I was honoured to be in conversation with journalist Zoë Yunker in the The Tyee – please go over there and support independent journalism! This post is going up so that I can share a link to this interview on sites that block news in Canada.
Zoë writes: “I don’t know about you, but lately I’ve been feeling overwhelmed.
Chaos and crisis are nothing new, but there’s something about the recent speed of change; its rough, sharp edges and the pain they have inflicted or will soon inflict feel particularly impossible to digest.
That can make big, important questions like “What should we be doing right now?” feel disorienting — it’s hard to know where to start as ever more staggering news hurtles towards us and clarity and agency feel scarce.
Thankfully, there’s professor and philosopher Alexis Shotwell.
Her past and forthcoming work explores our complex relationships to a world out of whack, and the ways we have moved, and can again move, forward.
“So much of the world is difficult, horrifying, incomprehensible,” Shotwell writes in her forthcoming book, Only with Others. “Changing things sometimes feels impossible.”
And yet Shotwell’s work is courageously hopeful about our potential to open up, bring our unique twists to long-fought struggles for a more just world, and be happy and fulfilled while doing it.
She tilled the ground for these explorations in her last book, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, which looks at how our imperfect responses to the world can be mobilizing. In her other forthcoming book, No Higher Purpose: Making Meaning in the Mess, Shotwell unpacks the science fiction writing of author Ursula K. Le Guin as a lesson for taking action in the face of it all.
So I asked to talk with her, because I needed to hear more about what she’s turned up. Maybe you do too.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.”
The Tyee: Much of your work focuses on how we respond to big, complex problems. How do you describe these problems, and what makes them so hard to address?
Alexis Shotwell: I start from the idea that anything we care about, as soon as we take a good look at what it is, becomes really complicated — and complicated here means it’s connected to everything. So, whether it’s safer injection sites getting shut down in Ontario where I live, or the weather becoming really weird because of global warming, or people feeling like they can’t travel to the U.S. because it’s not safe to cross the border. Whatever the thing is, as soon as we pull on it a little bit, we realize it’s like pulling on a fishing net full of different things, including fish and trash, and whatever we look at quickly becomes very complicated. And anything we try to do to fix it will have consequences we can’t predict and in some cases that we know we don’t want. Philosophers call these wicked problems.
I think many of the problems facing us right now are wicked problems.
We’ve been taught in a lot of ways that we’re responsible for solving these problems. We’ve come to think if we’re not doing a good job of recycling or cutting down our flight habits, we are personally responsible for global warming, for example.
So we have these big, wicked problems, and then this sense that we’re supposed to solve them through our individual force of will or lifestyle choices. But a lot of us who look at that know — my personal flight isn’t going to solve global warming. So we feel stuck.
I think that’s the place we can start. “If I can’t solve this personally and it’s overwhelmingly complicated, what am I supposed to do?”
What are some of the different responses people tend to have when responding to these kinds of wicked problems?
Sometimes we just try to learn more about what’s happening. I call that the “know-it-all” approach. It’s like — “I just need to know more before I take action, because if I don’t understand, I might make things worse.” Sometimes people get looped into self-blame. They spend lots of time ruminating and thinking about how they are implicated in terrible things. And I have a lot of friends who have what I think of as a “fuck it” reaction, which is basically like, “Everything’s so bad, I’m just gonna enjoy myself. And if my personal decisions don’t make any difference, I might as well have a really good time.”
Those are the main responses I see. And I understand all of them. But ultimately, they let us down. And this is what my work is on lately: the only actual solution is moving out of that level of individual response and into the only thing that’s ever really worked, which is organizing ourselves in collectivities with other people and the world. That’s much harder to do.
Why is working collectively with others harder?
We’ve been systematically deskilled in it. Very few people have experience working non-hierarchically, making decisions together with others.
People have to work so much that it’s hard to plug into activities, and the activities that people do plug into are often volunteering situations where there’s someone in charge. And of course, hierarchies aren’t bad, right? We need people to bottom-line things and host things, but if that’s the only place we go, we never develop this muscle of self-generating a decision and seeing what’s going to work. And other people are pretty irritating, so it can be hard to work with them. There’s a tendency to feel that if you’re going to be spending your precious human life doing something, it should be fun instead of annoying.
Another hard thing about collectivity is also a great thing: as soon as we move out of that individual register, the situation isn’t under our control. So we can’t be perfect with it, and we’re going to make mistakes. The beautiful thing about working collectively with other people is that we give up the idea of getting it right, and we shift into the practice of working on something bigger than ourselves that’s not under our control, but that we have the power to make happen. That’s something we can reclaim, working collectively.
One of the things I’m struggling with, and that I’m hearing others struggle with too, is this feeling of backsliding. So many hard-won developments, whether it’s around climate action or LGBTQ2S(IA)+ rights or racial justice, just to name a few, feel like they’re slipping through our fingers. It’s easy to feel powerless against this undertow. You’ve been grappling with questions of agency and powerlessness in your upcoming book No Higher Purpose: Making Meaning in the Mess, inspired by the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. What are you gleaning from her right now?
Le Guin is a science fiction writer, but she also had a coherent political view across a lot of her work as an anarchist communist. There are specific things she offers that I feel are incredibly useful to us right now.
One of Le Guin’s formulations is this idea of ongoingness. Basically, we’re never going to finally achieve things and be like, “We’re done.” Instead, her view is that we will continuously work on them in a way that will never end. Prison abolitionist Angela Davis, who has a continual refrain, “Freedom is a constant struggle,” also helps me think about this.
This all sounds really depressing, right? But for Le Guin and Davis, the idea that we’re never going to stop is useful and hopeful.
If we relate to what we’re doing as though it’s never going to stop, we take everything we win or lose as the terrain on which we’re continuing. We don’t lose and say, “Now I’m gonna give up.” We just say, “OK, now that this is the political situation, what’s the next thing we want to do?” It has this feeling of unflappability or equanimity about outcome, and recalibration. So that’s one part.
Another part that’s central to Le Guin is that we refuse to say it’s worth it for us all to burn out in order to win this campaign. If we take this attitude of ongoingness, we have to say, I want us all to be thriving at the end of this campaign, because it’s not the end, it’s something we’re doing. We commit to treating ourselves and others well, and we stop consenting to burn ourselves out.
We’re in a moment where we need hundreds of millions of people working on this. And we’re not going to do this by guilt-tripping people.
What advice do you have for people trying to figure out what they can contribute?
I’ve found it useful to read histories of social movements or to be around people involved. What becomes immediately obvious is that people who start from where they are can quickly get traction for much bigger wins than they ever would have predicted when they started out. Everywhere we have some friction, we can take that as traction: it’s not because we’re innocent of something that we work on it, it’s because I’m complicit that I have standing to say I want this to be otherwise. So any of the places where we feel complicit or guilty — those are actually places where we have points of attachment.
Instead of thinking, “What’s the best thing I can do for the world?” we can start to think, “The world is here. It’s what I’m connected to. That’s the world that I can affect.” And we quickly see how the world we’re connected to is connected with much bigger things.
The other piece is that we’re not going to be able to address really big things if we haven’t first been able to address small things. We have to build that muscle. For example, if we witness something that’s racist and we can’t say, “That was a racist thing to say,” it’s unlikely that we’re going to be able to defend someone who’s facing an unjust deportation.
All of this involves skilling up in messing up, where we begin to develop this imperfectionism around our own actions. When we try something and we mess up, that doesn’t shut us down completely. This is part of ongoingness, where we learn “What does repair look like?”
In a recent interview, you said many of us are experiencing a “profound meaning crisis” right now. What did you mean by that?
This comes back to the question of agency. When we experience ourselves as being at the mercy of incredibly complex forces that are out of our control, we can have this tendency to give up our capacity to engage with our life. That feeling of “Well, there’s nothing I can do” might feel helpful or liberating in the moment, but what it steals from us is the very powerful fact that we can do things to change the world. It’s actually very painful to pretend we can’t do anything.
Recognizing that the agency we need to practise right now is collective is a really powerful source for telling a different story about the kind of beings that we are. I think that’s true of anyone who has identified the reason they are doing something, whether it’s working or parenting or teaching, it’s always in that in-between space where we recognize we can do things, but we’re also not in control of everything. That’s the sweet spot of meaning making.
Ursula Le Guin, whom I’m taking a lot of this from, says, “To be whole is to be part.” We have to recognize ourselves as part of a bigger whole we’re offering our best to. For that to work, she thinks society needs to be the kind of place that nourishes us. Of course, lots of systems steal that from us, right? Capitalism chunks us up. Colonialism severs us from land relations. Fascism wants us to be allied with whiteness.
I find it useful to ask this question: If I were going to be my whole self as part of a bigger whole, what would that look like? What would the thing be that is uniquely mine to offer, and how can I build a society where everyone has the capacity to offer what’s uniquely, weirdly themselves?
Last question — why science fiction? What does that kind of writing bring to your analysis?
The science fiction orientation is one where we let ourselves be playful about the possibility of things being otherwise. Jo Walton, a wonderful science fiction writer, often says something like “We don’t write about the future to imagine the world that is actually going to happen. We write about it and we read about it so that we get practice being surprised by the world that ended up being the case.”
We want to be able to be surprised that things didn’t turn out so terribly. That’s what we need right now. When we read science fiction, we have this feeling: maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. If people don’t like reading science fiction, I always say, “That’s fine, then read history.”
What you know when you look at either of those, history or science fiction, is that anyone who ever did anything was profoundly imperfect. They really messed up a lot. And the great news about that is that if imperfect people did great things, which they did, then we imperfect people also could do great things, and so we probably should.
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