In the past, activism was risky business. By definition, it disrupts lives, threatens chaos, causes disorder and often ends in violence. It should, at the very least, get you in trouble with your boss. But these days, as others have noted, being an activist is simply another part of one’s career, one’s social life, one’s brand. It’s something you perform on Twitter and brag about on LinkedIn. The risk has evaporated and that begs the question: what does real activism actually look like?
This question has animated much of my reading this year: from Clayborne Carson’s Martin Luther King Jr, to Roy Foster’s examination of Ireland’s revolutionary generation in Vivid Faces. But the book that today’s Twitter activists could perhaps learn the most from is John Loughery and Blythe Randolph’s deeply researched and highly entertaining biography of Dorothy Day. This rambunctious American peace activist emerged in times that echo many of the crises we currently face, but her answer to them was, inspiringly, different.
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Born to a relatively comfortable middle class family in 1897, Day enjoyed a misspent youth among the radicals of 1920s Greenwich village, falling in love with feckless journalists and drunk intellectuals, writing novels, experimenting with feminism and socialism, and trying to figure out how life should be lived. If a friend of Dorothy’s was going to be arrested — and they often were, for agitating for votes for women in the 1910s, or protesting against the arms race in the 1950s or Vietnam in the 1960s — you could safely bet that she would be right there alongside them. The Groucho Marx saying about how a good friend will try to bail you out of jail, while a best friend will be in the cell next to you, could have been written about Dorothy.
Dorothy did not have to agree with you to love you. Her worldview did not depend on ideological convergence between friends — unlike that of today’s activists, who often insist on absolute purity and cannot tolerate disagreement. While Day’s openness allowed for the hectic fun of her early life, it gathered depth and meaning when she converted to Catholicism in her early thirties and began the journey that would lead to the foundation of her influential movement and newspaper, the Catholic Worker.
Dorothy’s conversion was an enormous surprise to her friends — she ran with a bohemian set and had been inclined towards communism as a young person (who isn’t?). But she ultimately declined communism’s emphasis on material progress as the only thing mankind need bother itself over. She needed more, and she thought humanity in general did too. Dorothy saw each individual as a whole person — which helped her avoid the horrific dehumanisation of the great ideological catastrophes of the twentieth century: ones that many of today’s activists, in their determination to hate those who don’t agree with them, seem bent on replicating.
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Dorothy, on the other hand, practised the love she preached. In 1933, she and Peter Maurin — a penniless French intellectual drunk on the radical potential of the Gospel — founded a “House of Hospitality” in Dorothy’s stomping ground of lower Manhattan. The House was for anyone who needed shelter, food and care — no questions asked. Crucially, no standards of behaviour or personal hygiene had to be adhered to. Dorothy liked to tell newly arrived volunteers at the House: “there are three things you have to remember about very poor people who live on the street: they don’t smell good, they aren’t grateful and they are apt to steal”. This is not the carefully sanitised language of the modern activist; it’s the no-bullshit lowdown from someone who lived her word. Dorothy was not interested in saving people: her religiosity was non-evangelical, her compassion was not charity. It was not about control.
The results of all this acceptance were predictably chaotic, and the Lower East Side House of Hospitality was always just about to fall apart: bedbugs, unsympathetic city officials, rats, fire. Dorothy was comfortable with chaos — former hedonists often are — and it was a principle of her new faith that it was no use to live in middle class comfort while helping the poor. You had to live among them.
Day’s commitment to writing about organised labour in the 1930s brought her all across the country and her concern for racism brought her to the south long before the typical white do-gooder from the north paid attention to conditions for black people there. She, like many anti-racist campaigners today, thought that America was rendered a hypocrite through its racist treatment of its own people — but she was prepared to write about it while it was still deeply unpopular and indeed dangerous to do so. It’s amusing to imagine what Day would think of today’s booming Diversity and Inclusion industry with its corporate activism; while an advocate of brotherly love, she also had a caustic wit and a deep, instinctive distrust for any kind of institutionally mandated morality. The Catholic Church of its day did not know what to make of her; at one point, she was asked to omit the word “Catholic” from her newspaper’s title. She declined.
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While Dorothy seems to have been on the “right side” of most of the big questions of the twentieth century — anti-Franco, anti-Jim Crow, anti-fascist, anti-war — she was no saint (even if the Catholic Church is currently engaged in the long process of beatifying her, it being much easier to celebrate her now that she's dead and can no longer shame comfortable prelates with her radical poverty). She was a less than ideal mother to her daughter, but then people called to higher ideals so often fail their own families. Tamar Teresa was born when Dorothy was 29, the result of a doomed love affair (one of several). She was a wanted, cherished child, and her arrival seemed to propel Dorothy towards the spirituality that would shape the rest of her life. But Dorothy was influenced by Emmanuelle Mounier’s “personalist” Catholic philosophy, which was sceptical of the bourgeois family and its emphasis on security and comfort — and this made her an unreliable mother.
A life of voluntary poverty is all well and good when freely chosen; Tamar never had the luxury of that choice. Growing up in an eccentrically run housing shelter can’t have been easy, especially as Tamar got older, and her mother spent increasing amounts of time on the road. While Dorothy had an answer to most questions, her life doesn’t offer many solutions to women who have children and feel called to something more. To be fair to Dorothy though, that one’s a toughie.
Dorothy Day died in 1980. She lived a huge life in a humble way, dedicated to improving — however slightly — the lot of the very least of us. She was a true activist: “the original hippie,” as icon of the counter-culture Abbie Hoffman called her, disciplined in nothing apart from her love for her fellow man, no matter how drunk, disorderly or ideologically unsound those men (or women) were. She is pretty useless as an example, then, to activists whose work involves identifying and shaming those who have the incorrect opinions. And maybe she’s also not that useful to the rest of us either: who among us is going to embrace a life of voluntary poverty? In this era of relentless careerism, such a notion is laughably quaint.
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As a life-long anti-war activist, the last decade of Day’s life saw her engage with the enormous wave of opposition to the Vietnam War. While she was heartened by the size of the protests, she was dismayed by their tenor; she hated the “contempt and ridicule” of the counter-cultural approach to activism. What would she think of current activism, which often seems comprised of only that? For Dorothy, the project of creating a better life on this earth — the project, one might in good faith assume, of all activists — had to be centred in love. And while few of us can follow fully in her footsteps — self-abnegation is not for the faint-hearted — we can perhaps learn from this.
Perhaps her most important lesson, though, for these terrifying, paralysing times, is Day’s rejection of the notion that anything or anyone will ever be “fixed”. Maurin said of the movement he created with her: “we don’t measure our success, we don’t despair and we don’t judge.” Our shambolic life on this collapsing planet is forever in crisis; we are always, like Dorothy’s Manhattan House of Hospitality, about to fall apart. But still she pushes us to answer: how can we make it better for the very least of us in the meantime?
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SubscribeGreat article. The entire time I kept thinking of Simone Weil, She also became a Catholic (pretty much) and spent her life in poverty wishing only to serve the poor – Simone going further and wishing to take their suffering – I read her line below and could never forget it.
‘”every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.””
She ended up essentially starving herself to death in 1943 because she felt such guilt having access to food wile the people on the continent starved.
They had some wild ones then, not like today’s people. I think of Gertrude Bell as Afghanistan is going through its trauma and the Taliban are very much in line with something she wrote so beautifully,
““...the holy men sat in an atmosphere
reeking of antiquity, so thick with the
dust of ages that you can’t see through it
–nor can they.”
― Gertrude Bell “
And I think of Mother Theresa – A wealthy American was so taken with her he flew all the way to India and visited her in person to give her a very generous contribution, which she took, adding – (paraphrased) ‘Next time stay home and include the cost of the trip.
How marvelous they were – Carry Nation with her hatchet and all the huge Publicans in fear of her wrath against their alcohol, such personality – when I see those super creepy Extinction Rebellion gender-non-specific wraiths I get a feel of disgust and revulsion instead of admiration.
This is a great exposé of the difference between the activism of love and the activism of hate: or activism that loves people rather than hate them.
Her advice on working with the destitute is spot on:
“there are three things you have to remember about very poor people who live on the street: they don’t smell good, they aren’t grateful and they are apt to steal”.
I would add a fourth from experience: ‘don’t expect too much success with transforming lives’. This helps one not to measure outcomes by success but simply as being the sharing of love and common humanity. It is very difficult bringing up children in that environment as the demand for attention to destitute needs is continuous.
The reason I would add the fourth point is that you are largely dealing with people who didn’t have the human right of a stable family upbringing and support network. I am not aware of any popular high-profile activism for the rights of all children to be raised in secure family life environments with their genetic parents; or do we think this is an impossible ask? (I am not saying this to wind anyone up or make judgments; it’s a fact that children’s rights are secondary to the rights of adults to put their life choices first).
Very true in regards to children, anyone would think they were less human than adults.
Too many today like to signal their virtue without getting their hands dirty as if the thought being there is all that counts.
The entire Liberal Left sick Welfare industry is designed to destroy the family – NOT to strengthen it. They are vastly successful at this.
In USA where I have a large experience of the welfare underclass – the men cannot live in the house paid for by welfare, or they must qualify, and NOT have any felonies – and any income they have is deducted….Women with children get full benefits, men do not except in unusual cases. (and if you know the underclass male they are not the culture of the man staying home as a single father – that is the role of the women. The men’s role is to try to get by with high unemployability, very low income, crime and drugs being a constant background noise, and usually some criminal record)
And so the men father children, but not live with them – and so the women have these many men who just move on, not parenting the children but producing them, but more often making them more messed up by the string of strange men staying in the house.
They call it “The Welfare Trap” Because it is a trap, once in you cannot leave – and it goes from one generation to the next with few breaking free – Liberal/Left social policies are evil because they will not allow what is right – only what is ‘correct’.
“by Theodore Dalrymple
4.21 ·
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Here is a searing account-probably the best yet published-of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does. Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. Dalrymple’s key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives. “
*Awaiting for Approval* – any talk of the underclass is banned these days –
To me, a lot of the “rights” of your final paragraph are privileges. They demand wealth, time, labour, i.e. resource, from others. Which inevitably leads to coercive and compulsory practices by state actors.
“But these days, as others have noted, being an activist is simply another part of one’s career, one’s social life, one’s brand. It’s something you perform on Twitter and brag about on LinkedIn.”
Ha ha. Sometimes an article (and this is a fine article, imo) produces a single, shining quote.
We have been encouraged to be so narcissistic that even when we attempt ‘love’ it is merely yet another ego trip. The ‘death of God’ – or rather spirituality per se means that there nothing else to consider in our decision-making except for our all-encompassing egos – that we are too dim to understand the convolutions thereof. As Jung pointed out ‘consciousness raising is a lifelong job of hard work’ – and who even realises that ???? before they decide that they actually know enough to make a decision about anything……………
Great article, i think if the current crop of fake acitivists are not reigned in the rest of us will be living in the same poverty as Dorothy Day but it won’t be voluntary….
“…, but then people called to higher ideals so often fail their own families.”
That might well have been Mrs Jellyby’s parting shot at her detractors, so astonished to witness her eccentric, ramshackle household. It sums up Dickens’s funnily teasing portrayal of this character of his in his book, Bleak House. Not Mrs Jellyby’s house, though, who, like the lady Day here, kept proper busy in her activism (in her case, for the poor in Africa), and, as well, seemed to have no time for dishing out contempt for, or ridicule on, those who stood in her way. They did not detest their fellow man, even if they thought too highly of themselves.
In 1929, when he was only twenty-four, Mounier came under the influence of the French writer Charles Péguy, to whom he ascribed the inspiration of the personalist movement.
As a newly minted American, I would vote for any party that does something about the homeless. They are conveniently forgot about in the endless culture wars of our times.