both of them. Community improvement is self-improvement — and vice versa.
And what defines Brighton? We can apply the same concepts to a town. We could say that Brighton is defined solely by the people who live here, or solely by virtue of being an Ontario municipality, or in Canada; but we know that we’re defined not just by who lives here, but also where we are, our history together, and our relations with other towns and governments and places. Improving Brighton improves Northumberland, and Quinte, and Ontario, and Canada, and the world. The actions you take as an individual, and the actions we take in our clubs and groups and municipalities, transform all of us at the same time. They do it on a scale that is almost imperceptible to us, but that’s the way that real change — even transformation — actually happens. We’re so used to seeing the change we need at a global scale, we can’t even see small-scale local change anymore, much less the point of it. But if we determine to live our lives on a local scale, we can more easily perceive those changes, and feel empowered by them. Our sense of having no agency is largely because we’ve become accustomed to living our lives on a different scale; if we can commit to a local, communitarian mindset, we can see that we’ve never lost our agency. Then we can be less insecure in the way we engage with the larger scale, placelessness, and timelessness of the internet and politics in the internet age.
You might have noticed that we’re talking about feeling, and thinking and talking. But what about acting? Isn’t that what real agency is about? Deliberative democracy begins with feeling, with our sense of who we are in relation to one another, our sense of whether we feel powerful or powerless; those feelings shape our thinking and prompts our talking, debating and influencing and converting, before we can move on to actions. Our agency begins with emotion, language, and expression. So long as our ability to really engage in that thinking and feeling and talking is stilted by the identity crisis we’re experiencing as we increasingly live in a timeless and placeless world defined by posted opinions, we will act less. And acting less further undermines our sense of agency, increasing our angst. We yearn for someone, anyone, who can act.
Of course, the only person who can act in such a situation, much less act definitively and swiftly and at a scale that satisfies our deeply felt sense that we need to act now to solve these festering problems, is the person who doesn’t care about those democratic norms and processes. The person who is not burdened by the collectivist notion of the good of the whole, or by the sense that they are at least in part defined by their relationships with others. John Donne told us that “No man is an island, entire of itself.” The narcissist disagrees, and unfettered by the opinions or expectations of others or any sense of obligation to the community, acts. And that works in a world that’s increasingly defined by that sense of powerlessness we feel when we live online; it doesn’t work nearly as well in a small town where we actually have the ability to make change. That’s why we see populist movements and support for dictatorships around the world, but not nearly so much in our small towns. That’s yet another reason why neighbourhoods, communities, towns, and cities are more important than ever.
So to recap:
-Our democratic institutions require more of us than we can really give in a world this complex and polarized and post-truth;
-Those institutions also offer us less and less functional agency, less sense that we can actually make real decisions that make a difference in the world;
-So we look to performative agency, that source of self-determination that is our own, the ability to show the world who we are and what we think;
-This gives us the ability to find people who share our perspective, and we form an in-group around our common story, but at the same time form an out-group to define ourselves against;
-The internet is a timeless and placeless place we access from a portal in our pockets, and in this place we have nothing in common with anyone other than our opinions;
-Being dislocated from our time and place can make our sense of identity quite fragile, making us feel insecure and craving that connection of real community with others;
-None of us have practical agency on the internet, we only have performative agency, and so we rely more and more on our opinions and the in-groups they form to feel less powerful even though we aren’t actually accomplishing anything there;
-Our sense of powerlessness, amped up by our internet-bolstered insecurities, makes us yearn for anyone with enough power to actually do something while the world feels like it’s falling apart, leading to a rise of populist authoritarians who aim to break down the institutions that no longer serve us the way that they’re supposed to.
BUT
-the scale, geographical rootedness, and immediacy of our own little town, neighbourhood, community provides an antidote:
-it roots us in a particular place, and we have that in common with one another;
-it gives us commonalities that help us get past our differences with an awkward pause;
-institutions exist at a scale that is still accessible here, so we CAN make a difference;
-change happens in smaller doses here, but we can re-learn to see it;
-community care is self-care, and vice versa, as we are shaped by each other;
-as we shape Brighton, we shape Ontario, and Canada, and the World, in small doses;
-by focusing locally we can re-learn to only seek agency where we have responsibility.
This is our town. I am me because I am here, and here with you. And I have the power to make Brighton better for you, and you have the power to make it better for me, and we all become better in the process. So forget the portal in your pocket. Thank you for being HERE today.