What is the Vibe: In This Together or Every Man for Himself
Poisonous Cow Parsley which looks a lot like an edible plant!
Welcome to America (or back to in my case). Hate to break it to you if you’ve been wearing the rose-colored glasses, but the vibes are a little off here these days. The past few weeks since I moved to Miami and started working with a team committed to building a welcoming Florida for all people, let’s just say it has been eventful. I don’t think I need to elaborate.
One of the things that I have been thinking a lot about these past few years is why we are scapegoating immigrants right now. Or rather, why are people so susceptible to the demonization of vulnerable “others”? The impacts of global instability have increased migration rates, sure. But that doesn’t explain why your everyday person, who sees themselves as a good person, is so receptive to such a hateful message. It is true that the fear of the foreigner is as old as anti-semitism and misogyny, two other powerful tools of those who weaponize our baser impulses for their own gain.
But I can’t just accept that it is human nature and move on. There are times when we rise to the occasion as a society. What conditions would create the desire to do so here.
Is the Common Good Global?
One factor is the persistence of Eurocentric worldviews that understand foreign policy through the lens of security for the US, Europe and the British commonwealth only. The current world situation demands us to consider the public good as encompassing the whole world, but the persistence of the worldviews based on old-fashioned colonial perspectives is very real. If we could expand our view, we would be compelled to look at the root causes of modern migration. Human migration is natural and practiced across cultures, but when people are leaving out of fear of violence or starvation, we aren’t looking at the healthy movements that occur at more sustainable levels. People fleeing their country for these reasons are the ones being characterized as the terrifying hordes at the southern border. They are easy to demonize because that is easier than looking at who is responsible for creating these conditions in the first place.
What is demanded of us in this moment (not just in immigration, but in climate crisis reversal and global peacekeeping as well) is that we see a common good that encompasses the whole world, but even in the Western states the idea of the common or public good has fallen out of fashion. We don’t even think of a common interest for those of us within these borders. Especially when it is asked of us to share with those we consider “the foreigner.” We are demonstrating in our western democracies, especially when we walk so close to the brink of electing authoritarians, that we would rather abandon the concept of the public good than reimagine it with inclusion. That is what is majorly throwing off the vibes here, y’all.
And it doesn’t have to be this way. But to break the hold that xenophobia has on the Western world it seems like we need to tackle this very depressing vibe that we would rather throw away the baby than share it. (Solomon reference for my Bible-reading people!)
What role do nonprofits in the U.S. play in all this?
I read an article called “The Origins of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex” by Claire Dunning where she very concisely situates the history of the modern nonprofit in the privatization of the delivery of goods and service. She confronts the common assumption that we have always had charitable organizations serving as the “third sector” to the government and the market.
Not only is the role of the nonprofit mythologized, it is done so as “an important political function - it is used to perpetuate a particular vision of what the role of the state is and what it should be.”
She traces the roots of the current grant-making system to the postwar cities of the US where segregation persisted, but calls for justice rang out. Some of these strategies allowed the federal government to circumvent states with racist policies.
But the privatized service-delivery through grant-making consolidated power while obfuscating who holds the power to provide or deny services. “(T)his sort of privatized inclusion became a way for marginalized communities to simply lose by a smaller margin. The consequences of this approach, which has become a pillar of the neoliberal agenda, remain with us today in the form of reduced government capacity, rampant inequality, and an unwavering expectation that small, private organizations can and should solve large, public problems.”
Not only was the system upholding the power of the federal government and wealthy donors, it also recast these services as “optional luxuries rather than essential functions of government.” Just as they expand services to include black and brown people, we recast these services as “entitlements.” And, of course, this patchwork comes nowhere close to meeting the need leading to the workers in the nonprofit industry feeling constantly underwater.
So now we must rely upon the altruistic wealthy to fill the gaps in this patchwork. Rarely is there the funding or energy to take on system changes. And maybe we are not in a position to do that system change work anyway. Unless enough of us believe in a common good or a public good that is worth upholding and defending, Dunning’s proposal for dismantling the nonprofit industrial complex will fail.
She writes, “(w)hat is needed is a wider reimagining of what public goods are and who should provide them, and a wider reckoning with what it has meant to routinely subject the needs of those traditionally excluded and harmed- particularly on the basis of race- to a system shown to be partial, privatized, and inadequate.”
If myths helped get us here, what does re-mythologizing toward a public good look like?
And I am not (nor do I think Dunning is) arguing that nonprofits are bad, let’s end them. But nonprofit leaders will be the first to tell you that we always feel like we are plugging our fingers into the cracks of a breaking dam, and getting mired in the guilt that it will never be enough. It cannot be enough structurally because even governments built by and for the people will struggle with the grand scope of serving the needs of people feeling the impact of stark wealth inequality while forestalling corruption within and criticism from without. All of these forces will be at play in the provision of these services.
Obviously, the privitization of service-delivery is in the context of a broader push that is often referred to as neo-liberalism. I just bring it up because it is one that we are not as used to thinking about in these terms. It’s one way that this every man for himself worldview seeps into all spaces, even the altruistic ones.
What can we do?
Sorry, I don’t have that many answers yet. Just questions. For example, how did the project of privitization seep so deeply into the consciousness of people in liberal societies? What connections can we learn here from the centuries-long project to build an ideology of anti-black racism that seeped into widespread belief systems. I bring this up because I learned from David Graeber in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years that before the ignition of the trans-atlantic slave trade, Christian Europe of the so-called “Dark Ages” had essentially ended the practice of slavery (and resisted debt with interest and Roman militarism). They had to change cultural worldviews by inventing and spreading modern racism to bring it back and it worked. We are still working on undoing that harm. But I bring it up because it is doable for both evil and for good. This is just a European example and I’m sure there are others.
I will keep pondering this. But help me out here. If you also think about these things, which I guess you probably do if you read this far, I would love your thoughts.
Xoxo
Tiffany
P.S. This video was very cute and basically makes the same point but in a more fun and consice way.
