The paradox of the greater good; it comes from strong individuals
When love thy neighbour becomes the path to enlightenment
Update: I have added a more specific part about same sex marriage. 1 July 2022.
I could easily have started this piece by quoting Mick Lynch, the tour de force through our media over the last few days. He exemplifies all I’m about to say (see the end of this piece).
However, I feel there is a truth in fiction and culture that speaks to us in a voice we can feel before we can comprehend its truth.
So I’m starting with a Bristol-linked movie set in the West Country. And I’m specifically looking at a bromance because of the comments on same sex marriage made by Hope Chapel’s pastor, Alice Bond.
Hope Chapel, in Hotwells, is the mayor of Bristol’s, Marvin Rees’, own church. He last gave a talk there in March 2021.
The pastors Alice and Chris Bond are both on the Western Harbour Advisory Group as one of the only resident representatives, the other being the chair from the Cumberland Basin Stakeholder Group (of which I am a member). No elected representatives are allowed to join the group.
In a sermon on Sex, Sexuality and Gender, Alice Bond says that she interprets certain teachings to say that “sex between two men or two women is a violation of design and doesn’t point to Christ and the church.”
She goes on to say:
“When a man and a man or a woman and a woman have sex, however monogamously, faithfully, mutually their context is, they do not become one. They remain two distinct units.”
“They may be described as married by certain cultures but before God they are not, as they remain two distinct units. Their lack of union means they do not point to Christ and the church. Marriage is by the very meaning of its root, union. Two becoming one. And this is only possible between a man and a woman.
Chris and I, therefore, would not bless same-sex unions because we do not believe they are a union.”
…
We believe marriage is uniquely between a man and a woman.”
For the Greater Good
From a sermon on what counts as a union to Hot Fuzz may feel a bit of a stretch but it makes such sense to me. An exiled Angel finds happiness and purpose through a same-sex relationship. If you haven’t seen the movie, be aware there are spoilers below.
“How can this be for the greater good?” shouts the exasperated Detective Nicholas Angel in the movie Hot Fuzz when confronted with a group of town leaders who’d been killing off nuisances ‘for the greater good’.
Hot Fuzz is a brilliant movie for many reasons; one of them is the example of how the notion of a ‘greater good’ when separated from individual/human rights, inevitably weakens that very 'greater good’. A strengthened individual, however, is uniquely placed to work at strengthening this group or community.
Police Constable Angel, played by Simon Pegg, struggles to bond with colleagues in the big smoke, London, because he is so focussed on doing his job and achieving his own aspirations. He loses his relationship and is ultimately exiled after making everyone else look bad.
He was out-achieving the rest of the officers and prioritising work over his love life. He was strengthening his own skills at the expense of building community.
The story we the audience engage in happens mostly in exile in his new precinct in Sanford, Gloucester. There he starts to bend and blend as his affection grows for his partner. Only with the strength of his new colleagues can he counter the human rights abuses perpetrated by a group of town leaders working towards the ‘greater good’.
And here’s where we come to our paradox. Strengthening the individual without a sense of community, ultimately weakens the individual.
At the same time, attempting to strengthen a community by weakening individuals, can only weaken both the community and the individuals. The two types of strength must go together.
Strength in groups
Let’s take a look at why, and how it begins with our human evolution.
Groups have strength not only because of the individuals within them but due to the bonds between those individuals, which are formed out of purpose. These bonds help people head in the same direction. In communities that represent us, we become a murmuration, following each other’s cues. Groups are strong because they help people act in concert.
But they are also strong because they provide us with a safety mechanism.
We need safety mechanisms as individuals and groups.
Indeed, collective action exists in large part to fend off threats. That’s the point of it. We have legislation to protect human rights from threats. The rights are not there for fun. They have a purpose.
Between safety and threats
The way humans react to threats is worth examining here. Our evolutionary path has led us to having three brains (Benjamin Fry);
the first and most basic one is our reptile brain;
the second and slightly more advanced one is the mammal brain — this one has emotions and understanding but no language and no ability to form cognitive ideas;
then there is the third brain, which is our human brain. This is is the one that helps us integrate functions in algebra and gets us to the moon and beyond. This human brain has language, it has reasoning, and it has a much more sophisticated way of finding safety.
Here’s a helpful summary of our responses to threats through the different brains’ reactions.
The reptile runs the freeze response. This is basic, a kind of on-off response.
The mammal runs the fight or flight response. This is more sophisticated and requires some judgement of whether or not a fight can be won, or whether running is required.
The human runs the social engagement response. It makes friends, builds alliances, greets people, gains influence. The human connects. -- Benjamin Fry
We have a range of responses that go from most primitive (brain) to most sophisticated: freeze, flight, fight, vigilance, and connections with others. The human brain knows that we don’t have to fight every battle to win. We can form bonds and we can protect ourselves through collective action.
Ultimately, collective action is the most advanced reason why we have groups.
We come together as a collection of individuals and find strength. Then, our collectives take on a life of their own. It’s fascinating to observe but there’s something both limiting and energising when people come together. I’ll mention the ‘energising’ part first and then get to the limiting part.
We don’t just take our own strengths and add them up; we join together and multiply our strengths. One reason for this might be that we can focus better on a common purpose with others rather than dilute our energies on our own thing. If we’re each building our own sandcastles, for example, we won’t get as far as if we join in and help build one big one.
Part of that strength comes in the safety we feel together and in the ability when safe to express ourselves. Fear blocks expression and creative energy. In contrast, when we feel safe we can be productive, present, and communicative.
But there’s another bonus in collective action, we have a chance to bring diversity into the mix. Few projects and purposes benefit from only one type of skill; you only have to run a meeting or a school fair to know that different skills are necessary at different times. This is true even within the same sector or industry or genre.
Bristol is a great example of this. I’m tempted to talk about the collective action the local journalists have taken to support a colleague who is being boycotted but that’s been covered quite a bit. If I was to look at collective action, I’d look to Bristol’s political Twitter and what it has achieved. But that’s a story for another time.
Let’s talk about collaborations and cooperation in general.
Banksy may seem a Bristol success — and in a way I suspect this myth has not been kind to collective action. But heroes are well-known because they focus attention on one person.
We love to see an individual under the spotlight. Partly to see how we’d react under the same pressure; like a run-through. But also as relief because who wants to be under all that stress and anxiety at all? I don’t. And looking around at all the other people who also aren’t individually known, I suspect lots more don’t either.
Limitations
I’ve written before about how cooperation helps us work together easier and better. But I didn’t mention individual strengths and rights then. And this is my serious point about how I see society being weakened with a pretence towards strength in unity. This is where the limiting part comes in groups that take on a life of their own.
We are starting to see human rights threatened, lost, and under direct threat with the introduction of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which came into force on June 28. At the same time, UK parliament is threatening to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights; and places like Northern Ireland, the US, and many more threatening abortion rights for women.
These attacks on individuals weaken our communities but they are supposedly being made to ‘protect’ us as a whole. They have been voted through under the pretence of protecting statues or protecting those who don’t want to hear people protesting. Part of the Act introduces the requirement for a Police Covenant, with priority areas being health and wellbeing, physical protection and support for families.
I’m making note of families here because conservatives favour the family unit for various reasons. It sustains the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (bell hooks) for one, which in turn strengthens conservatism, and the cycle repeats.
What this looks like in practice is rhetoric ostensibly in support of a nuclear family unit in the name of ‘strength’. The individual and their needs, however, become subsumed within this greater purpose for a specific type of family.
No abortions, no sex out of marriage, no relationship outside heterosexuality, no single mothers etc. These actions are meant to be harmful to ‘family’ units of narrowly defined communities.
But this notion does not stand up to serious examination. Once you weaken individuals, you weaken the bonds between them. Fear limits our ability to expression ourselves. It limits our actions, and it consequently limits cooperation and collaboration.
I’m thankful to my friend Scott who introduced me to Gustav Landauer’s A Call To Socialism. In that work, Landauer calls the state “organised spiritlessness” or “freedom without spirit”. The argument works towards a rejection of a state and a promotion of the benefits of smaller groups. I see sense in this and it’s part of the reason I find much of my perspective gleaned from anarchy and socialism. I wonder if the implication here is that any state will grow to this level of suppression of individual rights as soon as it stops aligning itself with individual needs. It feels like it to me.
What called to me from his writing, particularly, was this following section on the bond of unity.
“We will arrive at a real humanity in the external sense only when reciprocity as identical community has come for the humanity concentrated in the individual and the humanity growing between the individuals. The plant dwells in the seed, just as the seed is only the quintessence of the infinite chain of ancestral plants. Mankind obtains its genuine existence from the humanness of the individual, just as this humanness of the individual is only the heir of the infinite generations of the past and all their mutual relationships. What has become is the becoming, the microcosm is the macrocosm. The individual is the people, the spirit is the community, the idea is the bond of unity.”
The emphases in the text are mine. It is that last line that I find particularly resonates: ‘the individual is the people’ suggests that when the group’s focus is served by trampling on the individual, then the focus is wrong. But we are strengthened by our communities because we can live in safety and that gives us space to actualise ourselves. Safety and community and expansion of self can only come from strong bonds between individuals, through our ‘mutual relationships’. This cycle repeats endlessly but I hope you see what I mean.
Pride
Now, picture a society where some bonds are not allowed to exist at all. Under the patriarchy, same-sex relationships don’t exist or they are not allowed. This same-sex bond is alluded to in Hot Fuzz with references to bromance / buddy movies such as Point Break and Bad Boys.
The current, extremely conservative state of the UK, has reduced the protections for populations such as those of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities; they have come for freedom of expression, and they will be looking to weaken all bonds that don’t conform to the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Capitalism is as much a danger here as all the rest.
I’m not sure who is being tempted to believe that strengthening society comes by weakening individuals or that strengthening the individual devoid of community (which is what neoliberalism is — no such thing as society: Thatcher) is equally a winning strategy.
This is not a solution. We can see that by looking around at those sleeping and dying on the streets; those who cannot leave their homes because their accessibility needs are being ignored in favour of efficiency, cuts, and supporting the majority. Those who are denied the same rights of protection and self-actualisation due to their sexuality.
When I say bonds, I mean love. Through all religions, love thy neighbour as you love yourself, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, are the golden rules. They help us reach enlightenment and they help us build our communities.
Let’s bring the noise but we can only do that when we feel safe and when we have purpose and love in our communities. Only then can we be strong as individuals. Only then can we raise our voice and find that it’s in harmony.
The power of unions
I promised you Mick Lynch. Enjoy.