Alexis Shotwell: Purity politics in compromised times (ep322)
What is it that drives our individualistic pursuits for ethical purity? How do we embrace complicity as the starting point and begin to take responsibility for our messy histories?
In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Alexis Shotwell, whose work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. A professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin land, she is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Indigenous Cloud
“The idea that individuals should take care of big, complicated problems and that we are morally responsible and therefore failures if we don’t uphold those standards of perfection—that’s something that’s been weaponized against us as individuals and against the possibility for collective movement.”
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Transcript
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as invitations to dive deeper into the topics and resources mentioned. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: I'm the child of Buddhist hippies, so I grew up in a family that was always thinking and talking about what it meant to want to have a better world, and a world where there was more freedom and less suffering. My parents are also environmentalists who have been working on ecology and climate justice for more years than I can count. Because of all of those things, I started to pay attention to how people talk about what we should do and then how that matches up with what seems to work, what brings more people into working on complicated problems, what spins people out.
In my first book, I started looking at the importance of paying attention to feeling, commonsense understanding, presuppositions and other things that we don't easily put into words. I became really convinced that implicit understanding is really important to personal transformation and collective political transformation, especially around race and racism.
And I think when you finish one big project, all the things that you didn't do or that got left out, they come up... Or you find one answer to a question and it opens more questions... And I moved too—I'd been teaching in a philosophy department, then I started teaching in a sociology department. And I started thinking about how hard it is to change things, and it made me turn towards looking at complicity and complexity.
Kamea Chayne: I find what you speak to, in regards to this idea of purity, really relatable and resonant, because within social and climate justice movements, I have often witnessed this pursuit for personal purity, especially with the lifestyle-centered movements that are trendy and get a lot of attention, at least on social media.
And many do recognize that it is impossible to be perfect and therefore resort to calling themselves imperfect activists. Though for me, I think even identifying as imperfect still centers on the individual, and suggests that there is a way to be perfect amidst our greater systems that are rooted in exploitation and extraction.
But I wonder if what we're seeing permeating the activism space has to do with the individualistic culture that set the stage for it. And otherwise, what do you think it is that gave way to this sort of moral superiority complex and this idea of purity based on individual action?
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: We are definitely seeing an upsurge of individual, me-centered lifestyle activism. But that tendency has really long, deep roots in Western culture. When you go way back, asserting individual boundaries as a human person was a really important political demand—it was likely one of the things that helped move people out of feudalism. So not everything is bad there.
But that idea that individuals should take care of big, complicated problems, and that we are morally responsible—and therefore failures—if we don't uphold those standards of perfection? That's something that's been really weaponized against us as individuals, but also against the possibility for collective movement.
There are two things I want to say about individualism. One is… we could say that whenever we have the feeling or wish that if just by our own personal actions, we could fix the world and transform everything... that's actually so loving. It's a lovely aspiration. And if anyone could, through their individual force of will and their personal behavior, solve global warming and systemic racism, do away with incarceration and indefinite migrant detention, all of it—if anyone could, then I would say, that's great, please do.
We know that it's always going to be a failing idea, because all of the lifestyle things that we do, they don't solve "it"... But the impulse is something we can actually tune into.
That impulse to say, "If there was something I could do, I would want to do it"—that's actually tremendously useful and hopeful.
The bad thing is that because of capitalism, there are lots of forces, and it's not a single evil person who's kind of cackling in their supervillain fortress, but rather many different forces that are trying to take that impulse—commodifying, commercializing, and individualizing it. These forces are making us feel like if we can't personally solve everything, we should give up now, order all the plastic crap we want from Amazon, and take lots of plane trips, because soon the world will be over and we might as well just do that. So individualism is bad, because it doesn't work, and it demobilizes us, and it makes us make bad decisions.
The impulse to wish to be better—that's useful. We can do something with that.
I'm really interested in how when we're in spaces together, we can make use of those individual impulses, and turn them toward collective work.
We all care about these things, but what could we do that would actually be effective?
Kamea Chayne: I almost wonder if there are certain presumptions that underlie this idea of individualism, as in how it even defines the self, because I've been thinking about how different cultures conceptualize the individual and the self differently. Many Indigenous cultures view the self as the land, and so desecrations of the land are forms of self-destruction. I recently also spoke with Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta, who sees the self as an embodiment of all of his relationships, saying that the self is nothing without those relationalities.
As you explore this idea of individualism and the boundaries of what's considered a self, what do you think are the underlying presumptions of that within the dominant Western culture that reinforce this illusion that we can decontextualize and disentangle ourselves from history and the future or everything that's happening beyond our conceptualizations of the self?
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: So these conceptions of the self—as bounded by the skin, as in control, as independence, as capable of willing itself into the future, as though the self will not be transformed—are all part of philosophical schools that really arose out of the Enlightenment. It's not to say that everything in the Enlightenment was bad... But these ideas were central to a particular kind of world-making that is also rooted in a particular conception of Christianity—the sense that the body is the container for the soul, the soul is inviolable and moves on, all of those things are bundled in Western philosophical work… And they get weaponized in this current moment, which we think of as the neoliberal moment.
The idea of the self as a liberal conception, the self-willed, autonomous agent who ends at the boundaries of his skin—this conception is very deeply embedded in practices of whiteness, creating this social entity of a white person who is pure, inviolable, and self-willing.
So whenever I think and talk about purity and individualism, it often comes back to seeing the ways that in writings from philosophers like Kant and many others, that idea of the willed, reasoning person was meant to be—and it was explicitly articulated as—a white man. Many of those conceptions are what animated political practices like chattel slavery, colonialism. And we inherit this.
We have a sense that Indigenous peoples are connected to land, and that white people are cut off from our history and we don't have any relationship with the world. So in the work that I'm doing now, one of the things I really am interested in is: What does it look like for white settlers like me to be able to experience and live an understanding of interdependence rather than independence, that also doesn't appropriate those understandings from any particular Indigenous tradition or lifeway?
That's a really key question for us right now in the climate movement.
Kamea Chayne: To further this, you also speak to our need to understand that we are a product of history and that we must therefore take responsibility for history. When we discuss accountability for the past, for things that past generations have done, it gets messy.
We have people whose ancestors committed great atrocities, who feel that they may be good people today and that they shouldn't be punished for what their great, great, great grandparents did. We have people whose ancestors were the people who faced those atrocities, who still very much are dealing with generational trauma and the material conditions that came from that. And then there are many people who are descendants of both the perpetrators and the victims of systemic violence, and everything in between.
And of course, there are also different degrees of violence—whether institutional or chronic or acute and so forth.
So given that history is so immensely complex, and yet we're all entangled within it, and collective healing requires that we confront it, what does taking responsibility for history even mean? And because it is a collective work, how does an individual even begin?
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: Once we start to think about those layers of history and how we're situated in relation to them, there can be a tendency to want to claim innocence, to say, "Because I didn't personally do that or I didn't really benefit from it, I don't have anything to do with it.” People do that, but it's not a very useful thing in terms of actually reckoning with all the things that we inherit, nor is it really accurate either.
That sense of taking responsibility for something, even if we didn't personally do something wrong to others, is a good way for us to reorient toward reckoning with everything that we inherit. This is especially so for white people, but also settlers and people who are documented. We can say we received unearned benefits and ask, how are we going to use them toward justice or toward a different kind of world?
We don't have any history that isn't complicated. Almost none of us do. And the nice thing there is, as soon as we give up the idea that someone needs to be innocent in order to be useful, we can start working together.
So we have lots of different positions, different life experiences, different histories, but probably none of them are going to be completely uncomplicit in anything. And none of us are going to be innocent from at least receiving the benefits of oppression along one line or another.
Once we say, that's just the situation we're in, then we can start actually pulling on any of the places where we're complicit, or where we feel a sense of wishing that things could be otherwise.
And maybe I should just give an example here. So I've been thinking about this in terms of kin and inheritance. Many of my ancestors were driven out of Ireland by famine—which was a colonial technology of dispossession and pushing people out of common lands where they could have sustenance lives and into wage relations. Some came to North America, in various waves. And I know that at least some of my ancestors lived in the Caribbean and were divers who secured wharves to assist with shipping sugar, so we have these material connections to chattel slavery that way.
Still, some of my ancestors moved to Canada, and one, in particular, was a surveyor. He was directly connected with mapping the land that the railway would go on—that railway was excavated by enslaved Chinese laborers, and it was a key piece of the dispossession of Indigenous lands and their expropriation by the what would become the Canadian state.
So none of my ancestors were bosses or big villains; they were just ordinary settlers trying to make a living, trying to get away from famine. But they were also some of the engines for colonialism and dispossession.
I can respond to all of this by just saying: "Those were my ancestors; they don't have anything to do with me." But I can also take a different approach, and I can instead start looking at what it would mean for me to now be in solidarity with the idea that Indigenous peoples should have their land back. What does that look like in practice?
Right now, what that looks like for me is I try to be on the side of people who are doing land defense—who also happen to be the people whom I think are doing the most useful direct work in regards to shutting down oil pipelines and many of the other things that we absolutely need to do as a species if we're going to live on this Earth and survive.
So I can take that history that I inherit, and turn toward it, instead of turning away.
Kamea Chayne: I really think that just sitting with and being okay with complicity really invites us to go beyond the oversimplified binary of good versus bad. It almost feels like it's a multi-dimensional sphere, or plane, or what have you, of complicity, from which we can better understand our relationality to history and to the present, and use that to inform what our roles might be in helping to create our future.
What I've noticed is that when people center the experiences and histories of different people, it leads them to draw different conclusions about how drastically we need to change our society in order to achieve justice and to find healing. And the more that we center the most marginalized peoples of today, the more radical our visions tend to become for societal transformation.
And so when people do disentangle themselves from history and say that that was the past, my deeper question is always: Well, how interested are we in disrupting this collective trend towards destruction, and are we interested in moving towards collective healing together?
I fear that if we don't collectively recognize our history, our historical traumas, and harms, and if we don't recognize how that's interconnected with the future that we want to work towards, and if we don't use all of this to guide us, then we're just going to repeat history and these cycles of self-destruction again and again, in different forms.
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: So often when I'm talking to people, especially people who benefit from oppression, usually middle-class white people, they sometimes will have a tendency to worry that transformation is just going to mean reversal.
When people really learn about all the harm and wrong that is happening, and the way that they benefit from it, people will say to me, "I don't know what you mean by giving land back to Indigenous people, I don't want to be on a reserve, I don't want to be the subject of hunger experiments, I don't want my children taken away from me."
Something people can feel scared about is the thought that if we, white settlers, give up our power and say that we don't want to benefit from these systems, then the result is that we'll be in the place that oppressed peoples have been.
This is so instructive. It shows the limits of our imagination, that we—people who benefit from oppression—actually don't think it's possible to have a transformed world, that we only think it's possible to have different people on the bottom and different people on the top.
But when you talk to people who are really in the middle of liberation struggles, a lot of the time what you hear is, "No, we don't want to have a world where there are just different people suffering. We want to have a world in which many worlds can flourish. We want to have a world that is transformed, not just reversed. We want to have a world in which everyone has enough to eat, and air to breathe, and water to drink. And we don't want that just for the human people; we want whole ecosystems to flourish."
Starting to expand the scope of our imagination so that our complicity and our benefiting from harm isn't the end of the story, but rather the beginning of a different story, is really important—to not accept that we have to have terrible oppression and that we can just distribute it differently, but to actually move towards saying no to oppression and exploitation, saying that we don't need to have this be the organizing structure of our world, that actually, there could be something else.
Kamea Chayne: In a previous interview, you shared that something you felt you didn't do enough of in this book was to talk about how the material conditions of history shape the conditions of the possibility for the future.
So is this kind of what you just spoke to, as in, people who have experienced oppression might have different perceptions or ideas on our possibilities for the way forward?
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: So the book that I'm working on right now is called Collecting Our People, which is both the #SettlerCollector and the #CollectYourPeople approach. But it's also asking, how do we actually get together and make change and transformation?
In Against Purity, I just hold it as axiomatic that some people are more responsible than other people for destroying the world, and therefore they need to be more responsible for transformation. But I only say it a couple of times.
And so now I'm really trying to think through what it means, materially and practically, to think about redistributing resources, looking at who's responsible, and the differential responsibilities for great harm and violence, and taking those sort of entwined strands and asking how we make this kind of transformation.
One way that I am thinking about that is through what it looks like to make collective decisions, where we actually can identify the stakes of what we're doing and find strategic ways forward, collectively.
A lot of the time, I witness people coming into consciousness and then trying to find an authority that's going to tell them what the right thing to do is. And though I totally get that impulse, it puts too much pressure on charismatic, individual leaders, and it fails to build what we call "leaderful" communities.
Thinking about alternative practices for being together and collectivities that really make change is one piece of what I'm finding really generative here—and then also being much blunter about who's hoarding resources, who are hurting the planet, who needs to start paying taxes…
Kamea Chayne: I think what you're speaking to is really relatable during this time with the news about billionaires going to space. There's a lot of people saying that these billionaires are disproportionate contributors to our social and ecological crises and that they should therefore take responsibility and play a larger role in addressing the problems that they helped cause.
But at the same time, reality kicks in, and they realize we can't expect these billionaires, who are benefiting and profiting, to voluntarily do differently. So how do we work with this?
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: Here, I really take my cue from Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who is a brilliant thinker and astrophysicist—and she has a new book called The Disordered Cosmos that everyone should read. She wrote a really brilliant short op-ed in The Washington Post not too long ago, with her whole concern really being about what it means to say that we need a world in which the night sky is available to everyone and not just to a few billionaires, while also not giving up on the idea of science and going into space.
I'm a science fiction nerd, and I love the idea of going to space. And I am so angry at the billionaires. One of the things that Prescod-Weinstein said is that it's not just that we want them to make different choices with their money; it's that we want them to be taxed so that people can make collective decisions about when and how we send people to space, and what happens there.
Here, we see, again, a turn from thinking that what we need is these billionaires to be better people, to that we need a redistribution of wealth. There are so many different options for how that can happen.
What's most helpful is always for us to turn from wanting to change particular people to wanting to change the whole system.
The way that I think is helpful for us to think about that is to ask, "What's our theory of change?" The theory of change is the way that you believe this world is going to transform.
If we say, "I just want Jeff Bezos to have an awakening,” “I want Elon Musk to awaken and care about the world,” that theory of change is that all we need to do is change people's hearts and minds, and, consequently, that it's okay to have a few people have massively more wealth than others. But I don't think that's a good theory of change, because it doesn't actually destroy the entire system of capitalism and the existence of billionaires altogether.
There are many alternative theories of change. We could say, "I think we need to make it impossible for a single person to have as much money as a country,” or "I don't think we should have nation-states". As soon as we turn from focusing on the individual to focusing on the collectivity, then we're in the terrain of politics, which is great.
There are people who care about this world and who are working on it but sort of go a little bit wrong. For example, we see charismatic leadership crumble because those people get intoxicated with power, they get burnt out, or they get disconnected from the collective struggle.
Purity politics is saying that these leaders have to be perfect, know everything, and have a good idea of how to go forward—but this kneecaps movements.
So we need to turn towards collectivity, which, for movements, means that we're all going to be leaders, that we rotate around different roles in the organization, that we train each other to talk to the media, write things, listen, do the dishes, do direct action, etc., so that when we make mistakes, which we inevitably will, that's not the end of our time, that we don't get kicked out of the movement. It's that sort of messy middle.
We need to have hundreds of millions of people transforming the world together, and we're not ever going to do that by just having a few individuals who are perfect and then some other individuals who are evil... It's got to be this muddling along, together, towards something better.
Kamea Chayne: Right. And on this individualism and collectivism piece, I recently published an article contextualizing plastic pollution to show that while these lifestyle movements have grown tremendously over the years, our plastic pollution crisis is set to worsen, and global plastic production is estimated to near double within the next 10 years.
So I wanted to show that we have to better understand the complexity of the crisis and redirect more efforts towards collective action to have a greater impact.
But also, that in the face of complexity, individualistic approaches have not really helped to address our systemic crises... with this type of message, many end up feeling helpless and despair and shutting down with guilt, with seemingly nowhere else to redirect it to.
So the main message here is that there are more impactful moves that we can make—beyond pursuits for personal purity. And it might involve giving up this idea of purity altogether as the goal to strive for in order to see the other paths that we can take.
So rather than resorting to simplifying the problem so that we might feel better about our individual selves, what might be the power in surrendering individual control and even surrendering this desire to know exactly what the solution is and what we're working towards?
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: Some of the power of thinking collectively is in beginning to ask strategic questions. A strategy is something that we come to usually collectively, and one of the things that we don't have enough of right now is strategic thinking because we don't have as many collective formations as we probably need.
Recognizing that any battles we win are just going to be the terrain for the next battle we fight, how do we act such that whether we win or lose, we've built a movement, such that no matter the outcome, the movement grows bigger, becomes more resilient and more capable?
Often, what happens now is we have a few people who are massively committed, who work on a campaign really hard, get super tired and burn out and get super disillusioned, and eventually go back to just living life.
So while doing demonstrations, or trying to lobby government, or running education campaigns, we need to be asking ourselves, how are we going to have all of us come out at the end of this, not burnt out, not disillusioned, not mad at each other? How are we going to build movements where other people want to be in them with us? These questions reorient, because struggling for a better world is profoundly joyful and it can be so energizing, despite the scutwork.
When we find that lots of other people care about this thing with us, we begin to have a wind of energy that lifts us. So we need to be thinking collectively about how we can leave this struggle stronger and more nourished than we were when we came in.
This is an important question that I have been benefiting from asking over the last ten or twenty years.
The other piece that I'm beginning to be so compelled about, and something that I've done a lot of work on, is the question of how interpersonal harm happens within movements. And various people all over are doing really good work about trying to have better mechanisms for response and repair on various kinds of interpersonal harms, like sexual assault, or just people being really nasty to each other or betraying each other in different ways.
What's come out of that for me is that I think something we need to be doing in our movement spaces is setting up infrastructure that prevents harm—not waiting until something bad has happened and having a really good response team, but rather having practices and systems in place that make it very unlikely that people are going to hurt each other.
One of the best texts that I've been finding lately for thinking about this is Dean Spade's new book, Mutual Aid. In it, he has a good explanation of how to tell if you're getting to be a hero-martyr to a cause and also how to tell if your organization is tending toward individualism, self-exploitation, and boundary violation, like using more energy than someone actually has, making them feel guilty for not contributing everything to the cause.
It can sound boring, but having really functional collective organizations, where people really like each other and have fun and can see where we make wins—that's the long, good work that helps us actually turn.
And I think we can do it. I think it's possible. There are a lot of people who care.
Kamea Chayne: Before we go into our closing lightning-round questions, what else do you feel called to share in this moment that I didn't get to ask you about? And the other thing I wanted to ask you is, what does it mean for us to be working towards something that doesn't yet exist, and that we can't fully conceptualize?
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: We're always working toward a future that we can't predict, and that sometimes feels scary. But the thing that's great about it is we know that we don't want to just replicate what we inherit, and we know that we don't want to just continue what's currently happening.
We also live in a world where we have some really wonderful things in it, so it's not like that unknowability of the future is total. There are lots of things that we can say about the characteristics of or the things that we want in the worlds that we are building. We sometimes talk about this in anarchist circles as prefiguration, so that we start to build the world that we want in our current practices.
So if we want a future where people treat each other with respect, we start treating each other with respect in the present. If we want a future where everyone has enough to eat, we set up our meetings so that people can come and there's some food there. It's very basic, practical, and kind of kitchen-sink, but out of those, we begin to envision these futures that are very big.
The way that I think about this is that we can have aspirational solidarity, so we can be in solidarity with a future that doesn't yet exist, but we can be on its side, and we can be on the side of all the beings and all the people that could live and flourish in that future.
It's going to be different for everyone. Whatever we care about, whatever we are connected to, these places are good places to start, and we don't have to do everything right.
We just need lots of people to be working on the thing that they are connected to for a long time, with steadiness and joy. And that's better than a few people working on a lot of things with guilt and franticness and desperation.
We can look to the activists who've been in this work for the long haul, and they exist, and they're a joy to be around, and they're steady. And that's the kind of being we could be too.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: I really love Sins Invalid, the disability, beauty, and justice organization in the Bay Area.
Kamea Chayne: What personal mottos do you have or what practices do you engage with to stay grounded?
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: There's a line from Ursula Le Guin's story, The Day Before the Revolution, where she says: “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” And I've really been working with that quotation as a question. I don't think I yet know what it means, but I'm interested in taking the responsibility of a choice.
Kamea Chayne: And finally, what have been some of your greatest inspirations as of late that you'd like to share?
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: One of the people that I really take inspiration from is David Gilbert, who has been in prison for most of my life and is in prison for life. David is someone who just continues to think and organize and work beyond the bars of the prison.
I'm also just thinking about all of the people who are locked up right now, who are continuing to care for each other and keeping each other alive, which I find tremendously moving.
And then I'm really so impressed by, and it brings me to tears to think about, the people who are really on the frontlines of Indigenous-led solidarity movements to obstruct capitalism and the devastation of place globally. In the Canadian context, I think about the Land Back Lane, and the work that's happening right now around the Fairy Creek Blockade, it's all really complicated, but these are also some of the people that do long-term, steady work. And I love that.
Kamea Chayne: Absolutely, and we all have so much to learn from this collective action that is being worked on. Alexis, thank you so much for joining us here today. It's been an honor to have you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Dr. Alexis Shotwell: We need to keep going and keep loving. Thank you so much for having me.
