One of our most primal human needs is the need to feel seen and valued. Think of the experience of a lucky child raised by loving and nurturing parents. The infant gazes at their caregiver and they gaze back. Enthralled by this miracle, flooded with bonding and pleasurable hormones, we babble away and baby talk, suffused with wonder. This mutual gaze and appreciation helps an infant construct a sense of self.
(This series of writings is an experiment—I’m writing a book and releasing it a chapter at a time on Substack, accompanied with podcasts available on Substack, Apple, Spotify, etc. This is the first post in the section on Value, and the thirteenth post in the series. I have now numbered the posts that are part of the book, to make them easier to find,)
“ Abundant scientific evidence demonstrates that a major ingredient in this process is the “serve and return” relationship between children and their parents or other caregivers in the family or community. Young children naturally reach out for interaction through babbling, facial expressions, gestures, and words, and adults respond with the same kind of vocalizing and gesturing back at them. A baby smiles at you—the urge to smile back is irresistible! This “serve and return” behavior continues back and forth, like a game of tennis or volleyball. If the responses are unreliable, inappropriate, or simply absent, the developing architecture of child’s brain may be disrupted, and later learning, behavior, and health may be impaired.” (1)
The unfortunate children raised without this positive mirroring and nurturing do not thrive. as we’ve seen in studies of children warehoused in institutions or neglected within their families. “Indeed, deprivation or neglect can cause more harm to a young child’s development than overt physical abuse, including subsequent cognitive delays, impairments in executive functioning, and disruptions of the body’s stress response.” (2)
We are social beings, and while the stalwart among us may be able to maintain a sense of integrity and wholeness in the face of opprobrium and adversity, in general our sense of self is strongly influenced by what the world mirrors back to us. Are we being viewed with positive regard? Ignored? Despised? Adulated? Ever try teaching a room full of bored adolescence secretly texting away on their smartphones under their desks? Your words seem to sink into a void, your mind goes numb, and you wonder what terrible choices in your life have landed you in this particular form of hell.
Activist Ayesha Khan Ph.D writes of the pain she experienced being targeted and maligned by other leftists who did not actually know her but nonetheless orchestrated a campaign of vilification. In reaching out beyond her immediate circles for support, she encountered 43 others who had suffered similar attacks. “It hurts when people within our movements come for us with baseless accusations, contempt & disdain. It hurts us MORE than when the state comes for us because we expect it to. But we expect people who claim to champion revolutionary values to act with kindness, dignity & integrity— including towards the people they may not like or get along with.” (3)
When we join groups and organizations, when we take action politically, we do it ideally, or purely noble and altruistic reasons. In reality, often a key motivator is the unspoken hope that we will meet new friends and be well regarded by the group. Only when we feel that we are seen and valued can we truly feel that we belong or that we are emotionally safe.
That internal sense of value might be called pride. While pride is considered one of the seven deadly sins, in Pagan circles pride is a virtue. Healthy pride, that is: pride in the choices we’ve made in life, in our accomplishments, in the work that we’ve done, the people and causes that we’ve helped, even the mistakes that we’ve taken responsibility for and learned from. We all need that sense of healthy pride. It’s what sustains us, and it’s often what motivates us to do the right thing even when the right thing might be difficult or appear not to be to our immediate advantage.
Pride is also important to the groups that represent our larger identities. Healthy pride in our heritage might mean taking pleasure in our peoples’ cultural achievements, art, music, dance, literature, science, cuisine, and history of standing up for justice. Pride is especially important for groups that have long been the targets of discrimination and oppression. The Black Pride movement was born from the struggle for Civil Rights, to revalue some of the very things that had long been a source of scorn or disparagement: African culture and heritage, Black achievements in art, literature, science, sports and music, even natural hair. The Gay Pride movement sages parades to celebrate LGBTQ culture, turning an identity that was once a source of shame into one that has value. Pagans stage our own Pagan Pride Parades to educate the public about the heritages and traditions that have long been misunderstood. To successfully struggle for the rights of any historically targeted group, we must first counter internalized oppression with healthy pride.
So if we want our groups or organizations to be truly welcoming, to bring in larger numbers of people and to motivate them to do their best we must consider how to foster healthy pride, how to mirror back esteem and value to participants. And if we want to broaden our movement, and even perhaps bring in now disgruntled former Trump supporters, we must carefully think out how we can avoid shaming people, even when we feel they deserve it, and instead offer new sources of pride.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild has spent years interviewing people in red states and economically depressed communities about their political choices. She describes how many of the working class men of in Appalachia coal town suffered blows to their pride when the coal mines closed. In former days, although they did extremely hard, difficult, and hazardous jobs, they had prided themselves providing a very necessary service. They were the ones who kept the lights on, whose work helped America win World War 2 and rise to global prominence. But then, with the world heating up from climate change, coal became identified as destructive, dirty energy that was potentially destroying the planet. From pride they were plunged into shame compounded with the shame of poverty when coal mines closed and they could no longer provide for their families. In truth, workers and workers who retained their jobs had not seen a real growth in wages or benefits since the 1970s even while US productivity rose.
As Robert Reich, labor secretary under Clinton, said in his testimony to the Senate Budget Committee on March 17, 2021, “Even before the pandemic, America had the widest inequalities of income and wealth in a century, wider than any other developed nation. The median wage has barely budged for 40 years, adjusted for inflation, even though the economy was almost three times larger. The richest one-tenth of one percent has almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together. And more than half of Americans are earning so little they have no choice but to live paycheck to paycheck.” (4)
Stagnation was camouflaged, first when women went to work to contribute to the family income, and secondly with the rise in home equity and the availability of home equity loans, up until the crash of 2008. Today, extreme inequality of wealth has grown, to the point where the three billionaires on the podium at Trump’s inauguration own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population! And we are more and more exposed to images of unbridled wealth, on the Internet, and in popular media. Many people suffer from a sense of inadequacy, feeling that they have been left behind while others get ahead. The MAGA movement has been adept at transforming this sense of grievance to blame for immigrants, welfare recipients, and targeted groups, deflecting attention from the greed of corporations and billionaires and the right wing policies that have deepened economic divides.
In Hochschild’s book Stolen Pride:Loss and Shame in the Rise of the Right, (5) she identifies what she calls Trump’s four-part shame ritual. First, he says something transgressive: “Immigrants are eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!” Move two: the Left and the pundits react with shock and horror, and shame him. Third round: he then portrays himself as a victim, and four, strikes back with a vicious attack. For someone who is feeling a sense of shame because of their perceived lack of success in life, this ritual is cathartic. He transforms shame to blame.
“For those who are feeling angry and bitter, his transgressions feel liberating and his victimization seems to mirror how they feel. His refusal to accept shame feels admirable. In his ultimate revenge is their revenge. The tragedy is that this ritual bears no resemblance to reality, and leads people to vote against politicians who might put into place policies that could actually help them better their health, their environment and their economics.” (6)
What can Democrats and progressives do to counter this? Especially when his outright lies and vile accusations do deserve to be exposed and shamed? Hochschild suggests that Democrats tend to listen to Moves One and Two, while Republicans hear moves Three and Four. She suggests we stop after Move One, and offer empathy—not for false charges or Trump’s disinformation, but for the underlying shame and disappointment that leads people to believe him.
When avenues for earning healthy pride are few, when jobs and education are not available, when society itself makes it hard to fulfill its expectations, and casts that failure as personal lack rather than larger structural impediments, it’s going to be hard to construct a personal identity you can truly feel proud of. It’s tempting to invest your pride in a group identity: your whiteness, your ancestors, your heritage, the traditions of your region or place, and your status relative to other groups. Appeals like that of white nationalism gain all the more force.
Humans are sensitive to questions of status and rank. Even in a former egalitarian society, which the United States purports to be, where our social classes are much less distinct than those in England, for example, where we have no hereditary Lords and titles, we have very clear distinctions. They’re just harder to see. It’s important to understand that a threat of status loss is one of our core human fears. It may even be hardwired into our biology. For example, while we popularly associate testosterone with high levels of aggression–“testosterone poisoning”– more nuanced studies show that testosterone increases aggression only in those who are already prone to be aggressive, and only in response to a status challenge.
“Testosterone makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status and the key point is what it takes. Engineer social circumstances right and boosting testosterone levels doing a challenge would make people compete like crazy to do the most acts of random kindness. In our world riddled with male violence, the problem isn’t that testosterone can increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression.” (7)
Testosterone drives us to climb the ladder of social hierarchy and be the alpha. If we lived in a potlatch culture like that of the First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest, where status is determined by how much you can give away to others, testosterone would boost generosity. But in our culture, where strength is too often defined as the ability to inflict violence on others, it’s not surprising that challenges to status might unleash anything from irritation to raw, naked brutality. This doesn’t mean we should not name and challenge privilege, but we should be aware, when we do, that we may be evoking powerful forces of resistance.
Whenever someone is shamed, they suffer a status loss. And whenever someone is publicly corrected or critiqued, they are likely to feel shamed and humiliated.
What does this all mean for building a broad-based welcoming movement?
To begin with, let’s look at the ways in which we as a movement collectively shame others. Of course, some people do deserve shame and blame. One of the challenges in combatting the MAGA movement is the utter shamelessness of politicians who seem immune to any sense of guilt or embarrassment over revelations of cruel, self-serving or even illegal transgressions and blatant hypocrisy. Those who are responsible for enormous wrongs should be held accountable.
Yet too often we direct our ire and our shade against our friends and allies, rather than our real opponents. Every public correction, every time we go on social media to tell someone they have used the wrong word or transgressed in some manner, comes at a cost. That cost might be a moment of irritation, or stress in our relationship if we have one with the person we’re correcting, or it might mean pushing away someone who might otherwise have become a strong ally. And it might reinforce for bystanders that these people are shamers and are likely to shame me.
How do we hold people accountable without shaming them? First, if a correction is necessary, make it privately rather than publicly whenever possible. When someone puts something out on social media that you find less than fully sensitive, contact them directly and let them know in a supportive way. If you don’t know them, consider whether your intervention is really needed or appropriate. Think of the maxim “No correction without connection.”
At times, a public critique might be called for, not so much to correct the subject of it, but to educate others. Constructive critique is specific, timely, and its intent is to improve the work or the relationship. It acknowledges good intent, even when the impact of a statement or action might be awkward or ignorant. In one of our courses, we had a whole group of local Pomo and Miwok participants. Another student, at one point, offered one of the elder women tobacco as a gift, She looked at him, somewhat bemused, and said graciously, “Thanks you, I know that your intention is good, and this gift comes from the heart. But you should know that’s not our tradition.”
I once posted an article originally titled “Fifty Shades of Racism”. It attempted to delineate between personal prejudice, structural racism, discrimination, etcetera, and I was playing on the popularity, at the time, of Fifty Shades of Grey, a best-selling soft-porn S & M romance—which in turn led me to think of the saying that the indigenous people of the Arctic have fifty words for snow. I very carefully did not use the word ‘Eskimo’ as I knew that to be inaccurate and potentially insulting. Instead, I used ‘Inuit’ which I believed was the correct term. In response, I received a blizzard of criticism. I was told that there were many Inuit tribes and clans that should all be identified separately, that they didn’t actually have fifty words for snow, that there were interesting but obscure features of the languages in question that made it unclear whether some words for snow were, indeed, distinct words or contractions make of other words, etc, None of which had any real bearing on what I was actually writing about, or addressed any issues of racism, except for a subtext to the critiques that seemed to say “Hah hah—you’re writing about racism but you’re actually being racist! Gotcha!”
I decided to drop the entire analogy, as it seemed to be distracting people from the issue I wanted to address. I retitled it “A Short Lexicon of Racism” (8) and went on with my life.
But let us imagine that some actual indigenous person of the Arctic or expert on the anthropology and linguistics of the Arctic peoples was really concerned with my apparent transgression. A private e-mail would have been very welcome. But let’s say they didn’t have my email address or a way to contact me. A public correction could have been made in the form of a supportive addition. “I get your analogy, that people need multiple words to express complex concepts, that people who live intimately with snow, or racism, might have many ways to describe its subtle variations. But here’s some additional information on Arctic languages you might find interesting,..”
In future posts, I’ll continue exploring ways we inadvertently devalue one another, and how we can better support, see and value our fellow activists.
Notes:
1. “The Science of Neglect: the Persistent Absence of Responsive Care Disrupts the Developing Brain.” Working Paper 12. The Harvard Center For the Developing Child, P. 3
2. (ibid,) P. 9
3. Ayesah Khan, Ph.D and Aisha Abu Asada. “Beyond Infighting: cultivating movements driven by love for people rather than hatred of capitalism.” Cosmic Anarchy Substack,
4. Robert Reich. Testimony, U.S. Senate Budget Committee, Hearings on Widening Inequality of Income and Wealth in America. March 17, 2021 https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Robert%20Reich%20-%20Testimony%20-%20U.S.%20Senate%20Budget%20Committee%20Hearing5.pdf
5. Arlie Hochschild. Stolen Pride:Loss and Shame in the Rise of the Right.New York, The New Press, 2024
6. Decoding Trump’s ‘anti-shame’ ritual: New book explores the ‘politicized emotions’ of MAGA. Ali Velshi interviews Arlie Hochschild. Four-part shame ritual starts about 4 minutes in.
7. Robert Sapolsky. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York, Penguin Books, 2018 P. 105
8. Starhawk. “A Short Lexicon of Racism” in Permaculture Design Magazine, No.98 Winter 2015
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This post has been syndicated from Starhawk’s Substack, where it was published under this address.