Learning Not to Save the World - A Conversation with Anthea Lawson

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Our entanglement in what we're trying to change is inevitable. So how do we behave? I'm not going to not try and change things. I can't accept how things are, but how can I do it differently? Because if you go in so locked down, then there's no room for the other person to change and there's no room for you to change.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast this week. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. A big part of where I see the shifts happening in education systems is encouraging young people to get out into the world, into their communities, and make a difference to issues that they care about. There's so much learning that can happen in this process. And I've shared a few episodes in the past with fantastic people like Katherine Berger Kaye, Daniela Papi Thornton, and Zoe Weil, supporting young people and educators in this kind of work. But there are also some fascinating and important considerations to be aware of so that we really can have the impact that we're hoping to and we don't replicate past harms and unhelpful patterns. My guest this week, Anthea Lawson, has been working on the frontline of this kind of work for decades and has learned through her own experience just how complex and entangled these issues are that we care about doing something about. And she's been sharing her accumulated wisdom on this in her previous book, The Entangled Activist, and very excitingly in her new book out this week, How Not to Save the World: Doing Good Without Annoying Everyone. As a journalist, campaigner, and writer, Anthea has fought for many issues over 3 decades, including controls on the arms trade and an end to financial secrecy offered by tax havens. After training as a journalist at The Times, she worked for campaign groups including Global Witness and Amnesty International. You can find links to more of Anthea's work in the show notes. No, I just loved the entangled activist idea, and that's where I first kind of saw and heard about your work. So no, but first of all, thank you for doing it and then being willing to come and talk to me about it on the podcast. So we can dive in if you like.

Yeah. Okay. Let's go.

Amazing. I mean, maybe just for people to get a bit of a sense. Of where you're coming from into the work with your new book coming out, but also just, you know, coming from a wealth of amazing work before, perhaps you could just give a little bit of a story into where you're at now and just particularly this idea of all these issues that we say we care about and then we find ourselves kind of deeply entangled in them and with the problems as well as the, inverted commas, solutions. And, you know, how do we wrestle with some of that? And obviously that's a lot of what your first book was about. So yeah, just by way of introduction, perhaps you could talk a bit about that.

Okay, thanks. And thanks very much for having me on. Really appreciate this. And I'm looking forward to learning something from you as well, where educationalists are thinking about some of this and how we try and change the world. So look, I trained as a journalist. I was a reporter at The Times and didn't last very long doing that. I think I had a bit of a crisis. News values, I guess I should have known really, but there's seeing it from the outside and then there's doing it. I thought I was going to save the world by, you know, reporting on important things. Suffice to say that by my late 20s, I'd stopped doing that. And I was— I took my journalism skills, I suppose, to go and work for human rights campaign groups. I worked for Amnesty and other arms trade campaigns. I was investigating the effect of the arms trade on human rights, campaigning for treaties to try and control it. We got one of those treaties. It's completely failed to prevent the UK arming Israel and Saudi Arabia. You know, there are limits to this stuff, which isn't to say that it's not important to work on. And then I worked for an organization for 10 years called Global Witness, which works at the intersection of, quotes, "natural resource," close quotes, extraction and conflict and corruption. Anyway, I was working on that. I was a campaigns director in a, you know, arse-kicking organization and having a lot of fun in a lot of ways, you know, going after bastards was how we enjoyed thinking about it. But I was having all sorts of questions. And by 2014, 2015, those questions had become loud enough that I left because I I left doing that full-time. I then carried on working as a freelancer and consultant to give me some time to think, which resulted in my first book, The Entangled Activist. It started off with me thinking about why, as campaigners, are we replicating aspects of the systems that we want to change? And there were various versions of this. Like, I mean, the most obvious one, which came out a bit later on, around MeToo and Black Lives Matter, with all these charities engaging in discriminatory or abusive behavior. There was a series of scandals of which the Oxfam Haiti one was the most striking perhaps, but there were many. Human rights defenders treating each other terribly. What's that about? But also strategically, why are we using rational actor assumptions derived from neoclassical economics, the effects of which are what we're trying to tackle, But we're using those assumptions in our putting facts in front of people and expecting them to act on them sort of strategies. Like big picture, so systems-wise, here we are burning ourselves out, and that's working in ways that effectively replicate the way that our industrial growth economy, using Joanna Macy's term, is burning out the planet. You know, at every scale, and it's kind of fractal, what's going on? So The Entangled Activist was, I mean, it was my apprentice book, but it was also me thinking about, well, what's going on here? And really what I ended up with— I'm not interested in writing books where I know the answer when I start writing it, you know, it's an inquiry for me— and what I realized I hadn't really thought about: our entanglement in what we're trying to change is inevitable. Now that should be obvious, right? It should be obvious that we are part of the world. And then I realized, well, it's because of what we're told by the prevailing paradigm. You know, the prevailing imaginary says We're individuals, you know, even though there is plenty of understanding to the contrary, you know, from both biology and physics, but we've still got this kind of Newtonian sort of understanding of this quite sort of mechanical, I do something and I have an effect upon another thing. So that leads us to all sorts of ideas of linear cause and effect. You know, that very phrase, changing the world or saving the world, it's like me separate from the world, having an effect upon it. So in all of our kind of cultural, you know, completely unthought assumptions about the nature of who we are, we're seeing ourselves as slightly separate to what we might be trying to have an effect on. And then there's the stuff that goes on within progressive changemaking, which is where we adopt a kind of moral position, again usually unthought through. It's just, it's absolutely inherent and innate in a lot of the environments where this stuff takes place, whether they're voluntary, community level, right up to like big UN agencies, even government departments that give aid. I think it permeates all sectors to do with any kind of change-making or trying to do good. Often public sector work as well, which is like, "We're good, and so we're different from that." And so those, you know, those are the bastards that are doing it. And of course, that obscures all the many ways in which we're completely implicated in these systems, like whether it's through living in one of the wealthier countries, and then you're participating, you know, through your consumption, all of the systems which have created that and bring those products to you, or whether it's within your own country and privileges of class or whiteness, you know, whatever it is. All of that is somewhat obscured to quite a few people who engage in changemaking, and particularly those who, like me, were in these kind of professionalized organizations that had started off in the '60s as radical and scratchy and outsider and had really become quite establishment. And certainly, we think we're on the outside because we're being paid less than the people that we're trying to change. And if you compare it that way, then you feel that you haven't got power, but compared to a lot of people, they have got a lot of power because They're staffed with people who look and sound exactly like the people they're trying to influence. You know, and I have to tread carefully here because these organizations are like constantly under threat. So this is not a being down on them, but it's trying to look with clear eyes at what's going on with our assumptions when we're going to changemaking. So that book came out in 2021, and then I got into lots of wonderful conversations as a result of it, which was great. And I realized even before it had come out that there was another one that I needed to look into, another set of questions, which I hinted at in that book, but I wanted to explore it more, which is, okay, so we're entangled, so how do we behave? What do we do next, right? Because I'm not gonna not try and change things. I can't accept how things are, but how can I do it differently? And so I wanted to— I'd interviewed people the first time around, but I went and I interviewed about more than 100 people, some of them self-identified as activists and some definitely not. To ask them how they find ways to do it. And I've conceptualized this one differently. That frame of entanglement worked quite well with people who A) self-identify as changemakers and B) have been doing it for long enough that they've realized some of these things and they, you know, they appreciate it thinking through together effectively what some of the dilemmas are. But actually a lot of people are being politicized of all generations actually. It's not just young people. People of my generation, which is, you know, mid-Generation X, who were never political 30 years ago, and I always felt a bit sort of an outlier amongst my peers in doing what I was doing. They have become politicized by what's going on in very, you know, whether it's climate or politics or fighting against the far right, all sorts of things. And so I wanted to try and find a way to talk about the problems in a slightly more straightforward way than Entanglement. So my new book is called How Not to Save the World., and it's like, right, what are the things that can go wrong when we try and save the world?

Yeah.

What are the antidotes to it?

No, I love it. I mean, because it's, yeah, so much there in what you've said, but there is a, a really, I think, useful willingness that you kind of brought in with the first book to, to hold a mirror up to it and look, you know, to really reflect on because it goes so deep, right? In all the things you've just said, it goes down into some really deep places of the way we come to know each other and the world and the assumptions built into that and how we've learned those things. How have we been socialized into thinking what we think is the way the world works or the way the world is, or, you know, all these things. And for me, education is deeply implicated in that process. So that's one of my interests in the entanglement piece. But I definitely hear you that it's, you know, even the word entanglement is kind of complex or esoteric or abstract or whatever to some people.

That's right. It's an abstract conceptual frame which works for some people and really doesn't for others.

Yeah, exactly. But there was, I mean, I obviously read a really clear connection between the two books. I mean, as you were saying, one of the lines I loved was, "I am good is the foundational instruction of the save the world script. It obstructs self-reflection because it carries the message we are not the problem." And in your whole section of, or the chapter about perception of me as not the problem, I'm good. How can I, I can't be part of the problem that I'm trying to solve, or even the framing of problem and solution is also like builds in a whole set of biases and assumptions about what's going on, right? So it's, I mean, it's incredibly deep, but I hear you on the sense that there is just still, and we see this with young people all the time, there is still an urge or a motivation or a desire to do something about it. Because within the entangled frame, sometimes it can be quite stifling, right? Because you're like, well, so everyone's entangled. I may as well do nothing because even if I try and do something, it may make the problem worse. Or, you know, unintended consequences of my actions may ripple and who knows what'll happen. So maybe I'll just carry on doing what I was doing anyway. That's not good enough for people who have this urge to say, actually, I can see some things that are just not the way I would like them to be in the world and I want to do something about that. So, I mean, the title of the new book is just perfect in a way because there is this desire to change the world or save the world or, you know, all these phrases are problematic, but the energy is coming from an important place of seeing injustice and wanting to do something about it. So yeah, so how do we stop?

Yeah, that's right. And that Save the World title also points to something else that I wanted to explore, which is really get into where this saving idea comes from. Because I think it's our Christian heritage. You know, the book is written about Britain. I focused it on that. I did, when I was trying to distill down what I'm calling this Save the World script, I was interviewing activists across Europe. But when I came to write it, I was like, there's too much going on here, I need to kind of get a bit focused, because I do want to talk about some of the cultural influences. And yeah, I think the Christian heritage, this ambient idea of saving, it's just kind of out there. And it was only through talking to people whose heritage is in other cultures and other religions of realising that that saving idea is not there. Now, the service idea, you know, service goes through Christianity, of course, you know, so that idea is across cultures, as is the idea of charity, you know, with different emphases. But yeah, this saving thing is— it causes a whole load of difficulties. I just wanted to say, actually, what you were just saying there really made me think about how, in switching frame from entanglement to, you know, how not to save, you know, in a sense, I'm experimenting with pedagogy in a way. And it has occurred to me that, you know, a lot of what I'm trying to talk about, it's hard to find a way to talk about. It's hard to kind of get at this level underneath what feels like something very instinctive and obvious for some people and completely repellent for others, by the way, you know, which, which is part of the difficulty. And, you know, this is what I— so I've got a kid in primary education, a kid in secondary at the moment, and lots of teachers. And what is so amazing about teachers to me is this is a profession that has had to understand that just conveying information is not the job. You've got to find ways to it. And it strikes me that that's something that a lot of people trying to do very direct forms of campaigning and changing the world have not done so much of. This is one of the things I'm saying, it's precisely that. It's just like, well, we're gonna give our information and we can perhaps explore this a bit more, like where that comes from, this idea that we can just hand over our information.

Exactly. I mean, I would say in a way it's very linked to what you were saying about the rational actor, bias, because there is an assumption built into a lot of our systems, right? Obviously education being one of the, like, paradigm cases that if you give a certain set of information, any rational being will compute those in a way and come to the same conclusions. So if I give you all these data points about, you know, the warming climate and XYZ, you know, all of the different data points, then therefore, of course, you know, you're a rational computational bad robot, as Indy would call the way that we're treated. You will come to the same conclusions. And so therefore any kind of change-making or desire to influence other people is an informational problem. And we just need to convey the right information and that will be universally, uniformly computed in the same way. And obviously, I mean, obviously that's just utter nonsense, but there's so many deep biases built into that, that, you know, one of them being that even if we read the same paper about, you know, we're all, that we're all somehow seeing the same thing or sensing or receiving or—

Yeah, it's this empty vessel kind of idea.

Exactly. That we're not bringing our own perspectives to that, that we're not seeing it from our groundedness. Us in wherever we are. And as you were saying, our religious traditions or our own heritages, how we're feeling that day, on so many levels, our situatedness affects how we interact with any of the information or scenarios that we're in. So if we were going to do something that allowed that in, honoring that, an education that allowed that in, I mean, what does that even mean? Because it's not about conveying the right information to then regurgitate it on a test, you know, for example, in an educational context. The information that is alive, as Nora Bateson calls it, right? Yeah, that's right.

The unworn data.

Yeah.

And it's how people are feeling in response to it. So I think the form of campaigning that is starting to think about this over the last decade or so— there were some people thinking about it before that, but it wasn't so mainstream— is climate psychology folks. Because they are thinking about how does this land? Because it's, you know, it was becoming very obvious with climate campaigning through certainly 2000s and then definitely in 2010s, you know, around the sort of Paris Agreement time, they were still doing a lot of here's a bunch of information, here's what to do with it. And then the climate psychologists who'd been thinking, well, the psychologists who'd turned to thinking about climate, I think it came out of eco-psychology, which was a sort of discipline from the mid-'90s with much longer roots and indigenous roots. Obviously, of recognizing that we are not— we are not separate from the natural world. We are the natural world. And so what happens to it has an effect on us and vice versa. Anyway, so the climate psychologists were like, right, we actually have to think about this, how this information lands. You can't just give people facts. You have to give them space to feel their feelings about it. And then the work of Joanna Macy and those who followed her has been really important. In showing that when people have a chance to feel their grief and discuss their feelings and feel their feelings and express them, you can move through the grief into a point of action. And an action that is more sustainable, because the risk otherwise is either, you know, you go into a freeze state— 'I can't, can't deal with that, it's way too much, head down, I'm just going to crack on with my life'— or you go straight into action. It's like that kind of panic action, And, you know, I saw a lot of that. I took part in Extinction Rebellion in 2019, and there were some people who had been through very deep processes of grief and feeling it in many cycles of things, and they were a bit more sustainably involved. But there were big cohorts of people that, you know, this was like, "Wow, something I can do!" Bang! Straight in. Same with the Youth Climate Strikes. And then there's a lot of burnout because, you know, you take that sort of agonized feeling straight into some really I'm gonna go for it. And of course you're going to burn out. And if you don't burn out physically, you're going to reach that wall that anyone trying to make change reaches, where you see— and it's just inevitable— that your particular piece of it that you were doing is completely insufficient, of course, to what's required. And at that point, you then, you know, because you've been at the exit, you know, you just completely freak out and you step out, and it's a different kind of burnout.

Yeah, absolutely. And as you talk about in the book, that you're also going to piss some people off. And so you will kind of create a reaction in the system through that quick, maybe less thoughtful interventions. And, you know, you end up with a kind of reaction that potentially adds to the problem in another kind of a way. I mean, that's difficult. There's a whole bunch of entanglement there.

There is, and we do need to, you know, the pissing people off is— so look, the subtitle of the book, I should—

that's why I brought it up.

We honestly, I had such conversations with comrades and with my publisher about this. So the book is How Not to Save the World, and my working title all the way through, you know, when I was phoning people up saying, hey, can I interview you, can I come talk to you, um, was Antidotes to the Savior Complex. Now, like the Entangled Activist, that would have been me in my pedagogy of talking to people who already get it, because that works brilliantly.

Yeah.

Antidotes to the Saviour Complex for people who are already thinking about that, and it's hopeless for anyone else. So I got over myself, or had to get over myself. The publisher suggested doing good without annoying everyone, which is what we've got. Yeah. And at first I was like, oh no, can't do that, because we're in a culture war, right? Trump got back in on a war on woke, In the UK, Farage is doing the same thing. I don't know the details about elsewhere, but I know it's being used in different ways. The populist right and the far right use issues that look progressive as wedges.

Yeah, for sure.

They don't really care about them. Actually, you know, well, with climate they do because Reform is funded by some fossil fuel interests. So, you know, they do care about impeding climate action, but some of the, you know, the stuff about gender and transphobe, you know, like these horrible attacks that are going on, you know, they're looking for wedges where people will split because it's divisive. And, you know, people then get in a tizz about it, understandably, but there's also lots of misunderstanding. Anyway, so this trope of activists being annoying is all part of that. It's basically trying to abnormalise the fight for a compassionate, life-giving, living in harmony with nature and not fouling our nest on this planet society, and they're making anything that is aiming at that look weird. And making activists look really fucking annoying is part of that. You know, it's like, "Oh, those, you know, blue-haired people from the Green Party." You know, whatever it is. So I was worried— still am a bit, but I think I can handle it— are we reinforcing that idea? And yet, let's meet people where they are. The fact is that it is also annoying when someone is unthinkingly doing a certain set of activist tropes. That are not taking account of how they might be heard. And I'm not really talking about strategy here. I do think people need to probably shut down infrastructure sometimes. I think, you know, like totally annoying the public and getting yourself heard probably does need to happen sometimes. There are arguments for it. It's not so much about what you do. It's about the kind of how you show up. And it's something about the— this is what I really want to try and get at in this book— something about the the righteousness, the assumption that the person you're talking to is wrong or is stuck in their views or is not going to get it. You know, all of these things that we all know from having a family, being in relationships, teaching, raising children, simply don't work as ways of communicating with people, you know. And again, likewise, this kind of annoying kind of, you know, 'Are protests annoying?' It's like, well, no, you need protests. You need to see people in the street. I went on the March Against the Far Right last month in London, and it was absolutely brilliant and incredibly important to see half a million people in the streets, even if the media didn't report it, which was way more than Tommy Robinson managed to get out. And loads of people who went on that march will have gone home and been— it gives you motivation to carry on organising in your communities. That's important. But it's this use of a protesty voice in every other encounter, when actually what we need to be doing is— most campaigning is not speaking truth to power, you know, all these clichés. Sometimes you get a chance to do that, great. Most of it is organizing in your community so there's enough of you that you can actually make a difference. And to have those horizontal conversations with your peers and your neighbors, you know, you need to show up in non-annoying ways.

Exactly. And I would say not just non-annoying ways, but also back to your point about Oxfam, I mean, in ways that deeply model the things you say you care about. So like in integrity or like, you know, and again, there's so many difficult terms around it that become a kind of moral purism. But at the same time, I do think you have to be able to show up. And I mean, none of us can do this constantly, but it's something like a constant self-reflexivity about how am I showing up in this space and is it in line with the things I care about? I mean, fraught with difficulty in all sorts of ways, especially when you're up against the bastards. But, you know, even then trying to kind of, even the frame of the bastards is tricky, right? Because in other, I don't know, it's so complex, right? Because in other contexts of their lives, The bastards are also showing up differently. They might be a loving husband or a loving dad, or there are so many kind of complex facets to people's lives that there is sometimes, I think, an oversimplification built into the epistemologies almost of the way we show up in campaigning or organizing. I struggle when it becomes this like, yeah, of course that's against them, but this like moral purity of like, We're better than you are because we can see more. We're more awake than you are and we're more aware of these things. You can't see the things we can see. And if you could, you'd behave differently. There's like, yeah, I don't know what it is, like deep awareness of those traps and trying to constantly avoid them.

Yes. Without paralysing yourself by thinking so much that you don't—

Paralysing myself in even talking about it.

No, I know. And this is like sometimes, you know, sometimes you, It's both. I think this whole realm of thinking like this involves being comfortable with bothness. You know, it is both true that we are up against—

Yeah.

Some monstrous forces. Fossil fuel interests will continue to make their short-term profits until the Earth is uninhabitable. And far-right authoritarians will use violence and division and racism and misogyny and classism to get into power so that their billionaire funders can make money. That remains true. It remains true that we live, like in the UK certainly, in an utterly class-ridden society where there's huge inequality that's growing and where the people, a lot of the people at the top, really don't seem to care about that. Those things are true and they are not going to change if we spend all our time in analysis paralysis and trying to be nice about it. So this, I, I'm really— for sure, like, super clear that this is not a manifesto for being polite and asking nicely campaigning. It's really not. But what I am interested in is what is strategic? What actually works? Because in the organizing that needs to be done to try and change anything, which does involve coming together and does involve countering the individualism that, you know, has been the norm for a couple of centuries, but in the last couple of generations there's been for many people and in many communities, no vision of collective action and what it can do since the '80s, basically. And so in that context, there's a lot of getting together that we need to do, which feels kind of— it feels transgressive and new to a lot of people. And I suppose what I'm talking about is what do we need to do to just get aware of some of the things that might be shaping how we show up so that we can more effectively turn up, get together, have the conversations that we need to come together and start organizing to do what needs to be done. And so it's both. It's like both, yes, there are some total bastards who are wanting to keep things as they are. And if we bring our anger at that and our bastard-defying sort of, you know, to everyone who is supporting that point of view, that will worsen the polarization that, you know, we could do something about. Because actually a lot of the people that are drawn to political viewpoints that might seem like the opposite to ours are worried about all the same things that we are worried about. They're worried about paying the bills.

Exactly.

They're in a state of anxiety, which increasing numbers of us are. And most people are not stuck in where they are. So I'm involved in a thing. Let me be more concrete and give an example. I'm involved in a project at the moment that is political conversations on the high street. It's very lo-fi. We've got a flip chart, bunch of questions, little dot stickers. The questions are things that actually are things that would be reforms policies, but they don't look like it. And then yes and question mark and no columns, and then a bunch of things at the bottom of what, you know, what do you think the government should be doing? And they can just choose issues. And we just have conversations basically. Now, some people take one look at it and they're like, ah, I can see what you're doing, I'm not going to talk to you. Or they, you know, they come in really fighty like, no, no, I'm voting for reform straight in. There's a limit sometimes to what you can do. Sometimes I just have to say, you know, cuz we are also modeling non-polarized, non-shouty conversation. We're showing that it's possible and often it is, but with some people actually it's quite hard and we just say, oh look, we're just gonna have to agree to disagree. Lovely to meet you. Shake hands. Off they go. Yeah, that's fine. But with a lot of people, they have all the same concerns that I might have and yet they've gone in that reformy direction. But they're not stuck in it. They think that's what they want to do, but you can have a conversation, and you can have a conversation that ends up being, well, actually, all of these things that you say you want, you know, Farage has voted against, or, you know, they're not going to do that, they actually want the opposite of that. And if you make a connection first—

Exactly, yeah.

And it's not just about, you know, here it is, you can actually get somewhere. Now, if I was doing my old form of campaigning, which, you know, admittedly it wasn't so horizontal stuff. It was more kind of like going straight to power, going straight to lawmakers and trying to get things changed. But even so, I had a tendency before to lump anyone together that was in favor of certain points of view. It was like, well, they're the other side. I don't think that works in the situation we're in now.

Interesting. But I mean, the sentence that spoke to me most deeply in your book was exactly on this point, right? It was, 'Afraid that will convey weakness by allowing any nuance or shade.' We press our point so hard that we leave no space to engage. And that's kind of what I hear you talking about there is that there is this almost fear of showing up with any kind of nuance of the both and, or the, you know, the complex entanglement, the constellations, whatever language you want to put on it, but to show up with in nuance that I have a bunch of cares and I'm not always consistent and I've, you know, I may be a bit more like you than both of us think initially and how can we make a connection, like worried about doing that because it somehow shows weakness so that we jump straight into just pressing our point that we've decided is the right position. And as you say, we leave no space to engage. And it's like, that's my deep question, like in all of the work I do is like how to create more spaces to engage and whatever engage means will be different in different places. Sometimes it'll be dialogue, otherwise it'll be, you know, other things. But it does, that feels like a critically important part of what we're talking about.

Yeah, I'm smiling because it's funny having like somebody read a sentence you wrote back to you because I'm like, oh, I should have written that a bit better actually. I would have unpacked engage because actually what I mean by engage, yeah, is, I mean, I do mean engage, but actually there's something more to it, which is the possibility of change. Because if you go in so locked down, then you're not leaving any, you know, psychological defenses. Well, you know, anyone knows if someone's going on at you, then of course you're going to defend yourself. There's no room for the other person to change, and there's no room for you to change.

Exactly.

I learn things in these conversations we're out on the street having each week. There's a really wonderful story in the book which is like really changed me hearing this from an academic who was involved with a National Trust project about the National Trust's connection to enslavement. And basically the money from plantations, you know, was paying for some of these houses. Anyway, she was working on this and some culture-warring group of MPs, plus the Telegraph, right-wing newspaper, got hold of it. And whenever an article was written about her in the press about the fact that she was doing this, she was getting hundreds of pieces of hate mail. And her response was to write back to some of them. It's really extraordinary. She just wrote back very calmly, just saying, 'You wrote to me about this,' very sort of flat tone, not kind of sarcastic or anything. 'You wrote to me about this, and I just wondered if you might like to know,' because the newspaper hadn't actually given her a right to reply or anything. 'I wondered if you might like to know what it's actually about.' And people would write back, and with most of them, it took 3 back and forths for what had been vitriolic, abusive hate mail to turn to a respectful conversation. And most people were like, "Oh yeah, respect to you for writing back. Yeah, I didn't know that." And what was also interesting was she learned something from— she got to get to the bottom with some of these people about what their concern was. And actually it was a, "But what about me and my ancestors? What about my working-class ancestors in Britain who were working in factories? And why are we not talking about that?" And that's what ended up being her next book. And it was about the entanglement British working-class histories with the histories of enslaved people in the Caribbean, and it's brilliant. So that's a really good example of how her whole research changed through engaging, as well as being able to do something in these encounters.

Yeah, beautiful.

And find the— elicit the humanity in these people who've done something, you know, really shit actually, and violent. Now that's not for everyone, I'm not saying everyone should do that, but there's some really interesting things No, absolutely.

And the thing that that makes me think is that we're also then in kind of institutional incentive landscapes that promote a certain kind of way of engaging, right? What I mean by that is we've created a bunch of, for example, social media as an institutional, you know, it promotes the kind of way of engaging, which is not that thing. Calm, responsive, reflective back and forth in overtime through letters rather than just immediate limbic system shouts at each other. And so it just, the broader question, obviously for me on the podcast is about what kinds of institutional contexts are we creating in which we do, for me, the thing I obviously care about is to do the work of education. But even that I think is in a way a similar thing. Do we, are we communicating that actually being right is the most important important thing, or engaging deeply in dialogue in a spirit of learning is the most important thing. And most of the time it's the former, right? In the way that we set up our incentive landscapes in schools and in universities and in education, it's about being right is the thing we're trying to get to. So we position people in this like illusion of certainty, but you know, that feels again, just deeply implicated in this whole thing.

There's a lot to say there. Yeah, we've got an education system that leads into a political system that precisely prioritizes this kind of trading of facts and debate. A friend of mine, Sarah Stein Lebrano, have you had her on the podcast? If you haven't, you should. I recommend it. She's written a great book called Don't Talk About Politics. She's a cognitive scientist and she's like, here's why debate doesn't work politically. And it's a really important point. That sort of trading of who's right, who's right, who's right doesn't allow for an exchange of views which might give rise to something else. Which was why Perspectiva, an organization we've both done things with, you know, was for a while a few years ago trying out a format called the anti-debate.

Yeah, still alive, I think.

Yeah, so, you know, which is flawed and it, you know, it does— I think there are problems with it, but I think the, the impetus behind it is really interesting.

Yeah, me too.

Because it's like, how can we find a way to elicit what comes about through really exploratory discussions. Now, I don't know in mainstream schooling, let alone progressive schooling, where discussions are about teaching kids to debate. I know there's, you know, in the UK there's a lot of talk about, you know, kids having better oral skills, and I'm sure, you know, debate is probably one of the first things that people go to as a, you know, good to get kids doing that. And of course, confidence in speaking and ordering your thoughts verbally, you know, that is part of it. But I do wonder about modeling more exploratory forms of conversation. And then it goes much deeper than that, doesn't it? Because I think, I mean, my personal view is a system which is doing its Sorting Hat thing by testing via exams is creating a perception of, you know, the primacy of facts over relationship at a really, really deep level in ways that are, you know, quite hard to unpick. Which is one of the reasons why some of the people I know who've got their kids in alternative forms of education are doing it. I haven't got the resources to do that, but I'm really interested in it, 'cause it goes so deep, doesn't it? This is one of the critiques of Western forms of education, full stop. You know, the primacy of the written word over relationship. And I'm interested in, this is one of the things I wanted to try and explore in this, 'cause I've got a chapter called, 'cause each chapter in my book is an instruction on this save the world script. You know, so it's like, I'm good, I protest, I'm pure. And then it's, "I know better than you." So it's all about this thing of knowledge and how we wield our knowledge. Now, there were several reasons I wanted to look into this. And the one it starts with is the politics of lived experience, because what often happens with changemakers, particularly those who are doing it as their job, tend to come from backgrounds where they don't have lived experience of the problem they're working on. In international development, that's entirely structural on a kind of national level. And so the learned knowledge of those who are helping or saving or giving service or whatever it is, takes precedence in multiple ways that are completely baked into the structures of how all that work happens over the lived experience of those that it's supposedly for. So, you know, there's an absolute ferment in the third sector, has been for a decade and a half, to try and grapple with this question of lived experience. And I think ultimately it would require these organizations to be constituted entirely differently and probably a completely different set of organizations. I'm not sure it's a problem you can solve with a bunch of institutions that were set up on a charitable purpose at a different time, including a time of empire. I just don't know if you can turn them upside down like that. They've been trying for decades to do it in very small ways that don't really hand over the power. But then this kind of— with each of these instructions on this script I'm hypothesizing, I think they serve in their inverse as well, to keep people away from change-making. You know, so that idea of, oh well, I'm not pure enough, I'm not green enough, I don't I don't have solar panels, or I, you know, I haven't given up meat and dairy yet, so I can't, you know, talk about the climate. You know, that's how it works for the purity thing. And I think the knowing better thing is, well, I don't have lived experience, so, you know, you get into middle-class guilt and whiteness guilt, so what can I do? And again, we've got a kind of binary thing here of it's one or the other, which, if we had more of a sense of relationship, you know, I think, you know, individualism is the problem here, but knowledge being individual. Is the problem as well. Now, what if we had had modelled at school and in our education an idea of knowledge as something co-created? Now, you know, if that was being modelled in schools, I think we'd live in a completely different world actually, but specifically with respect to what I'm thinking about, which is what goes on in change-making circles, it would be a very different encounter, wouldn't it? Because you could have equal weight to different forms of knowledge and then you have the idea that knowledge itself itself is created in relationship. You know, you've talked about Iain McGilchrist. You know, I find his philosophy that he draws out from his hemispheric hypothesis, from the neuroscience and his experience as a psychiatrist, I find the philosophical, the metaphysics that he's pulling out from it very interesting. And one of the things I find very interesting is his idea of knowledge as relationship, and he goes really into that. Now, what he doesn't go into, he acknowledges that there are other traditions that recognize some of the things he talks about, and he recognizes that indigenous traditions look at this, but there's another one he doesn't reference, which is feminism, because feminism has done some great work. Feminist philosophers, feminist epistemologists specifically, have done great work in looking at how knowledge can be co-created. You know, this comes from the lived experience of women having their actual experiences completely kind of like downgraded and not seen, ongoingly so, shall we say.

Right.

And so, and so that idea of knowledge as relationship, anyway, so this is a very long answer, but this is where we go to if we start questioning questioning that idea of the fact-based thing.

Exactly. I mean, it's a beautiful answer. I mean, I 100% agree. And just fun fact, one of the kind of, what would you call him, the granddaddy of kind of evidence-based educational stuff in the UK, Dylan William, in a podcast I did with him, we ended up talking about the book Women's Ways of Knowing. He was telling me about this.

Oh, great.

I don't know if you know that book, you know, teaching us midwifery and all this amazing stuff. So yeah, and I never imagined the conversation with him would go there. So just to say, absolutely agree. And another friend of mine, Ray Ison, also talks about knowing rather than knowledge. And Tim Ingold, the anthropologist, also emphasizes the verb rather than the noun, because even as soon as you bring in the word knowledge, it becomes a kind of a thing that can sometimes get stuck. And if the way we are doing, we are in knowing, we are in processes of knowing in all sorts of multiple ways. Simultaneously, all the time, you know, male, female, human, more than human, all of it, in all of our kind of complexity, we are in all sorts of kind of sensing and knowing processes. None of that, or not none, but very little of that is taken seriously in formal education.

No, because I think, you know, this is where Ian's argument, you know, following on from the processual philosophers, that, you know, we live in a thing-based world, you know, and of course that comes through in education, you know, that is the underlying metaphysics that would give rise to an empty vessel theory of education and an information deficit theory of change in campaigning.

Yeah, or even a concept of information that could be moved from here to there, right? I mean, back to information that's alive, I mean, would be a processual version of even the concept of information. I mean, all of it, it's such a stack of thingness and, you know, it goes so deep.

Right, which can become very overwhelming. And yet, you know, in education and in activism, there, I guess, you know, there are ways of bringing in practices and processes that demonstrate, you know, the other way of being.

Yeah. And I would also say they are already there in a lot of ways. They're just not given any credence or any value.

Give me an example. What you thinking of?

So what I mean by that is, again, in my context, teachers, you know, really good teachers who are deeply committed to their craft, understand this stuff deeply, that what they're doing is not really the information conveyance thing that you were talking about. They, like, they know that. But obviously they play the game of meeting the targets and doing all the things they have to do. But they understand that such a significant part of what they're doing is being in a room in relation with a group of humans in order to create spaces that are nurturing and generative for them to become the best versions of themselves that they can become and go out into the world and do their thing. I mean, a lot of teachers really do understand that, and they're entangled and caught in these incentive landscapes that say they don't really value that. So my point is just saying, I think this is quite important to me in the sense that I don't want to always bring it in as something new that people have to step into or a new way of being or doing. Actually, sometimes it's just a kind of reframe of some of the value systems or the incentive structures that we live in, because this stuff is already with us in the room.

Yes, that's right.

Together.

That's really important, isn't it? And that's really important with the changemaking perspectives that I'm writing about. Nothing that I'm sharing in this book as antidotes to this saviour complex is new. You know, wise people have been doing this forever, and particularly people and communities further from organized power in our current imperial states. You know, like, I'm not writing this book only about and for white middle-class people. Definitely not. And I know already from who it's landing with that that's not the case. And yet there is something really core to those perspectives and, you know, the way they have become the dominant culture that needs unpicking. And that's some stuff I really wanted to get at, you know, which is of course personal work, because that's in me. It's, you know, I know, I know it's in my bones and a 3-decade process of slowly coming to recognize it and how it has a hold on me and how it's not inevitable. That is actually a form of cultural shaping.

Yeah. Absolutely. And the other thing I really appreciate or find interesting about Iain McGilchrist and his work is that he roots a lot of his reflection on that in the Christian tradition, because that's his tradition. And that's a really interesting thing to do because it, I mean, he often says it in a slightly self-conscious way. It kind of, it potentially alienates some people who are listening who broadly like his work, but then might be put off when he starts talking about God or or Christianity. And yet that is his tradition. And so this is also this kind of both thing of, in a way, your National Trust story is really similar. It's like not immediately polarizing and vilifying the thing because you think, oh, well, that's just what, you know, everything that's European white Christian colonialism, you know, is all lumped into this one thing that's all the problem that's over there. And actually, like, particularly for the white middle-class UK-based people you're talking about, a lot of them will have grown up in a deeply Christian tradition. And wrestling with that is really difficult for a lot of people because it's not very interesting. I mean, I'm speaking personally, right? I grew up in a Christian house in the UK, and it's like, I don't— that doesn't feel exotic and interesting to me to look there in that tradition to find any answers. I'd much rather, you know, talk to the indigenous leaders or find some Buddhist tradition or— so there's something really deep and interesting there about how do we look where we don't want to look in a way, like how do we kind of find some of the similar wisdom that we're talking about in the traditions from which we came from.

Yes, and I think that's important for a lot of these discussions about, you know, because you can be extractive, right?

Well, exactly, it's cultural appropriation or—

continue the colonial project. Which psychologically is— it's always a bit of a displacement, right? At the heart of that colonial relationship is a projection, you know, it's a split. So, you know, you go and cause harm elsewhere, you extract from elsewhere, and you're not really engaging with what's going on at the core. You're accumulating and you're putting up a shield. Because I think actually it's only, you know, decolonization in its truest sense can only occur when the people who've identified with it or whose identity is at the heart of it, actually look within and see how we have used it, you know, as a psychological shield to not have to go there. 100%.

Absolutely. And I would say to also look within the traditions from which we have come from.

Right, exactly. Yes.

Sorry, that's the other step. And from which colonialism has come from. Because there's something about sometimes it's like, I just want to erase the last kind of 2,500 years of history and, you know, go back to some I mean, it's like, it makes me think of John Viveki where he says, "No nostalgia, no utopia," on his headstone he wants written. You know, the idea that sometimes it's like, oh yeah, we just want to, let's erase that horrible period of where we were out, people were out doing all that bad stuff based on these traditions. And actually let's go back to the kind of romantic indigenous pre, before the continuum was disrupted by the Roman Empire or wherever, you know, Manda, my friend Manda, she puts it in, you know, in the kind of Roman Empire, the trauma of the Roman Empire.

Oh, Manda Scott, her Boudicca novels. Oh God, yes.

Yes, yes, fabulous. Absolutely. She's wonderful, wonderful. And it's just really difficult to hold, right? Because we can't do that. Like we are where we are and we are implicated deeply, right back to where we started, right? Entangled in these traditions, which have brought some amazing things into the world in all sorts of ways. And some, just some of the worst atrocities. And so it's like how to pass That, I mean, it's incredibly difficult. And you also can't do it in theory, in propositions, in clever talk. You also have to kind of just live into those contradictions or something. I don't know quite. It's like you have to just be the thing you're saying. I don't know. It's hard.

And I think it's hard because I think in Britain, we are only at the very beginning of doing this. And we're currently, you know, there's currently also a very regressive current. And so we're fighting rearguard actions to preserve— when I've got brown friends being racially assaulted in the street, um, yeah, exactly, like, you know, like there's work to do, right? And there's like immediate work, because, you know, this appalling regressive thing is coming in that threatens the idea of Britain being multicultural, which is just so mad, it's demented.

Yeah, well, and yesterday the attacks on Jews in Golders Green, right?

I mean, so we're dealing with like, you know, violence and threat right now, which needs standing up to politically and practically in our communities. With all our voices. And we're also talking about this, because I do think it's psychological work, because I think one of the reasons that it's, for some people to hear that empire wasn't great, which is so challenging to some people, is because their own identity, their own sense of themselves, has got tied up with it. And so the work somehow is to find, education's gonna be absolutely key. I almost don't want to go here too much because I feel like I haven't got concrete things to point to at the moment. I've got a sense of what it needs to be. And I'd love to find out, you know, this is a whole separate discussion. I'm really keen.

No, no, it is. But I would say yes and no, because you do, I mean, there's so much concrete stuff in the book, obviously, in the reflections that the people you're interviewing talk about. And, you know, you talk about Camden Imagines as an example of the way a community can kind of come together around some of these difficult, you know, and there are really concrete actions that communities are taking around these things.

Yeah, yeah, I was thinking in education, I don't know what it looks like. But yes, you're right, there are all sorts of projects. That Camden one was great. A woman called Phoebe Takel, who who calls herself an imagination activist, which is great. And it's— she was working with Camden Council and working with their staff to try and find ways to liberate the— you know, it's not like people don't have it, of course people have it, but in their institutional roles, you know, you get into patterns where, you know, you don't feel you can use it, of course, because, you know, you just have to do the things that are on your job description. So trying to kind of like break out of some of that and think about, you know, 7 generations thinking and what would it look like to put care at the heart of everything. Yeah, I know, there's There are good things going on in lots of places. I think the point is that until we acknowledge that it's— the statements about what it is are not enough and we need to give people a felt sense of what it feels like to be doing it differently, it's going to be super hard.

Exactly. No, just experiencing it and having spaces where the young people can experience it early and keep experiencing it and, you know, be scaffolded to reflect on that. And I mean, it's, yeah, it's a huge part of the educational work for me, I think. But thank you, Anthea. I mean, just, yeah, such an interesting conversation.

Thank you. Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. Fascinating.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.