There’s a special skill that many change makers and activists seem to share. No, I’m not talking about the ability to successfully organize events or the stamina required to keep going in the face of opposition. What I’m thinking about is the remarkable ability to derail almost any conversation with our strong feelings on the issues and causes most dear to us. It’s a ‘talent’ perhaps best portrayed by Rachel Dratch as her SNL character, Debbie Downer. I’m sure you’ve seen the skit; a group of people are having an otherwise enjoyable conversation until Debbie brings everyone down by interjecting increasingly bleak news followed by the iconic ‘wah wah’ sad horn blast. Like Charlie Brown or Eeyore before her, she has become yet another archetype for gloom and doom.
It’s funny; but also hits a little too close to home.
With the holidays now here, many of us will likely find ourselves sitting around tables with family members and friends and certain passions, frustrations, or opinions are likely to come up. So, in that spirit, I thought it might be worth reflecting a bit on how people tend to respond to the news of injustice or suffering in our world in hopes of making those conversations more fruitful.
A while back I came across an article by Venkatesh Rao that I feel adds some important insight into this topic. In it he describes this thing he calls Ark-Head as a common way in which people respond to the growing list of catastrophes we regularly hear about. He writes,
“We’ve given up on the prospect of actually solving or managing most of the snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards…
We’ve concluded that the rational response is to restrict our concerns to a small subset of local reality–an ark–and compete for a shrinking set of resources with others doing the same. We’re content to find and inhabit just one zone of positivity, large enough for ourselves and some friends. We cross our fingers and hope our little ark is outside the fallout radius of the next unmanaged crisis.”
Though most would likely not say it quite like that, I have found that this sort of limited capacity to understand or take on new problems has become a common barrier in onboarding people to a particular cause or issue.
I admit that I used to only see this sort of response as a lack of empathy but I think this article helps frame it in a different way - a sort of mental survival mode that kicks in in the face of too many problems. However, I also don’t want to give this too much of a pass. There’s more going on here than people simply feeling overwhelmed. Rao makes this really intriguing point later on in the article about the decline of world-saving ideas, suggesting that “those who pursue global insight-peddling ambitions seem oddly anachronistic and tone deaf to the zeitgeist today, and wonder why the world is paying less attention to them than they’d hoped.” What he does describe as a growing apathy got me thinking about systems. While not an entirely new thing, it has become much more mainstream to think about problems in greater complexity than we used to. And, as this emphasis on the interconnectedness (or, intersectionality) of things has become the more dominant way to understand the world, it has forced us to grapple with the question of whether or not good intentions are good enough?
Maybe think about it like this: there was a time - not so long ago - when big, world-saving ideas were celebrated because they were simple (buy a pair of shoes and a child in an underdeveloped nation gets a pair as well). Today, that sort of approach is highly criticized against a more complex way of understanding the world and the rippling consequences of our (often) careless good intentions. Now, let me be clear, they deserve to be! Those of us who have benefitted from the privilege and power of this system have too often naively believed that its tools could be used to somehow fix its failures (to paraphrase Audre Lorde). That being said, I do think it is worth considering the relationship between the criticism of good, yet misplaced (or destructive) intentions and the rise of this ark-head mentality. It’s something I have encountered in older, mostly upper class people who seem to be feeling that society has turned against all the good that they thought they had done in their lives. In response, many seem to be taking their resources and putting them towards the causes and solutions that still fit their worldviews and values. It’s a form of ark-head that gets further entrenched with every argument.
I don’t want to suggest that these mentalities shouldn’t be criticized; but we need to have these conversations with Uncle Mark in a way that helps him connect his good intentions to doing the most good thing for the present state of the problem. As a wonderful writer once told me, it’s not enough to be right; you have to be right in a way that cares for the other person.
All that to say, as we gather with loved ones throughout this holiday season maybe we can try our best to switch up our narrative from slipping into doom as we talk about the things we care about. Maybe we can try an approach that reaches people with something more than bad news. Rao ends his article by suggesting that perhaps the way out of this ark-head mentality is to “keep trying to tell stories beyond ark-scale until one succeeds in expanding your horizons again.” It’s an approach that pairs well with a really fitting theme for this season, that of hope.
Hope is rooted in the wonderful potential of the work that we do. It does not give in to either misplaced optimism or doom and gloom pessimism because it leaves the door open for either outcome. Even when it seems like we’re failing in the short term, hope keeps us going because, as the sticker on my office wall outlandishly declares, ‘the future is unwritten.’
This is the posture I am going to attempt to take as I talk with my family and friends over the coming days; one that places hope at the centre and leaves room for everyone to join in. Hopefully I ruin a few less parties this year this way. Wah wah.
Great piece, Ben. I've been thinking a lot in the past few years that ENGOs and the environmental community in general needs to start focusing more on solutions based, collaborative advocacy, as opposed to the more oppositional posture it's more associated with historically. Good reasons for that, but I think reality is forcing a convergence between status quo institutions and outsiders/ environmentalists who've promoted public good issues, such that collaborating for solutions increasingly makes sense.