I was talking to social activist John Pacheco the other day about Socon.ca his latest venture. One of the objectives of socon.ca is to help transform the culture, that is, bring more, what I call "cultural products" to the masses. His thinking is (and mine as well) is that so long as the culture remains the same, we can have all the correct arguments in the world, the people will not support traditional values. Their hearts must be changed. They must be able to see a new worldview. Only then, when more people have absorbed and assimilated pro-life values, will the culture be changed, and the terrain prepared for pro-life (and pro-marriage) legislation.
I support his initiative, and I think it's a great idea, but I would like to add to that.
I think that while transforming the mainstream "non-pro-life" culture out there is essential, it's even more essential that pro-lifers actually develop their own culture and therefore community, in order to be effective.
Cultural products that don't have a community to support them don't have any effect. They're someone's poems hiding in a drawer, someone's music in a hardrive, someone's unread blog.
Without that community, those things also are deprived of meaning. I have written so-con poems. But if there is no body to assent to these poems, in some way, they won't have any audience, any "mileage". They may as well have not been written, as far as their influence is concerned.
We need this community and cultural identity not just for its own sake, but because without it, we will lack political clout, and we will lack cultural momentum, and therefore political momentum.
What do I mean when I say we lack community and culture?
Let's take community first. Who are we? We're people in favour of fetal rights, and to a secondary degree, people who oppose euthanasisa, assisted suicide, and the like.
Is that all there is to us?
Pretty much. And that's why we don't get ahead.
We're isolated individuals that are connected by a set of abstract principles. Abstract principles are fine, but they don't create community, and by themselves they don't create culture. So pro-lifers are defined essentially by their activism and their ideas; it's a very narrow identity.
There's no "soul" so to speak. People can't put names to faces. People can't tell what we're really like. They don't know what movies we watch, they don't know what songs we listen to, they don't know what magazines we read.
Heck, pro-lifers don't know that!
We're known by our principles. If the principles are rejected, we are rejected. If our identity is so bound to abstract principles, and we're so anonymous and so "nothing" to ourselves and the rest of the world, of course we're not going to create any momentum. We're just a bunch of isolated individuals known as members of Campaign Life, or the local Right-to-Life assocation: we are completely defined by our lobbying and our political defeats, and NOTHING ELSE.
What needs to be done then is to create a pro-life community. We have lots of pro-lifers out there, lots of groups, lots of websites, but we don't have a lot of community.
By community, I mean, the sense that we know one another, of connecting to one another, not just as political activists but as multi-dimensional human beings.
Take the pro-abort lobby. Name a pro-abort actor. Easy. Whoopi Goldberg. Name a pro-abort band. Easy, REM. Name a pro-abort activist. Easy. Judy Rebick.
I can go on and on-- name a pro-abort this, name a pro-abort that.
Now: Name a pro-life actor. Mel Gibson. Patricia Heatley. And? Name a pro-life singer (in the mainstream media). Hm... Name a pro-life activist. If you said Jim Hughes, pretty good, but I'm certain that he's not a household name.
We have an idea what social liberals are doing and what they're talking about because they have a community. It largely corresponds to the mainstream culture at large, although I don't think they're necessarily synonymous.
People don't know who we are, and we don't know who we are.
This puts us at a massive disadvantage. The lack of community impedes momentum because that means there's a lack of networking. There's also a lack of heart. Right now, in the pro-life movement, we see the most dedicated partisans of fetal rights. But we need the less committed, as well, at this point. We need the moms and dads who don't have the time to be activists. These less-than-committed pro-lifers (or moderates) like to be part of a movement that gives them some emotional satisfaction, some pride. It also helps us when we're discouraged, and boy do we ever need that. We also need a community for a readily accessible audience for the exchange of ideas an strategy. I know we have The Interim and Lifesite, but one newspaper and one newssite cannot go at it alone.
People need to be part of a movement, vicariously. I realize it might seem a bit irrational, but this is how it works. When people go see a documentary by Michael Moore, and they agree with him, they see themselves as part of the left. It does not matter whether they ever lift a finger for a leftist cause, their identification with the left makes them amenable to lefist policy.
That's exactly what we need.
And we need them to be conscious of the fact that they're part of a greater group. When I was an isolated pro-lifer in Quebec City, I had no sense of being part of a greater group, because I simply had no pro-life references in my life, so I felt like I had no group. And because of this, I didn't act on my convictions.
But if people don't feel alone, they are more willing to act. The sense of community contributes to this.
Another major reason to develop a sense of community and culture is that right now, pro-lifers are defined in the national consciousness by the socially liberal media. They define who we are to non-pro-lifers, and to an extent, they define who we are to ourselves. Our opinions and our cultural products surface here and there in the MSM, but not often enough and persistently enough to affect the mainstream consciousness. To the larger society, we're right-wing nutjobs, and until we create our own community, we won't have a strong basis to counter this perception.
Some might suppose that since so many pro-lifers are conservative Christians, conservative Christian identity would be sufficient to define pro-lifers. We all know, though that "Christian" and "pro-lifer" is not synonymous. We also need more than religious doctrine and symbolism to define our pro-life culture.
Culture is made up of various kinds of things: art, entertainment, dress, behaviours, expressions, etc. Religion or overtly religious images/themes are not-- and do not have be-- part of every one of those things.
Just because a cultural artefact does not explicitly mention God or Jesus, isn't explicitly Christian or isn't squeaky clean a la Ned Flanders doesn't mean it has no place in a largely Christian community.
I sense that there is an underlying fear that in omitting to make everything overtly Christian, there is a betrayal of religion, or a fear that it will not be properly understood.
Cultural artefacts will be interpreted and understood in light of the individual that creates it, and/or the community from which they emanate. So a movie by a Chrstian director will be understood to be consistent with Christianity, given its provenance.
By doing all this, we give non-pro-lifers the opportunity to find out who we are, without any kind of confrontation, and they get to step into our worldview. Naturally, some wil reject this world view. That's okay. Some will initially reject it, but slowly come around as they are more regularly exposed. They will understand that many of the things our political opponents say about us are false, and that will build credibility. They will assimilate our values and identify with us.
It is thus essential that we develop a community and develop a more multi-dimensional cultural aspect to our work. We can't just be picketers, letter writers, CPC volunteers and the like. We have to be actors, writers, directors, producers, celebrities, as well as those who just consume pro-life culture. We also have to put forward narratives to change their hearts of the people: about our principles and who we are.
How to do this? I am not sure, but it's something to keep in mind and work on. John Pacheco's socon.ca is a step in the right direction. Even though we may not have the solution today, we should bear in mind that if we don't work on this, we're screwed. It's as simple as that.
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