Matters arising

FOUR. March 6th 2019

In contention for ‘highlight of my activism journey so far’: the feeling of hope and solidarity engendered by finding myself among 700,000 people at the second People’s Vote march; the unexpected thrill of being arrested on Lambeth Bridge at the first big climate demo and hearing the cheers of hundreds of people behind me as I was marched away by two policemen (who, by the way, were very nice about it).

The low point is to be found somewhere among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of minutes of discussion about stuff  in draughty halls or overcrowded front rooms.  Agendas are circulated. Minutes are read through and agreed. Proposals are made and voted upon. Most of us are patient and stoic, team-spirited to a fault, recognising that this is somehow what we have to do in order to ‘get organised’. Somewhere, sometime, as a result of these machinations, no doubt as necessary but also as tedious as cleaning the bathroom, somebody actually does something. I suppose this is activism, but it really doesn’t feel like it.

Most likely, if we didn’t do this, we would never get anything organised and we wouldn’t build the sense of familiarity, connectedness, trust and solidarity  necessary to mount a challenge to the status quo which has any remote hope of being effective. John Cleese once presented a very entertaining film about meetings – their pitfalls and purposes – which did the rounds in the public and voluntary sector in the nineteen-eighties and which pointed out, as a central thesis, that the purpose of meetings was not primarily functional but social; we need to get together and feel this sense of collective discipline and order sometimes, even though there might be all sorts of easier ways to organise and coordinate action than to sit together for hours on a Wednesday evening and record every last matter arising and item of urgent any other business; which, in my experience, rarely turns out be urgent, except in the sense that the person raising it feels an urgent desire to speak about it.

This brings me onto a particular problem with meetings, which is the tendency for their real purposes to be hijacked by the personal needs and interests of one or two individuals. This is partly why Cleese made his film and tried to convey the importance of good ‘Chairing’ and other procedural skills which can help things to go smoothly. If there is not good Chairing, plus attentiveness and discipline from most participants, and if there are people present who we might describe as having “high needs”, then the meeting can quickly become a drain upon rather than a support to the group’s energies and endeavours, Meetings in general may start to be experienced as a drain (Cleese’s film was entitled “Meetings, Bloody Meetings”) and, feeling themselves alienated, activists will drift away and become lost to the cause. Of course, this is one very big reason why the world of national politics is dominated by manipulative people with insufferably large egos and unappealing personalities; their needs are so high and their capacity to meet them anywhere else except within a political organisation so low that they are prepared to devote twenty odd years of their weekday evenings to enduring these meetings – which are generally something like 10 percent creative. 30 percent useful, 30 percent frustrating / infuriating and 30 percent plain boring – until they inevitably rise to a position of power.

I’m realising that the simple act of attending meetings  – being seen and sometimes heard and eventually recognised – is an important part of building a base for influence, whether or not one hopes to rise slowly through the ranks, like the current Prime Minister apparently did, to a position of eminence (which I don’t). It makes complete sense when you think about it and it accords with the results of research by psychologists and behavioural economists about how people form beliefs and opinions, but it’s bit depressing; the fact that you’ve seen someone around a lot, recognise their face, their name, makes it more likely you’ll trust them and maybe even start to admire them and think of them, for no better reason than their familiarity, as a potential leader.

Having said that, it’s also true to say that it’s quite easy to get tired of some people quite quickly. My schedule has been quite dense with meetings of late and, having sat with a wide variety of people for hours at a time, I can testify that one two of them should definitely not be considered as potential leaders of anything; although of course this doesn’t mean they won’t be. Being the wrong sort of person to be in charge, as is evident from a brief look at the TV news any night of the week, is no disqualification.

It might be possible to divide into two broad groupings the people who cause problems at meetings. They are  (a) high-needs people who are not suitable to be in charge but want to be and (b) high-needs people who don’t want to be in charge but whose need for attention hampers the efforts of those who do. The first group (obviously, Trump is the archetype) are likely to get power and then do something bad with it. The second group is likely to prevent anyone achieving anything. Both put their own needs way ahead of the group’s.

Because we seem to need to have meetings, managing these people is an important activity and if we don’t have skilful Chairing etc then the proportion of creative / useful  time in the meetings will decrease and the proportion of frustrating / infuriating time will increase. (The boring bit I think we just have to live with). The task of getting organised to bring about change needs to be well managed if it is to avoid being an actual obstacle to change.

In one of the organisations with which I’m involved it has been interesting to observe a different approach to the this task, one which seems to side-step some of the pitfalls of the traditional approach – agendas, matters arising, any other business, and whatnot –  by employing an apparently less-organised approach. Using terms and ideas like ‘self-organising’ and ‘holocracy’ they permit themselves what seems like a loose and even chaotic style and structure which, while it may suffer from an apparent lack of order and imposed discipline, has the advantage of avoiding getting stuck in disputes about subsection 3.5 (b) of the Minutes of the last meeting or of participants losing the will to live because the need to stick to a rigid format and/or the failure to actually keep people to it and to allow them to talk endlessly about their pet personal interests (and sometimes even their pets) has meant the meeting overrunning by 2 hours. 

Indeed, in these meetings, there are no minutes or matters arising or any other business, which I must say is a merciful relief. Maybe it’s there at other levels in the organisation but at least at my ‘foot-soldier’ level, so far,  it isn’t. The absence of this stuff has been refreshing if a bit scary. Empowering people to just get on with things rather than trying to corral them with bureaucracy seems to have enabled a lot of action to get going very quickly. The pace has been invigorating, the atmosphere creative and relational, and nobody turns up to things with that ‘meetings, bloody meetings’ look.

Perhaps most cheering of all, it has given grounds to question a mindset long held my me and others of my acquaintance, which basically goes along the lines of the left being unable to organise a piss-up in a brewery. I have evidence of this with which I won’t bore you as I expect you have your own. Whatever the paucity of the right’s message, they are generally better at getting it across, and whatever their moral bankruptcy the coffers are full for reasons which go beyond the relative wealth of their supporters. Say what you like about Mussolini, as the saying goes, but he made the trains run on time.

The fact is that with apparently quite ramshackle structures, plus methodologies for organisation and communications which were set up very rapidly and appeared to rely largely on imagination and faith, thousands of people did arrive in London last autumn at the same time on the same day and organised themselves effectively enough to keep six major river crossings blocked pretty much all day and to avoid behaviour which was aggressive, dangerous or even impolite; which in my book is a remarkable achievement. There have been other large and very many smaller localised actions which have been similarly successful.

I’m looking forward to more of this, not least as a refreshing antidote to hearing those numbing words, “Matters Arising” in the more ‘mainstream’ activist contexts in which I find myself. It occurs to me that the whole business of agendas and minutes and reports etc can be interpreted, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, as simple resistance; meaning, we know what we need to do and are perfectly capable and ready to go and do it, we just don’t want to because we are a bit scared or shy or lazy, and sitting around talking about stuff is essentially easier (if boring). We avoid real responsibility like this. My inner experience just prior to the bridge-blocking stuff confirms this – I was, despite my convictions, very reluctant to take real action and I more or less had to force myself to do it.

The reason why nearly everyone of a certain age recognises the phrase “Judean People’s Front” is because the hilarious scene in Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ (also featuring John Cleese) where the activists don’t get around to saving Brian from crucifixion, because they are too concerned with getting the wording of the minutes politically correct, is such a perfect illustration of this.

I’m sure all movements have to come up against this resistance issue and will progress or founder to the extent that they negotiate it effectively or not. As the climate rebellion group gets bigger and inevitably takes on more of the trappings of the mainstream it will be instructive to see where and how this subtle resistance appears. I didn’t notice much at all of it in the autumn – we all seemed to be too busy and possibly carried away with the excitement of doing active  things – but I’m sure there are many ways it can find it’s way in even if there are no minutes and matters arising; disagreement about structures and procedures, misunderstanding and misinterpretations and, of course, the inevitable high needs people confusing their own requirement for security and attention with that of the planet. If not handled well, these kinds of pressures inevitably lead to splitting – Judean Peoples Front vs People’s Front of Judea – and we definitely don’t need that right now. Here, maybe we could learn a lesson from the right, with their dedication to solidarity in adversity. We may see this as ruthless self-interest, but from another perspective maybe they are just more serious than we are about having power (although I expect their meetings are equally tedious).