Introduction: Reclaiming Our Humanity
This introduction begins a new blog series on Reclaiming our Humanity. This series stands as my own response to myself, and recent posts I have written naming various ills and evils of our world. I began with broad strokes in “The Trifecta of Evil” and picked apart 3 specific issues, and then I started delving into power here and here.
I document and name the pathologies and toxicities I see within myself, my culture, my world. Facing these hard things is a first step in reclaiming our humanity, and our re-entry into a healthy and generative place within Creation. Denial and nostalgia are significant obstacles to our spiritual and cultural growth and development.
Rather than feed any scapegoating or make it easy to detach ourselves from complicity, I decided to discuss the systemic, that whole which is larger than any data set of parts. Concern about the loss of our national security and safety nets has had me thinking about what we have built, what we are inheriting, what we are passing on in regards to our systems of care. The first post in this series was called “Our Deep Systems of Inhumanity” and was an attempt to name the deep brokenness in a few of our least functional systems, education and healthcare. The second post called “Reclaiming Our Humanity: Systems are People, People Are Systems” spoke broadly about systems themselves, and how I’ll use that idea in context.
We will be well served to more deeply understand the systems around us, how we encounter them, what we can do to affect them. We must engage the powers in order to transform them, we must engage the powers to recall them to their highest purposes. We must stand free of their control over us, the use of fear and momentum, expectation and convention, to dictate our behavior. For we have all we need to build generative and life-giving systems.
Systems & Choices
When I began my most recent musings on systems this year, I started with one of the most popular and familiar models, family systems theory (FST). This body of work is basic fare for most of the social intervention world, from psychology, therapy, and counseling to education, theology, and sociology. An academic at Portland State University did a nice and succinct job of an FST overview, which you can find here.
I especially appreciate that the author, a Dr. Morgaine, framed FST within broader systems work, and provides a few definitions of systems:
Any system is defined as a bounded set of interrelated elements exhibiting coherent behavior as a trait. (Constantine, 1986). Another definition is an assemblage of objects related to each other by some regular interaction or interdependence (Webster).
I’d thought to enter into a more indepth view of systems by writing about transportation, one of the most complex yet basic systems most of us living here in the US encounter regularly. But as I read back over what I’ve been actually saying, I realized I started this about 3 1/2 years ago when I started thinking about power and resources and climate. I was focusing on the issues around our difficulty in facing the dire realities of climate crisis, which you can read here. Our fundamental misunderstandings and heresies around Scarcity & Abundance became crucial to mention, and I find that is so again.
Many of our institutions and systems continue, and are even defended fiercely, because we cannot think of other ways to do the things. The two-party national political system is an obvious example. Much of what organized religion does can be put in the category as well. Healthcare is another…
I don’t mind sending y’all to things I’ve written before but I find it odd to quote myself. Nonetheless, I said what is necessary very clearly last week:
Loyalty to a system itself with no regard to the effects of that system is dangerous. There is a chasm between faithfulness, discipline and blind adherence in both outcome and process. Most of the systems at work in America right now do not serve the common good, those in need, or any future generations. They do not ensure our health, safety, and general welfare and yet we seem paralyzed to change them. We know our systems do not reflect our values, and many of us do what we can to change the rules or mitigate the damage, but it always feels like playing catch up. Because it is.
The most effective way to disrupt a system is to step outside of it. It often takes great privilege and resources in order to do this, as anyone who has known or is a survivor of domestic violence can tell you. Whatever system is dictating your choices and options, be it bad public policy or necessary healthcodes, it is effective because your level of acquiescence is directly related to your access to options. If you don’t want to wear shoes inside a restaurant, but you want someone else to prepare and serve you food, you need to find shoes, or be so wealthy that a private chef could come to your home and prepare and serve you said meal.
Then again, the other great way to go barefoot, and not have to prepare or serve food, is to do it in community. Gather a group of friends to cook together, or go have a meal with rarely seen family. This is a different kind of privilege and resource use of course. But it is a third option in a system that seems binary.
As women in this country look towards a day when our reproductive decisions are not protected as private choices, I am aware of feeling trapped by the binaries, and wondering how alternative options can be used. I know that many are choosing to defy both the spirit and letter of many new draconian laws by establishing relational networks of care providers.
It is easy to feel ground down by systems, to feel trapped by them -as if any move simply enacts or fulfills an unintended (by you!) consequence. It is also not as hard as it sounds to tweak, to manage, systems from within them. It has been my experience, however, that the effectiveness of change from within is limited.
Seeking ways to step outside of any system, even if only temporarily, affords us a new viewpoint, opens up what is possible. Simply to bypass the generally binary choices given by a system and search for choices is subversive. The ways forward may not be obvious -particularly if they really were ways sideways or up. Decades ago, a friend quoted me at church as having said “What if we’ve been playing Monopoly this whole time when it was supposed to be Twister?” It was a key for her to think differently about the “rules of life” that she’d been given, an invitation not to buy into the assumed system.
We are also given more insight into our own system involvement, into how the things we do unfold and why, when we take this step away, this sabbath. It is crucial to be able to examine, to question, and sometimes only absence reveals a thing. Distance can bring a different kind of clarity. With that space comes the chance for choice.
May it be so for all of us.