Activism: important, but not without its darker side — well, what is?
On Thursday 19th June 2025, Anthea Lawson and I will be in conversation from 6.00 - 7.30pm UK time.
Anthea Lawson is a campaigner and author of The Entangled Activist: Learning to recognise the master’s tools, which draws on her own experience, critical analysis and interviews with leading activists to explore how activism is entangled in the problems it seeks to solve. She has campaigned to shut down tax havens, prevent banks from facilitating corruption and environmental devastation, and control the arms trade. At Global Witness, she launched a campaign that changed the rules on secret company ownership and resulted in new laws in dozens of countries. Prior to human rights work she was a reporter at The Times.
It is a free online event. However you must resgister to get admission. Please click on the link at the bottom of the picture below if yo wish to be there.
The talk will be recorded and made available on YouTube a few weeks after the event.
I just returned from a walk in the woods where I pondered and concluded that Activism seemed to be at the root of most of the things that are dividing us. I added "ism" to every thing I could come up with and got the feeling that each of those things was not serving to change things for the better, or that somehow they were manufactured to divide us. Not original thoughts. I was obviously struck by the title of this substack topic upon my return. Thank you, Iain, for sharing your words and research.
This is an important and very timely discussion to have. I recall that recently you were with Rupert Read at the Climate Majority Project. And you are clearly aware that there are many people who are looking for a deeper connection with the sacred. Emerging out of that connection, many of the same people feel called into some form of engagement with the metacrisis ("the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises" [1] per Rowson) that itself derives from the "left hemisphere capture" of contemporary Western culture and civilization, as you've persuasively documented in your books and conversations. This capture that has shattered our world today, as it has done several times before. Activism can be sacred work, at its best. As you pointed out: "In the Judaic tradition it is our duty and obligation, but also our honor, to be the means for repair. That is why we are here: to repair what was shattered." [2] "I hope it's true the idea that I might be trying to affect, or succeeding in affecting, something of a paradigm shift." [3]
Anthea Lawson previously described activism as "trying to change things through either opposing what is already going wrong, creating new alternatives, or working to change the spiritual and psychosocial underpinnings of how we relate to each other." From the same conversation, she said (paraphrasing) "I'm encouraging anyone who's doing activism to think about the fact that we're not separate from the problem we're trying to change. It's not wrong to point out that many "captains of industry" are profiting off of the exploitation of working-class communities. But, when we speak to people who we want to join us, if we have a sort of morally superior "we've got the answer" attitude, that is extremely off-putting." [4] The sort of activism that is blind to how it might increase polarization is the enemy of the mass action for systemic change that it seeks to inspire. (Indeed, sowing such division is the tool of choice for opportunists.)
Rupert Read put it bluntly, "As long as we're inclined as activists to think we are the "pure ones," and those we are fighting are the "impure ones," then basically we've already lost... This is what I sometimes saw over the years, people choosing purity over success. They would rather kind of feel like "righteous losers" than have to in any way compromise and actually succeed in changing something, as if they were more interested in preserving their own personal purity over any kind of possibility of actually making a difference. The "frame" becomes so strong that it repels any evidence that doesn't fit it, which ironically is exactly what we were criticizing our opponents for. We become just as unwilling as they were to be evidence-based... We need to be inclusive of people who will not ever want to be identified as "activists," people whose politics do not agree with our own, whether that be on identity politics or on the left-right political spectrum. If we're not interested in that kind of inclusiveness then the reality is that we're not interested in building a truly mass movement for change."
This is where Lawson's notion of "entangled activism" comes in. (It also reminds me that only a few days ago Bayo Akomolafe wrote about "para-pragmatism." [5] Which may not be an entirely unrelated idea.) Anthea Lawson: "We need to be building movements that are as broad-based as possible so that everyone can speak among their own circles and connections. We can't place ourselves on a soapbox; we are part of an interrelated web of communication." Jonathan Rowson noted that perhaps one of the things people fear is a kind of "cultural assimilation" within an activist tribe, that they'll sort of disappear into the will of the whole, and that they have to parrot things that they don't feel like are entirely their own. So it's critical that people find the space to speak, to feel, and to discover their own interests and appetite.
[1] https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/prefixing-the-world
[2] https://youtu.be/P35P74OUARw?t=3076
[3] https://youtu.be/knFbTu8UtTE?t=5350
[4] https://youtu.be/q3lDne57t1s?t=762
[5] https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/how-to-be-available-now-sidenotes-from-the-para-pragmatic