A personal reflection by Mark Cole
I finally got around to watching a film that was made back in 1960 and of which I have been aware for quite some time – and particularly just recently as I have become all the more involved in practice and scholarship on the charged topic of voice and silence in organisations.
It is entitled The Angry Silence and the plot hinges around an unofficial strike at an English factory. It is intimated that the union representative at the factory – a man named Connolly – is pursuing this dispute in light of his own personal ambitions, a dispute moreover that is not supported by the union bureaucracy.
There is also a shadowy character in the movie who arrives from London at the start of the film, called Travers. Connolly meets him at the railway station but is scolded for so doing and told that they need to maintain the illusion that they do not know each other. The following day, Travers turns up at the factory and is introduced to Connolly as a new member of staff.
The Human Impact of Influencers and Ideologues
Travers sits impishly on Connolly’s shoulder, whispering political guidance into his somewhat naïve and inexperienced ear. In the evenings, however, Travers is seen on the phone to contacts in London; it is never expressly stated but I was quick to assume that he was meant to be seen as a Communist Party or Trotskyist agitator, particularly as he is manipulating the dispute to engender strikes that will threaten what is seen to be a crucial government contract.
The initial demands that Connolly makes are seen by all involved in the negotiations as a ploy to ultimately achieve a closed shop at Martindale’s factory. When the explicit demands (as opposed to the expectation of a closed shop) are presented to management, they are rejected, thereby precipitating a walkout by the workforce following a shop floor meeting, at which an old stager named Bill Arkwright seeks to raise a point of order amidst the clamour and indiscipline of the meeting – and Tom Curtis, the lead character in this drama, pointedly votes against the strike, when a show of hands is called at the close of the so-called debate.
His opposition seemingly pivots expressly around the unofficial nature of the labour withdrawal, for it means that the strikers will be ineligible for strike pay. For Curtis, this is a significant concern, as just that morning he had discovered from his young Italian wife that she is pregnant with their third child.
However, there is also a strong sense throughout the film that his primary focus is on his home life: despite several acknowledged bursts of verbal anger towards his wife, each followed by a seemingly heartfelt apology, he is seen to be a loving and faithful husband as well as a devoted and caring father. Work is somewhere he goes to make his money: his heart remains very firmly at home, even as he amiably greets colleagues as he walks through the streets and into the factory, and as he stands throughout the day at his machine on the shopfloor.
So, Curtis is personally focused closely on his homelife, and the drama of the workplace is not of great interest to him. That said, with the arrival of a third little one, money is patently going to become even more of an issue than it currently is. We see very early on that Curtis and his family live in rooms in a boarding house and it is noteworthy that one of his work colleagues – Joe Wallace – lodges with them, doubtless helping the family to meet the rental demands of the unseen but oppressively ever-present landlady, Mrs Jackson, bellowing from the bottom of the stairs.
The Tyranny of the Majority…and the Lone Voice
In light of his financial concerns and his disinterest in what goes on in his workplace, Curtis ends up as part of a small group of workers at the factory who coalesce around Arkwright and opt not to strike. Instead, each morning they face the picket, march through the factory gates, and report for work.
At some point, this little band reflect on the futility of their resistance, particularly in light of the fact that some amongst the strikers – in particular, it is intimated, an oafish foursome of ill-disciplined young men – have, in the dead of night and under the cover of darkness, thrown bricks through their windows, smashed their greenhouses, and vandalised their pushbikes.
They decide in light of this horrid violence towards them and their loved ones (and Curtis’s landlady, who lives on the ground floor of the house and received a brick through her window) to join the strike. Curtis, however, opts to go it alone, becoming the only member of the workforce to continue to go to work.
It felt to me, as I watched the film, that the reason that I had perhaps avoided it in the past was because of some vestigial workerism that resided in me, an echo from my 20s when I was a shop steward in the NHS and actively supported the miners’ strike of 1984-85. Curtis is a strike-breaker – but he is one that is viewed sympathetically in the narrative.
Indeed, the character is allowed to voice his reasons for choosing to continue to work – and they suggest his refutation of the workplace collective proceeds from his total dedication to his burgeoning family…and potentially an unspoken awareness of the political machinations that undergird this outbreak of labour unrest.
At one point, Curtis is visited in his home by Connolly, which takes the whole family by surprise and clearly sets them on edge. This experience underscores the fact that Curtis and his family are reacting to the presence of a person who has power over them in their private space. It is clear that having this controlling figure step over his threshold and try to tell him what to do in the place where as Curtis pointedly says, “I pay the rent” is provocative and causes him to embrace and espouse the principle of his personal liberty.
Travers eventually engineers it so that the strike ends, although he is seen to be advising his comrades in London that he proposes to use Curtis as a reason for another strike later on, encouraging the workforce to demand his sacking and then getting them to withdraw their labour again when the management refuse so to do. This scheme is expressly seen as a way to maximise the negative impact on the government contract.
A meeting is held to end the current strike – and whilst, as viewers, we are not privy to the deliberations that take place there, it becomes clear very soon that the workforce have decided to send Curtis to Coventry.
The Imposition of Silence
This manifests on the first day back at the plant, as those around him pointedly turn their backs on Curtis or fail to acknowledge it when he speaks. In a cinematic trope that will be familiar from high school movies and the like, he struggles to find a place to eat at lunchtime in the works canteen – and when he does eventually settle at a table, those already sitting there pointedly stand up and leave.
Moments later, Arkwright inadvertently plonks his tray in front of Curtis before looking up and realising who he is about to sit opposite. Even though he was crucial in convening the small group of those who originally chose not to join the strike, the camera focuses in on the panic on the old man’s face as he struggles to decide how best to avoid sitting with the victim of the silent treatment. Eventually, a voice provides him an escape route by calling out, “Bill! Over here!” whereupon Arkwright beats a hasty retreat without having even acknowledged Curtis at a personal human level.
The person to whom no one is speaking is clearly someone about whom everyone is speaking, albeit behind his back. His very name is denied – and instead he is allocated the vituperative labels of scab and blackleg. The latter crude epithet comes to life when a group of older boys after school attack Curtis’s young son and coat his legs in black paint. His tearful mother rescues the sobbing boy from the school toilets, carries him home (despite being in the early stages of her pregnancy), and bathes him with limited success in terms of getting the paint off.
When Curtis returns from work, his wife advises that she has let the boy go to sleep in their bedroom, given how upset he was. Curtis is eager to speak to him – despite his wife’s plea to leave him in peace – so he creeps into the bedroom, talking gently and kindly to the boy, who is still weeping. The boy doggedly resists his father’s kind words and gentle hand on his shoulder, until he suddenly turns round in his bed and repeats what the vicious bullies had said to him in the course of their assault, namely that his father is a blackleg.
On another occasion in the canteen, following this horrific episode with the black paint, Curtis sits in his silence – and the noisy silence that others are generating around him, as they natter, chatter, bellow and guffaw as if he is not there – and becomes more and more oppressed by the overwhelming sound that is all around him and permeating him but of which he is no longer part.
The pressure mounts in the room – and crucially inside Curtis’s head – until he leaps up and screams for everyone to shut up. The room falls silent, as the voice chiming all the way from Coventry asserts itself and demands the attention of those around him. It is clear that a boundary has been crossed for Curtis in terms of his co-workers no longer merely breaking windows and damaging bikes – aggressive and horrendous though that is – but physically attacking his family. Having said his piece, he gathers his jacket and bustles furiously out of the room, which remains utterly silent.
The Menace of the Mob
I felt deeply discomforted when watching this particular sequence of the film. It compelled me to recall a time as a political activist in my 20s when the print workers were on strike as Fleet Street embraced new technology to streamline the production of their newspapers – and to edit the print workers out of the picture, given how reliant the publishers were on these employees and hence how empowered they were in respect to being able to obtain very positive pay, terms and conditions for themselves.
For people on the Left, the dispute was made all the more complicated by the fact that other unions – in particular the body that represented electricians – were unwilling to take action in support of the print worker’s case. In light of this, demonstrations bifurcated: the pickets persisted at places of work and there were protests against the employers; and, in light of the fact that the electricians’ union was headquartered in the town where I lived, protestors turned up to picket them as well.
At one such event, which took place on a late afternoon, we demonstrators turned up outside of their offices and made noise, which tends to be most such protests can achieve. I doubt that anyone there thought for one moment that the leadership of this union would change their mind. Instead, it sought to create a sense of menace for those working in the buildings – and reassured us that we were being seen to be doing something, specifically by each other, and therefore we could – as progressives – obtain that almost religious reassurance that we were on the right side of history.
Such a perspective, of course, can lead to the tacit assertion – which often becomes implicit as politics plays itself out – that the ends justify the means. And this belief saw a few of us start to collude in the midst of the somewhat paltry demonstration that we’d managed to muster about how to move the protest on. Someone in the group pointed out that one of the key electricians’ union officials lived just a few roads away. And so it was that a mob turned up on the doorstep in a quiet suburban street of this person and their family, chanting and yawping, in what can quite easily be interpreted as an act of terrorism, insofar as it was patently intended to strike fear into those who lived at that address.
Nowadays I am very much of the mind that politics that seek to critique the world and offer an opportunity to allow a new one to emerge desperately need to embrace prefiguration. In essence this means that the ends simply cannot be used to justify the means and that the means need to kept under constant review, in light of the fact that the way in which we come together collectively will determine that place where we eventually arrive.
I tend to take this further: we need to abandon the notion of an end to which we inevitably progress – a crude metanarrative notion that has led to unspeakable horrors taking place under a variety of flags – and instead explore and experiment with new ways of being and doing things in life. This reaction – unsurprisingly – is reinforced for me by the shame I now feel very deeply about turning up as part of a mob outside of the family home of someone with whom I politically disagreed.
Competing Voices and Silences
This film – a little like another title that appeared the year before, called I’m All Right Jack – patently expresses a quite conservative view of unionisation and issues in British industry. To an extent, this mirrors the way in which a notionally feelgood movie like It’s a Wonderful Life operates, wherein the subtle subtextual message for George Bailey and others can be read as being that one should know one’s place and we should not become overwhelmed by ambition. This conservative message is the sinister undertow of the seemingly heartwarming tale of George being shown just what he contributes in terms of his loved ones, those around him, and his community.
Curtis is presented as an anti-heroic individualist who will not submit to the crowd. He is willing to stand firmly against his fellow workers, in light of his particular circumstances and due to his disdain towards the politics of the workplace. First and foremost, he serves those who depend on him, his wife and children, rather than an abstract collective that is being craftily manipulated to serve someone else’s agenda.
I have no doubt that this is why I have been conscious of the film for a good many years, but never felt motivated to watch it until now: my political provenance patently led me to denigrate Curtis and to see him as an entirely unsympathetic figure because he fails to fall into line with a good many of his workmates initially – and then with all of his workmates, as the small groups of resisters buckle in the face of the attacks on them.
Varieties of Silence
Crucially, at this juncture, they fail to maintain their independence as a group within the larger workforce group, one distinguished by an ongoing objection to the strike but a complicity with the action in light of pressure applied. Instead, they are absorbed into the mass. And the only way in which this can happen is if they have genuinely abandoned their principled objections – or if those principles have been compromised and they now choose silence instead of voice.
Even Curtis’s lodger Joe – despite their friendship at work and his intimate proximity to the family, given his personal circumstances – chooses to refuse to speak to Curtis even in the domestic setting. To that extent, being sent to Coventry suddenly seeps out from behind the factory walls and is unkindly brought over the threshold of the family home.
I am forced to acknowledge – as someone who was bullied throughout much of his school career, particularly in the final years of secondary school, and who could only feel safe when at home with my family – that victims of this unpleasantness these days can often find that the bullies follow them into that space outside of school hours, gaining access through the social media on the ubiquitous smartphone.
All of the above tends to underscore observations that John Higgins and I made in our book, entitled The Great Unheard at Work: Understanding Voice and Silence in Organisations, about how silence in particular plays of critical role in bounding and shoring up social groups (pp99-118). As human beings, there is strong sense for most of us that we crave acceptance and relish being part of social groups.
Such groups are often bounded by shared beliefs and ideas, precepts to which we need to subscribe in order to be accepted into membership. We might enthusiastically accept this relatively informal and occasionally unspoken constitution, particularly as we are first accepted into this circle; thereafter, we might exercise our intellect and find elements of it with which we are unhappy or actively disagree. At this point, the pleasure of belonging may cause us to remain silent about our concerns. Alternatively, we may find that we have moved to such a distance away from that which binds the group together that we need to move towards its perimeter and give voice to our contrary opinions.
This act of heresy serves a vitally important role in terms of sustaining the group and leaving it unchanged. Its very expression reinforces for everyone involved exactly where the boundaries are that define this group’s identity – and thereby reinforce them through that act of reminder. As a heretic, I then have two options as I teeter in the liminal space between the in and out of the group: I can double-down on my voice, continue to express my concerns, and acknowledge that this will see me being forced into the wilderness beyond group membership – or I can swallow my words and recant, embrace silence and complicity, and hope that this contrary behaviour will be forgiven and forgotten by my fellow members and their leaders.
In advance of accepting voluntary redundancy from NHS England last year, I was increasingly unhappy in the organisation: it seemed increasingly dysfunctional to me and poorly led from the top. But I needed to be a recognised member of that group, because I adored the people with whom I worked most closely, felt that there was value to the work that I did and which I enjoyed, and I needed to feel part of something that was bigger than me and which left me feeling connected.
Whilst I tried so hard to hold to the principle that I needed to speak out, there were patently things I couldn’t say because they ran counter to what was felt to be the dominant discourse in the organisation. It is difficult to overestimate just how oppressive I found having to keep silent on matters that felt to me to be of great significance. And just how stressed, repressed and (yes, I have to concede) unwell that self-silencing left me feeling, not least because the conversations that I would have wanted to have in the open – using my voice to express my experience – were instead internalised and took place in my head.
In light of this, I am hugely indebted to my family, for their support and love throughout that period and beyond. Similarly, the weekly freeform conversations that I have had with John Higgins over many years now, which have enriched my social, emotional, and intellectual life immeasurably, enabled me to move those corrosive thoughts out of my head and into a dialogic space where they could be interrogated and reflected upon through the connected lens of theory and practice. And finally I was blessed in finding an existential psychotherapist with whom to work coming up to 18 months ago, whose sessions offer a superb framing within which to make sense of my life.
The Constraint of Consensus
This serves to remind us of Elias Canetti’s rich observations about the relationship between power and crowds, the latter very often an inchoate social group but also something on occasion that appears and evaporates shortly afterwards. Canetti’s distinction between open and closed crowds is an important one in terms of the business of human beings coming together.
An open crowd appears spontaneously and desires little more than to grow by absorbing all of those who are standing in close proximity to it. Therein lies its shortcoming, however: it attracts people without discernment and so – once it ceases to grow – is deemed likely to disintegrate.
Meanwhile, though, Canetti argues, ‘The closed crowd renounces growth and puts the stress on permanence. The first thing to be noticed about it is that it has a boundary. It establishes itself by accepting its limitation. It creates a space for itself that it will fill… …Once the space is completely filled, no one else is allowed in.’ (p17)
In terms of the argument that I am seeking to advance here, a social group very often emerges – to a greater or lesser extent – as an open group. But there are then two potential routes of development: it can remain open until such time as its openness leads it to unravel or it can close itself, potentially limiting membership…but more importantly from the perspective of this analysis defining itself through the introduction or emergence of precepts to which those who seek entry are compelled to adhere.
Such spaces are dominated by the idea of consensus, which is presented without contestation as a positive thing in our social, familial, political, and business contexts. But it is arguable that consensus demands compliance, particularly among those who may have taken a contrary position in the discussions prior to the imposition of a decision. The position that one might have originally held is compelled to disappear once the power that inhabits the structure in which we find ourselves residing declares that an agreement has been reached. The minority opinion – or opinions – melts into air and the vague notion of collective responsibility asserts itself. To that extent, consensus can be an oppressive force in social settings.
Curtis assertively raises his hand to vote against the strike at the union meeting. His voice is effectively reduced to a tightly managed gesture. Arkwright endeavours to speak out in respect to the strike – but, in the film, his voice is gently sidelined by the clamour and excitement of the majority in the meeting and the bureaucratic processes that have been imposed on this voluntary coming together of workers in a particular company. Arkwright’s speech and Curtis’s gesture are very apparent to everyone in the meeting – but the meeting tacitly allows the voice, whilst then pointedly ignoring it.
Most of us in corporate life will be used to such an experience in respect to the exchanges that occur between us and the management. We occasionally accept the invitation to speak out, thereby failing to admit to ourselves that we will make a sound that others will seemingly listen to but will refuse to hear.
Here, another distinction offer by Canetti is extremely apposite. Using the example of the way in which a cat will chase a mouse, he speaks about the contrast between force and power in the following fashion:
‘The cat uses force to catch the mouse, to seize it, hold it in its claws and ultimately kill it. But while it is playing with it another factor is present. It lets it go, allows it to run about a little and even turn its back; and, during this time, the mouse is no longer subjected to force. But it is still within the power of the cat and can be caught again. If it gets right away it escapes from the cat’s sphere of power; but, up to the point at which it can no longer be reached, it is still within it. The space which the cat dominates, the moments of hope that it allows the mouse, while continuing however to watch it closely all the time and never relaxing its interest and intention to destroy it – all this together, space, hope, watchfulness and destructive intent, can be called the actual body of power, or, more simply, power itself.’ (p327)
One might add in this regard that it is rare that force is used to compel us to accept and espouse the opinion of the collective of which we are part. However, the power of the community and of the effect of consensus affects the way in which we think about such things and behave in relation to them. And consensus distinguishes itself in this respect in terms of an observation made by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, namely that ‘The more powerful power is, the more silent is its efficacy. Where it needs to draw special attention to itself, it is already weakened.’ (p1)
He goes on to argue two important points. First, the exercise of power without violence – which should be thought of as the cat playing with its prey – requires the person exploiting that power to occupy the soul of the subaltern person (p3). And, second, following on from this, if one wants to inhabit absolute power, one must eschew the use of violence in favour of using ‘…the freedom of the other’ (p5).
The individual, the collective, and dialogue
Unsurprisingly, these observations draw heavily on the Foucauldian notion of power. Previously, we experienced power primarily through the presence of force. In light of myriad socio-economic and political changes over recent centuries, that modality has shifted so its presence is less apparent – and it tends now to act within and through us, rather than on us. Power is something that inveigles its way into us, into the ways in which we think and behave in a profoundly surreptitious fashion. Importantly, we are both a target of that power – and often an unwitting vehicle for that power. And crucially it emerges from definitions of normalcy, often a statistically generated notion, which in turn creates the category of the other, which invariably and with limited exception sees us adjusting our being in order to avoid slipping from Normal to Other.
The strikers at Martindale’s – despite lacking official sanction from their national trade union – are patently, within that defined social space, defined by themselves as a collective and by the management with whom they are in dispute as being normal. The film demonstrates constantly that the predominant collective voice is the privileged one, whereas the lone voices of Arkwright and latterly Curtis are speedily rendered as the Other. Power resides in the coming together of the crowd.
Arkwright’s acquiescence is a demonstration of how human beings will often leave behind their principles so as they can demonstrate their normalcy, which is less a reflection on that human being and more of the pervasive power of human beings coming together. But Curtis persists in his resistance, despite the social and physical violence that he and his family experience as a result. To that extent, he is a prime example of the concept that Foucault brings to his discussion of contemporary power from Classical experience, namely that of parrhesia.
This represents a willingness to stand up and speak the truth, notwithstanding the effect that this is likely to have. Indeed, in its Classical origins, it meant to speak truth to power even in the face of the cold knowledge that it could lead to one’s death at the hands of the powerful. And, as we are beginning to see here, the manifestation of power in contemporary circumstances is as much about its presence in and emergence from the collective, however that might arise, as it is about the presence of individuals who occupy an elevated position in our social pyramids.
It is important to recall here that parrhesia carries with it a strong notion that it is the act of an individual in the face of something about which they feel they cannot but speak. But one problem faced in our contemporary context is that neo-liberalism – with its powerfully individualist foundations – has so penetrated our public discourse that everything is endlessly expressed in terms of the individual, which inevitably renders it difficult to affect meaningful social change because that requires collective action.
This leads to an observation as to how the balance between individual and collective might be more imaginatively envisaged. When Curtis refuses to strike in light of his personal circumstances and worldview, the power of the collective is adversely impacted, because it immediately lacks unanimity. This has two potential effects: it might embolden those with whom the collective is seeking to negotiate; and it might offer an oppositional pole of attraction within the collective to those who are not hugely committed to the choice of direction but cannot face taking up a contrary position.
However, when the collective exercises its power by seeking to silence people within its ranks and closing off all possible channels of disagreement and discussion, it loses its way as a notional force for good, especially in respect to the idea of prefiguration in respect to the question of the relationship between the ends and the means. Often, it does not require being sent to Coventry or having a brick through one’s windows: the most effective power is the one that sees people silence themselves for the sake of belonging.
It’s worth recalling from history that Lenin forged the Bolshevik party in Russia as a democratic centralist formation. In practice, the centralism effaced the democracy, as it ended up as a practice that curtailed – indeed, prevented – debate once the collective has taken a vote. This, after all, was the way in which the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was to be realised, which was meant to appear when the democratic centralists got to apply this modus operandi once they had taken over (and bolstered) the state. Instead, the gulag appeared, alongside the Stasi, and Soviet tanks rumbling through the streets of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, the depressing and oppressive manifestations of that centralism and the supposedly necessary dictatorship.
To return to our discussion of the individual, the neo-liberal mobilisation of this concept as part of its political project – and the negative impact that this has had on people seeking to oppose it, where progressive politics have been adversely individualised – clouds the following important observation:
- We are thrown into the world as individuals and must live our lives on that basis, existentially steering a course for ourselves that recognises that our decisions define us – and also inevitably shape the wider notion of humanity.
- The most significant decision we can make as individuals is to commit ourselves to a collective, for the sake of the greater good.
- However, that collective needs to be kept under constant review by each and every person who forms it, to ensure that those myriad individual commitments are actively sustained – and that the collective does not deliberately or inadvertently invest itself with power over its diverse membership but instead builds strength through dialogue and dissent.
A journey is not solely about the destination; it is about the route you plan, the route you take, and the things that you see and hear on the way.
The Courage of Curtis
The tension that exists between coming together as a group and asserting ourselves as an individual has always been problematic in human society. To an extent, it mirrors the similarly complicated sociological question of how structure and agency are experienced by human beings in their lives.
As noted above, the most profound individualised gesture is for us to marginally efface ourselves in order to come together with others. To commit to the collective good, though, we need to be reassured that the collective is being good to us. And we need the checks and balances that prevent that collective from becoming a stricture rather than a positive support.
The collective after all is the way in which humankind supports one another – I am thinking here of Kropotkin’s notion of Mutual Aid, where humans come together as a benign crowd in order to respond to some adverse circumstance – and will find ways of addressing the global challenges that we face, by which I mean that the issue of climate change will only start to be properly addressed through our collective intelligence.
We cannot know how the variety of individuals who made up the union membership at Martindale’s factory thought about the situation. All bar Arkwright initially and Curtis throughout may have been biting their tongues, unable to speak out in light of their desire to maintain their membership of that group. They may have chosen silence but too often we assume silence to be an absence of voice, when – in fact – the voice continues speaking through its choice not to speak.
Curtis speaks out initially in his visible vote against the strike. His voice carries through the courageous gesture of the raising of his hand. But the democratic centralism that prevails in that kind of bureaucratised structure allows him to speak in that way but does not hear what is said, once he is seen to be the minority – in this case, a minority of just one. It appears there is momentarily a narrow space for dialogue in the union meeting. But what little room there is for discussion snaps tightly closed once the show of hands has been completed.
Whatever motivates Curtis to stand against the crowd is by the by. Traditionally, the collective has undergirded itself with the precept that “unity is strength”. It certainly can be unless that unity is compelled either structurally or socially. This slogan has a vaguely totalitarian feel when analysed in this way: there is a subtle and menacing sub-text, where a seemingly cheerful chant of “unity is strength” – bellowed through the megaphone that always appears in the midst of protests, the amplified voice enchanting the crowd and dominating the discourse – generates a shadowy and tacit demand, namely “…so keep your trap shut”.
This demands of those of us who wish to work together with others for the sake of the collective good that we should attend very carefully to how voice and silence is experienced in those social spaces that we create. We should constantly work to prevent the ossification of the group of which we are part, find meaningful ways in which to support dialogue in that space, work solidly to avoid bureaucratisation, challenge the idea that consensus is the thing to which we should be moving when we recognise the tyranny associated with it, and actively engage with voice and silence in terms of the discourse within that group.
Postscript
Just as I was completing this piece, around a fortnight after watching The Angry Silence, we saw the publication of The Khan Review. This report – undertaken by Dame Sara Khan – inquired in some depth into the contemporary challenges to our social cohesion and democratic practices. This comprehensive document pulls together a range of materials in respect to this topic and – in so doing – offers this observation in its Executive Summary:
‘Evidence gathered by this Review reveals a wide-spread phenomenon of extreme forms of harassment leading individuals into silence, self-censoring, or abandoning their democratic rights. The Reviewer calls this freedom-restricting harassment (FRH), defined as when people experience or witness threatening, intimidatory or abusive harassment online and/or offline which is intended to make people or institutions censor or self-censor out of fear. This may or may not be part of a persistent pattern of behaviour.’ (p6)
The review encompassed a survey of a sample of 1279 people. In response to the question ‘How often, if at all, do you restrict expressing a view publicly out of fear of receiving “freedom restricting harassment” and abuse to yourself or loved ones?’, it is suggested that 76% had felt obliged to behave in this fashion, with 47% suggesting that they had self-censored in light of seeing someone else experiencing FRH (p7).
Regardless of how one thinks about this piece of work, it is patently tapping into a social phenomenon that resonates with the experience of Curtis at Martindale’s and which demands greater scrutiny. And the analysis in this article has sought to show that it is not merely the explicit activity under the rubric of FRH that should be of concern to us, although this will be experienced as particularly oppressive.
Instead, we need to recognise that, while the collective is the means by which we might come together to generate ideas and experiments for positive change, it is also a place of constraint, where some voices are heard and other are silenced, just as a result of the act of coming together. Let’s constantly remind ourselves of the need to engage in prefigurative practice, using a means that properly reflects the end…and demonstrating a willingness to debate and adjust the end that we might have in mind to take into account dissenting opinion and changing circumstances. The checks and balances needed to refresh the collective arise not from a bureaucratic plan but from our active and engaged presence therein.
Radical OD 