Soul of a Citizen

Getting involved: an interview with writer Paul Rogat Loeb
interview by Silja J.A. Talvi, Free Press contributor

What compels some of us to act loudly and publicly in the name of justice, fairness or equality? Why do others of us shy away from civic activism, even while we live with simmering outrage toward glaring societal inequities? Why do so many Americans appear so disenchanted with social action of any kind, plagued with seemingly unshakable skepticism toward every known form of public dissent?

Seattle-based writer Paul Rogat Loeb has spent a lifetime observing and considering these issues, cultivating a well-rounded understanding of the nature of democratic participation, the influence of rampant societal cynicism, and the profound transformation that activism has brought to the lives of countless thousands of American denizens.

A nationally recognized author, lecturer and essayist, Loeb's previous published works have included highly acclaimed studies of activism and specific social struggles: Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus; Hope in Hard Times: America's Peace Movement and the Reagan Era; and Nuclear Culture: Living and Working in the World's Largest Atomic Complex.

But with the release of last year's Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time (St. Martin's Griffin), Loeb realized he had tapped into an issue that resonated for a wide and far-reaching audience: In the slick, materialistic 1990s, a newer generation of young activists had faced a sometimes grossly politically uninformed and oft-apathetic climate on colleges campuses. Older generations of activists, for their part, were finding it more difficult to sustain their own social and environmentally-focused work, struggling with group in-fighting, and often lacking a clear vision of the kind of future they sought for themselves and their children.

It is Loeb's contention that too many of us have become convinced that there is nothing we can do to affect our future. A "learned helplessness," says Loeb, has permeated our lives and has prevented even the most well-meaning individuals from taking even the smallest steps toward bettering their communities.

In Soul of a Citizen, Loeb weaves together a diverse, captivating set of personal stories, and combines this cross-section of voices with the wisdom of inspirational historical and religious figures. A lucid personal narrative and Loeb's sharp, psychosocial analysis all contribute to a strong, compelling work that has garnered praise from the likes of Howard Zinn, Grace Paley, Alice Walker and Studs Terkel.

Journalist Silja J.A. Talvi spoke with Loeb about the challenge of present-day activism and how we, as individuals and communities, can learn to heed, and act upon, our deepest convictions.

ST: In Soul of a Citizen, you go to great lengths to explain the ways in which many Americans-young and old alike-have become convinced that none of our efforts can truly affect the future: A culture of cynicism and a "learned helplessness" that seems to permeate our society. Tell me about some of the cultural or historical factors that you think have conspired to create so much cynicism?

PL: We're told continually that nothing we do will matter. Again and again we get this message that says, "Don't even try, don't even start. It's not worth it." After a while, we begin to believe it, and it does become a self-fulfilling prophecy because if we're not involved, we're certainly not going to be able to do anything. It comes out of a few different places. Thirty years ago there were these great, high hopes and some of them got dashed. There is this residual sense that says, "Well, they tried this and it failed, and therefore why should we try?"

On the other hand, a lot of it has to do with how you look at both that period and its legacy. So, if you say, "Gee, they didn't completely change the world," well, that's one way of looking at it. Or you can say, "Look at how many people cared about the environment 30 years ago," and that kept going. Look at the difference in the opportunities for women now versus 30 years ago. That kept going. Look at how gays have a certain dignity now whereas just 30 years ago, just to be "out" back then [was so dangerous]... There are a lot of areas where the efforts of people who have acted have made a difference. But we're not told that.

We're also told that everybody from that sixties generation that got involved betrayed their values and went to Wall Street and became greed-heads.... The same people who say that say, "Now look at these lousy slackers, these couch potatoes. They're completely no good. They're lazy."

It hits you from both sides, and [both of these notions] are false. One thing I write about in both books is the student anti-apartheid movement from the mid-1980s to early 1990s. At colleges all across the country, people were pushing companies to divest that did business with South Africa. The cumulative weight of all of that was the pivotal force in the Congress finally passing sanctions instead of supporting South Africa as we had for years and years.

I write in Soul of a Citizen about reading this ad for Slate, Microsoft's online magazine, and they write of "this certain insouciant smirk that thinking people find so compelling these days." I went into my dictionary to look it up. "Insouciant" is carefree, like a Laura Ashley ad. Nothing touches us. A smirk is an attitude of contempt, a bully smile. I thought, "Why the hell are they praising this?" They're trying to draw people in by saying "We look down on the world." What a weird idea. I felt they were trying to say "We're a magazine for people who feel superior. Come join us."

I just felt that this was such an indication of [the direction] of so much of the media; this kind of "we're snotty, we're hipper than you are, none of this really matters, so we don't have to care." It's damaging because it sets a tone. It makes you feel naive for trying to do anything. And if you do, you're going to be the recipient of some of this kind of snideness.

ST: What of this notion that some of us were just born to be activists and leaders and do the work of change, while the rest of society is more or less fated to sit by and watch things happen? Do you think that's just the natural order of things?

PL: It's a very popular notion.... The problem with that is that I look at so many people who didn't start out involved and are now doing really powerful things. There's this wonderful woman in San Antonio, Texas, named Virginia Ramirez who has an 8th grade education, she's Latina, of a very poor background, her husband runs a tiny taxi business, and then a woman in her neighborhood dies because the house is so run down that the wind whips through her every winter and she gets sick. The paramedics arrive and say, "She'd be alive if someone cared enough to do something." This woman, in her mid-40s, decides to get involved in a community group, takes one step and then another. She starts speaking up and ends up testifying before Congress on a very powerful job training bill. She goes from completely not being involved in public life to being a significant leader in an organization that brings about a billion dollars of public and private resources to the poorest communities of San Antonio.

ST: Talk to me a little about the absence of the "magnetic north" in progressive or radical political circles, and what kinds of challenges-positive and negative-this presents us with?

PL: The phrase "magnetic north" came out when I was interviewing burned-out activists. One of the major sections in Soul of a Citizen is about burn-out. I was interviewing them trying to figure out why these people who had experience, skills, who had won victories, established important institutions and fought back unjust ones ... why did they stop? All of us know too many people who have cycled through... people who have retreated into private life, they watch the news disgruntledly, they wish things would change, maybe they try to work with integrity in their jobs, but they're not taking on the larger struggles of society like they once did. One of the reasons that people gave was the sense of erosion of their long-term vision. They way that people articulated the continuum was that these were people who had a fairly complex critique of society and market capitalism. They wanted an alternative too that, which is a reasonable thing. At one point, there was the socialist tradition and there were the actually existing socialist states in their various degrees of deprivation: USSR, Nicaragua, and so on.

When those states collapsed, it left a void even among the people who were very critical of the abuses of power in those states. As one friend put it, "It's not that I ever liked them, but I was hoping they would evolve into something else." That they would go back to that truer socialist path, something that was humane and that allowed human dignity to bloom, which is what the socialist vision was, originally.

This world run by Microsoft, Disney, Mitsubishi, GE, this isn't the only way to go.... We've got the Social Democratic tradition in Europe, Sweden, Holland, Germany, with workers on the boards of big corporations and kids getting health care and housing--all of that looks like heaven from here. But you still want to look beyond that, and the looking beyond that is difficult.

What happened, I think, is in the difficulty of looking beyond that, it rippled out and demoralized a lot of people. These people cheered the revolutions in the late 1980s and early 1990s, because they were hopeful things, but then you saw a worse kind of buccaneer capitalism taking over, and so it was further demoralizing.... So what you had were people who were confused by that and then felt they couldn't act on anything.... People have abdicated their voices. The phrase that someone used that I thought was painful and eloquent was "I feel like I no longer have a magnetic north." A place to point to that's where I want to go, and that makes it harder to act in all of the other ways that are very far short of that magnetic north.

A lot of people felt that. They felt dislocated. The Gulf War also demoralized a lot of people-the speed of it, in particular. And then the confusion over Kosovo. Trying to respond to a complex world isn't always easy. At the same time, what I find is that when people are able to act, they're saying, "OK, we're just going to live with a lot of uncertainty."

The perfect standard is a barrier for people who have never been involved. It's also, in a more sophisticated version, a barrier for people who have been involved. It's a barrier that says, "I once had this certainty and now I don't, therefore I can't act."

People get tangled wanting this perfect, coherent, consistent [ideology], and they wouldn't have done that when they were beginning. I see so many people who feel like they can't get involved because they don't have all the answers. I keep saying, it's not about having all the answers. It's not about certainty. It's about the stories that move [your] heart... The theories come later. I'm not disparaging the theories. It's useful to have the theories. It's useful to think of what kind of a society would really be just. But you don't have to know the answer to that while you're acting.

I ran into someone who I had interviewed for the book [who was a burned-out activist], who had subsequently gotten re-involved in activism. She said, "I've got a new philosophy. It's show up, do the best you can, and let go of it."

What else can you do? When you keep pushing for justice and you live long enough, you get to see a lot that you've accomplished ... I remember Alice Walker talking about how we talk a lot about forgiving our enemies, but we don't forgive ourselves. We feel like whatever we do, it's not enough ... We beat ourselves down needlessly. We can do what we can do, and if enough of us keep doing it for long enough, it's going to matter.

ST: What kind of advice do you have for those activists who have put in their years organizing and agitating and who have burned out not on the work itself, but on the people around them, who may have treated them poorly, or who have perhaps failed to acknowledge their work? How should a person like that contemplate re-entering activism?

PL: It's hard ... Part of the challenge in re-entering activism is to take control of the process and maybe be a little careful at first, a little self-protective ... As you get back into the swing of it, you can make decision at greater levels of commitment and engagement. The process of getting involved [as an activist for the first time], taking it one step at a time, it's just as true with re-involvement.

How do you deal with the difficult people? It's hard. If you're in a group, a group has the right to say to a person, "I'm sorry, other people need to talk. You need to be quiet." If that person doesn't heed that, then you have the right to say, "I'm sorry, you're not welcome here." Every group that I've ever known is a voluntary association. You have the right to do that. On a personal level, if a group that you're working with is just so filled with infighting and what not, you need to go to a different group and work with people who aren't as divisive.

It's not only the "bad people" who cause trouble in groups that burn people out, it's all of us when we're just so overloaded and we take it out on someone else. And that hurts because it's from someone you trust and like. That stuff wounds sincerely.

Some of the interpersonal difficulties are products of not knowing how to work through differences well. If we took ten percent of what we spend on postage and brought in people who are good at facilitating and training on this kind of thing, we'd keep a lot of people who otherwise burn out.