On fences

8 months ago I left a job with an international NGO after 10 years. On my last day, we had the ritual humiliation that is the tea party, at which all staff gather (lured by cake) and say nice things about the person who’s leaving. And I in turn said nice things about the organisation I was leaving. It wasn’t hard: working there quite simply transformed me and I loved it.

So I said that, in 10 years at Trócaire, I had learned to be an activist, to act on my analysis of the ills of the world. It had taught me to campaign for change, to attend or organise demonstrations, to climb ladders and knock on doorsteps in support of causes I believed in. Above all else, it had taught me to know – and if I didn’t know, to choose: which side am I on?

A few months later, at the beginning of my PhD, I met a very good friend who has mentored me through academic decisions for many years now. He told me that doing a PhD would change my worldview. That scared the bejesus out of me. I like my worldview. I wasn’t really in the market for a new one. But here I was, opening myself up to new things, so I would just have to open myself up to a new worldview as well.

I’ve spent eight months now reading, which is a curious way to pass time, at once arduous and self-indulgent. I observe myself moving  from an NGO way-of-life to a pleasant in-betweeniness: I’m a student, more focused on myself, my learning, my analysis than on the world around me. I observe something about the NGO culture that I’ve internalised: an impatience and a frustration with real conceptual grappling which I’m struggling to let go of. Back in my NGO job we used to have a shorthand when an investigation was getting out of hand. “Let’s not be held up by the paralysis of analysis” we used to say, as though analysis was a dreadful indulgence that was slowing us all down. As though the answers were obviously there, and we were wasting time trying to understand them.

I try to let go of the impatience, and give time to the conceptual grappling. And of course I encounter all the debates that I have heretofore silenced or brushed past hurriedly. I find myself frustrated by the simplifications that make activism possible, all of them. Am I really a socialist, when I’m so suspicious of communitarianism? Does my feminism reproduce gender essentialism? My social media feeds (from which I’m having to withdraw because they confuse me so much) are noisy with activists, fiercely narrating their way through society’s crises. None of the narratives work for me. I believe in activism, but everywhere I look I see elisions and conflations, easy simplifications that translate into individuals being excluded and denied.

I think back to the time before the NGO, before I learned to be an activist, back when I was a perennial, and rather comfortable, fence-sitter. I used to fall back on my confident insights, “ah but it’s not as simple as that”. The NGO impatience that I learned burned this complacency away. Pick a side and stick to it. Which side are you one? If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor. As one of my dearest mentors used to say, daily, angrily: “the world is on fire!”

If my worldview is shifting, I’m going to have to look for a better one. I still believe in activism, and god I believe in the activists I know. But I’m not looking for a unifying narrative, because I don’t think there are any.

One of the biggest frustrations of academia is the knowledge that there are so few new thoughts. Here I am, articulating something already well-articulated, on this dusty blog that nobody reads. A record for myself. A document of the moment it began to happen.  Back on the fence, thinking about how to make progress from here.