Emotional Alchemy: anger, fear, and grief as fuel for change (part 1)
Today in The Platypus:
Deepak explores the role of emotions in politics and social change, using the AIDS movement as a touchstone.
The reading recommendations focus on emotions, including a discussion with a brilliant psychologist about how we construct them and can actively intervene in our inner life, and a variety of readings about the movement against AIDS.
Savvy Corner features Harry’s new, two-minute video about the book Deepak co-edited with Ruth Milkman and Penny Lewis: Immigration Matters: Visions, Strategies, and Movements for a Progressive Future. And there’s a great event on March 2nd about leadership and social change with Gara LaMarche, Rahna Epting, and Maurice Mitchell that you should register for here.
Delights and Provocations includes a brilliant film about the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and an explanation for the misery of email.
What do Donald Trump and the movement against AIDS have in common?
Deepak Bhargava
Today’s theme is intense emotion. How do emotions arise and shape our experience of the world and our identities? What are the tools available to us to work with them skillfully? And what is the relationship of these emotions to politics and social change movements? We’ll look at these questions through the prism of two pandemics: AIDS and Covid-19.
The country marked 500,000 deaths due to Covid-19 last week. We have endured a year of mass death, recession, political and racist violence, and authoritarian insurgencies. And these experiences have stirred intense feelings, pushing many of us beyond our usual range of emotions. This pandemic jolted me back into the experience of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and 1990s. It took decades for 700,000 people to die in the U.S. from AIDS, but for many years panic and dread gripped the gay community in ways echoed today. I recognize many of the emotions now that I felt then: the fear of death and of being a vector for illness to come to others; grief at the loss of people and of community; and, above all, incandescent anger at the malignity of a brutal government’s response. Many gay men living through the AIDS crisis came to associate intimacy—something we all need, want, and deserve—with extinction. The experience of seeing proximity to other people as potentially deadly is now widely shared in our culture.
The AIDS crisis became fuel for my own political awakening, as I like many others did what ACT-UP proposed and turned “grief into rage.” Somehow and mysteriously, we metabolized those feelings of fear, grief, and anger from raw, private emotions into public ones. It took six long years for this process to unfold. The first cases of AIDS were reported in 1981 and the first ACT-UP action took place in 1987. This process of turning pain outward forced the government to respond, eventually reshaped AIDS policy, and spurred the LGBT equality movement forward.
It was queer alchemy: a kind of collective sorcery that transformed those potent emotions into the needed fuel for heroism, struggle, and change. Our fear became alertness to the existential threat we faced; anger became adamantine clarity about what needed to be done and the strength to act; and grief became the wellspring of compassion that held our hearts open to each other. As a result of this alchemy, even amidst the horrors, there was joy, which found expression in vibrant, creative, and even artistic activism – not just a defiance of death, but also a tender, passionate great embrace of life. There is an astonishing account by sociologist Deborah B. Gould (in today’s reading recommendations) of the pre-existing “structures of feeling” in LGBT communities before the AIDS crisis. Gould shows how the community moved from intense feelings of shame and fear and activities of self-help – designed to communicate responsible behavior to the dominant society – to militant anger and protests of escalating intensity. There was nothing at all inevitable about that transition in the political posture of the community. The AIDS movement emerged at a time when few observers would have considered objective conditions conducive to success. Gould argues that
Emotions played a determining role in the emergence of militant AIDS activism. A tightening of political opportunities helped to crystallize more oppositional emotions and reconfigure the prevailing emotion culture in lesbian and gay communities, animating a new “resolution” to lesbian and gay ambivalence about homosexuality and about dominant society.
You can see the power of consciously working with fear consciously in the work of David France, whose documentary and book How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Scientists Tamed AIDS are among the best accounts of organizing and social change.
Like AIDS, Covid-19 has been refracted through and also reinforced grotesque patterns of economic and racial inequality, as legendary AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves has mournfully observed. But Covid-19 has had a far broader impact on society and culture than AIDS did. Our whole society has been suffused with fear, grief, and rage, and those emotions have fueled both beautiful, effective political mobilizations and mutual aid and also hate crimes and resurgent white terrorism.
I’ve been compelled by this year of inner and outer tumult to ask how we can consciously and deliberately work with such intense emotions, as individuals and as communities, rather than suppress or react to them in unskillful ways that create harm. I’ve come to believe that strong emotions are even more central to organizing, social change, and politics than we normally admit. Social scientists often analyze movements as responses to deep structural conflicts between social groups or as responses to political opportunities. Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, editors of a superb collection of essays, Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements make a strong case against the narrowly structural and overly rationalist ways that social scientists have made sense of protest and political action, arguing that “academic observers have managed to ignore the swirl of passions all around them in political life.” They show that “emotions can be strategically used by activists and be the basis for strategic thought.”
Social scientists who emphasize agency – the choices people make about how to respond to given conditions – often assume that individuals do or should make political choices in terms of rational calculations of material interest of various kinds. This story that has been complicated in recent years by Trump’s rise and by the millions of people who are voting based on their constructed identities and tribes, through which they make sense of their interests on their own terms, often in ways that are confounding to people looking in from the outside. (Arlie Hochschild’s book Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right remains a touchstone for understanding the interior experience of this racialized identity and emotion). Structures, political opportunities, and rational interests surely are critical to understanding politics and social change – but emotions play an underappreciated role. Anyone who has been moved to throw themselves into a social movement will tell you about the rich inner life of motivation and feelings that churn below the surface and are too rarely the subject of analysis.
In contrast to right-wing politics which consistently arouses negative and tribal emotions, political analysts and even many movement actors on the left tend to privilege the role of rational appeals to interests and detailed policy prescriptions in winning votes and change. Marianne Williamson, perhaps the strangest of all the 2020 Presidential candidates, first came to prominence in the AIDS crisis. She had a breakout moment in the Democratic primary debates when she became a vessel for a profound truth about American politics. She warned her fellow Democrats who were debating the fine points of their differences about health care and other plans that “If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.” And she said, "Mr. President, if you're listening, I want you to hear me please: You have harnessed fear for political purposes, and only love can cast that out.”
Donald Trump has been a wizard of dark emotions, conjuring the very worst in other human beings by manipulating pre-existing deep structures of identity and emotion. The affective appeal of authoritarianism – on vivid display in his mega-rallies – is central rather than incidental to its success. When the election was finally called by the networks and Harry and I went out on the streets to celebrate with millions of other people banging on pots and pans, dancing and laughing in happiness, I had a sense that the dark wizard would be driven out of power not only by smart, cerebral strategies but by the invocation of the energetic antidote to terror, which is, of course, the kind of collective, embodied joy that extended through that glorious weekend in November.
So, the reading recommendations this week are all on the theme of emotions – what they are, our ability to remake our affective experience, and the central role of emotions in the movement against AIDS. A future issue of The Platypus will look at questions of emotion, race, identity, and politics including the role of emotions in fueling authoritarianism. Our working hypothesis is that progressives will have to get better at the kind of emotional alchemy practiced by the movement against AIDS and other successful social movements if they are to succeed in strengthening multi-racial democracy, advancing social justice, and defeating authoritarianism.
Reading Recommendations
In a fascinating interview, Northeastern University professor of psychology, Lisa Feldman Barrett argues “We don’t just feel emotions. We make them.” She explores the way in which our emotions are algorithmic interpretations of somatic experiences operating below a conscious level. We use concepts to interpret what’s happening to our bodies based on past experiences. These concepts are both personal and cultural, with the range of emotional responses varying immensely across societies. These cognitive heuristics we use to make sense of experience through emotions can often lead us astray but are also subject to conscious intervention. We can remake our interior, emotional life.
RadioLab produced a remarkable podcast about the AIDS crisis, focusing on the day in 1992 when the AIDS memorial quilt was displayed on the national mall for the first time. It was an act of profound collective grief that wove together a community and was part of that alchemical process of transformation. In a less-well-known action by ACT-UP on the very same day, activists brought the ashes of their cremated lovers to the White House and tossed them over the fence to protest the hostile indifference of the national government in the face of discrimination and mass death. Simultaneously at two symbolic locations in Washington D.C., grief and rage were consciously and powerfully metabolized in ways that have had a lasting impact on our politics and culture. These political acts were also alchemical transformations of the deepest energies of collective psyches for change. ACT-UP activist David Robinson who hurled his dead lover’s ashes over the White House fence to protest the hostile indifference of the Bush administration and other activists had this to say about the “ashes on the White House lawn” action:
Some of the [ashes] just falling and some going in [the White House grounds], the wind wafted back over us and began to coat us . . and the feel of those ashes, even a taste of them on your face and lips? I can remember having to clean my glasses because I couldn't see. It was somewhere in the process of this that I went from that grim feeling to justice. Fierce. I had a feeling like an embodiment of this enraged grief. It was an incredible release of energy out into the universe.
Mike Smith, one of the founders of the Project AIDS Quilt project said this about the impact of the quilt:
We'd said, if you get us a panel by October, by September 15th, we would get it into the event on the mall a month later. And on the three days around September 15th, we had eight hundred pieces of overnight. Now. Oh, wow.
From every state. And they weren't from the gay men in the urban core, they were from others, it was all these like Midwestern ladies whose sons died of AIDS and they had no one to talk about it with. They couldn't really talk about it, maybe with their families.
They couldn't even tell their church group what their son had died of. First of all, how much how isolated and desolate do you have to be to create a beautiful, loving fabric memorial for your son and then box it up and send it to a bunch of gay men you don't know three thousand miles away.
But we tapped into this nationwide sense of grief, and that's when the panels [they] named started to get really, really beautiful . . . bomber jackets and high school track medals and things that mom put on that really tell the story of the person.
And it changed everything. By the time we got the quilt out there on the mall, this wasn't a protest banner. It was literally all of America saying, wake up, our sons are dying. You know, when it came to talk about media attention, there was like a ton of media attention on the AIDS quilt.. . . two thirds of the members of Congress at some point had a mother standing in their office with a quilt panel. And within a few years, the Ryan White Act provided two billion dollars to sustain public health systems in hospitals across the country that were buckling from the weight of all of these dying people and the fact that we could do it in a way that was also colorful and loving and warm and spoke to middle America, made us a little bit of a Trojan horse, but not everyone agreed with that approach.
I began my reading adventure on the topic of emotions last year with the previously mentioned superb collection of essays edited by Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. One essay in that same collection rocked my world: Deborah B. Gould’s “Rock the Boat, Don’t Rock the Boat, Baby: Ambivalence and the Emergence of Militant AIDS Activism.” It prompted me to start reading Gould’s book Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT-UP’s Fight Against AIDS. Her introductory chapter proposes a theoretical framework for how we understand the importance of emotions to social change that resonated deeply with me.
David France’s amazing documentary about ACT-UP and the book of the same name How to Survive a Plague: How Citizens and Scientists Tamed AIDS provide an inside account of movement dynamics and the process through which activists turned grief into rage. France also has a remarkable piece called “The Activists” in The New York Times, which offers some lessons for today’s organizers.
Walt Odets’s Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives is an extraordinary, profound, and subtle exploration of the interior lives of gay men in the years since drugs to treat AIDS became available. He considers the ways early life traumas around sexuality intersected with the AIDS for different generations of men and takes an unflinching look at the role of shame:
Shame is probably the most fundamental, pervasive and destructive consequence of stigmatization. Society projects its own fear, hatred and self-hatred onto others through stigmatizing treatment, and the stigmatized individual converts that stigmatization into self-stigma and shame. We begin feeling like the person we are treated as, we’ve bought the message. Shame among gay men is thus a product of the internalization of social stigma.
Savvy Corner
Harry produced a two-minute video to promote Immigration Matters: Visions, Strategies and Movements for a Progressive Future, a forthcoming book edited by Ruth Milkman, Penny Lewis and Deepak. Please share it!
A second conversation about leadership for social change, moderated by Gara LaMarche and including Rahna Epting of MoveOn.org and Maurice Mitchell of Working Families Party, is on March 2nd from 12:30 – 2. It will be incredible! You can sign up here. The event is also sponsored by CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies and the Colin Powell School at City College
Delights and Provocations
We were immensely moved by Judas and the Black Messiah about the life and assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.
There is this excellent piece in The New Yorker about why email is a source of so much stress and even misery for so many of us.