Grievance politics -ethical?

 Reading an article about the way populist leader turn grief into grievance and then to support, these sentences gave me pause for thought.

 pretty much every 

successful populist or authoritarian leader finds ways to riff on shared loss — falling living standards, defeat in war, loss of empire or status or prestige — as a source of grievance and thus political power.

My pause was around these two questions: how would a left-wing version of this go? And; would it be ethical to do so?

I guess the answer to the first is readily found in history. There have been revolutions and uprisings which have "riffed" on the losses experienced by the downtrodden (losses of just shares in wealth, of security, family life, respect etc) and the grievances turned (with some justice) upon those who perpetrate injustices and violence directly as well as upon the wealthy who operate and direct the systems to their own advantage. There is an element of a zero-sum situation. In such cases wealthy people and their collaborators have been targeted. Often there has been some justice in this: they have been people who have been held to account for real crimes small and large. Sometimes (and there are still arguments about how frequent or inherent) relatively innocent people have become suspect and 'rounded up' and the situation has become an opportunity to settle old scores that have little to do with justice.

The left wing version then would focus grievance on holders of structural power, usually mediated by holding much wealth particularly from being a rentier. And this raises the issue about how deserved the opprobrium may be.

Grievances can be deserved or relatively undeserved. To me, it looks like having a sense that there are powerful people who are maintaining their power (usually correlated with wealth) by inflicting degrees of misery on many others. The injustice of that deserves grievance. Blaming migrants for trying to make a better life and avoid misery seems relatively injust, particularly if on further investigation we discover their migration and seeking a better life is driven by the injustices of the aforementioned powerful.

Structural injustice isn't solely or even mainly about people, individually or collectively. Focussing on persons leaves the probability that removing office holders or staff leaves the system intact. One despot replaced by another despot still leaves oppression in place. And yet people still form the system and can be appealed to in order that they might not co-operate, or may sabotage. Leaders might, sometimes, be prevailed upon to make significant changes.

An ethics about this would recognise the harms that change might involve and what kind of changes might invoke what kinds of harm. Obviously that would be considered alongside the existing harms and the 'price' of business as usual.

I note a further dimension, captured later in the article:

how do we defuse this grief to grievance pipeline? If, as Vamik Volkan argues, it’s through a process of collective mourning, then what would that even look like in cases where what we’ve lost isn’t a person whom we loved, but a way of life, a sense of hopefulness about the future, or a healthy group identity with confidence and self-respect?

Now that's really interesting.

Formation for participraying -a PS

 Yesterday I started to read 'Answering God' by Robert Ellis. 'Towards a theology of intercession' is the helpful subtitle. The reason is that I discovered the book on my shelves, unread, and realised it looks like what I've been thinking about lately in the participraying short series of posts. I became interested in the lack of reflection on this topic in the meetings and I felt that it would be good for me to now feed the soil of reflection by seeking further input. 

The book seems to promise a somewhat philosophical approach to what is involved theologically in the issue. Much of it so far echoes thoughts and perspectives I have come to over the years of reflecting piecemeal on it. -But it's only the first chapter!. 

Anyway, one of the things I've been thinking about is the phrase "unanswered prayer" and I'm reminded by it's being mentioned in the book. For a long while I've felt it was a misleading or unhelpful characterisation. If it's right that God always hears our prayer and that God cares deeply for each and all, AND that God is always, in some sense, communicating with us (or striving to) then there can be no such thing as unanswered prayer. The issue is how is the prayer responded to by God. 

It might be better to consider the phenomenon being gestured to in the phrase 'unanswered prayer' as something like, "unrequited prayer" (I quite like that phrase -it might be a good title for an article on the matter). I also wondered about "unfulfilled requests" or "~petitions" but that seems perhaps a bit too like the phrase I'm troubled by. I think we need a phrase that at least hints towards the possibility that God wants to invite us into conversation of some sort about our requests. The request or petition is perhaps meant to be a starting point and not merely a seeking of a short answer but an exploration of our motives and defaults, of God's character and purposes and of the way the world is and how God and we relate to the wider world and creation; singly and together.

In terms of the 'participraying' dimension of this topic, I think that it raises -or, better perhaps, underlines the matter of corporate discernment processes. If we are to respond to God's responding to our raising a matter of concern (whether a request or something more tentative), then we need to be able to question our own motives and assumptions. Doing that corporately raises some delicate questions about developing a group who have the emotional intelligence (or maybe simply the kind regard that characterises neighbour-love) enough to understand how to challenge, or to raise a question that could be quite 'personal' in the sense that it may touch on deeply held convictions and or emotionally-laden matters and beliefs. It also invokes the need on the part of those challenged to respond well to such challenges. These are matters of individual and group formation. 

I can imagine scenarios where this might mean someone's concern or initial request is met within the group with something like, "I understand that this matters to you deeply, I feel something of your anxiety /anger" (Maybe others might chime in affirmatively here). "Could we sit with that for a bit? Would you unpack it a bit to help us to grasp what drives your concern emotionally?"

And in such a scenario, we shouldn't necessarily be assuming that the emotional response is awry of of God's concerns. The point is to understand whether God is in it to affirm, challenge or a bit of both? And, of course, this kind of dynamic could apply also to someone feeling that they have a sense of what God might be communicating about the topic. 

I think that this can be tricky: often there is a church culture which discourages us from pressing the questions that should be offered. Maybe from fear that it would cause affront (and that alerts us to the need, when we offer such insights, to offer them tentatively, inviting 'testing' and finding an inner posture of curiosity rather than being too certain at that point. That in turn would mean learning how to speak about our own inner experience to some extent. Learning how each of us processes possible insights from God, promptings of the Spirit and how we each pass up things that we suspect might merely be our own stuff. It would mean us becoming comfortable with discussing our theology and learning together about how to think about Providence. It would involve bearing with one another as we learn to process all of this. It would involve trust and some intimacy.

I guess we should also acknowledge that because God dwells with people and in situations, we also have to note that these processes may also 'carry' God (this is an image related to that phrase in the psalm about God being enthroned of the praises of his people). This questioning, exploring, self-examination, opening up to mutual scrutiny, mutual vulnerability is participating in God in prayer. It is part of prayer. It is Jacob wresting with the unnamed man at the Jabbok. It is Abraham dialoguing with God at God's instigation at Mamre.