I always-already make a difference...
Sometimes it's hard to believe that we matter, hard to believe that we can do anything about the horrible things that go on in this world, hard to believe that we make a difference.
The crafting gentleness website invites you to consider the practice of gentleness as a possible and powerful politics in your life. Through this website you are invited to consider that you do matter, that you always-already make a difference. Every moment of your life you move within a sea of influences, changes, and consequences. Every moment of your life you make a difference. What's important is to helpfully understand how.
For many of us, prejudice, hate, discrimination, force, coercion, violence, domination, and oppression are very much part and parcel of everyday life. Sometimes we suffer physical or psychological pain at the hands of others. Sometimes we ourselves inflict physical or psychological pain on others. Sometimes it's easy to feel that power is the exclusive privilege of those who seek to control, manipulate, and dominate. How can there be any room for gentleness in such a world? Often it's hard to work out how to make sense of our place in it all. The crafting gentleness site is here to help you work that out for yourself.
A "Politics of Gentleness"?
Often when I use the phrase, "politics of gentleness", I get a range of interesting reactions, from intrigued curiosity to dismissive mini-outrage, although thankfully more of the former than the latter. "Politics", after all, often tends to refer to supremely ungentle individuals pushing very ungentle agendas with predominantly ungentle consequences.
What might a "politics of gentleness" look like? Feel like? Can a politics of gentleness be anything other than a strictly personal journey, or might a politics of gentleness guide us in thinking about the broadest range of what are often categorised as social, political, and economic relationships?
I say "a politics of gentleness" rather than "the politics of gentleness", because I trust that many others out there are living and articulating their own take on a politics of gentleness in their everyday lives.
A few questions ...
If there were a systematic theoretical framework to justify the social and political relevance of gentleness as a form of political action, what might it look like?
What room, if any, has there been for a politics of gentleness within orthodox social or political theory, and, therefore, in the more obviously political spaces of our everyday lives?
If we were to start from an assumption that gentleness is a baseline possibility for being human-in-relationship, how might that effect our understanding of who we are and how we relate to each other? How influential are dominant, universalist economic, legal, and political models such as homo œconomicus or the rational or possessive self-interested individual in our everyday lives?
Is it possible to develop a social-theoretical basis for the political relevance of gentleness?
Might a baseline of gentleness foreground the study of hope, optimism, transformation, community, and social justice in social and political theory?
Through a politics of gentleness, might it be possible to retain the power of grounded political optimism without the excesses of de-peopled, dissociative, and often divisive utopianisms?
Must attitudes of gentleness be equated with political quietism?
Might more systematic social and political understandings of gentleness lead to more effective responses to violence and conflict?
Might a politics of gentleness open up opportunities for the transformation of local and national governance and policy formation?
Is it possible to identify clear social and political principles for the everyday application of gentleness within education, work, politics, healthcare, self-care, and relationships?
Might more systematic understandings of gentleness provide insights into the challenges of institutional religious practice?
Might a politics of gentleness provide insight and guidance in practices of resistance against oppression, so that violence does not have to always beget violence?
In what ways might historical figures inform the development of a politics of gentleness?
What are the hidden histories, the hidden stories of people who have lived gentleness far from the demands of fame, leadership, or political ambition?
Might there be a difference between a politics of gentleness and a politics of non-violence?
What insights might an understanding of the performing arts yield for a politics of gentleness?
Is it possible to develop a systematic politics of gentleness without engaging in prescriptive approaches to ethics and relationship?
Is it possible to develop universal principles for a political understanding of gentleness that respect the particularities of person, place, and context, or is any form of universalism anathema to such a politics?
Is it possible to identify the features of a politics of gentleness without falling into ethnocentric essentialisms, whereby we expect understandings earned in our own part of the world to apply automatically to everyone else?
Are there local and powerful non-institutional traditions of gentleness around the world unrelated to the strong association of gentleness with religious and spiritual institutional practices?
In the localised, lived invitations of a politics of gentleness, experienced in and through relationship, might there be the seeds of a truly international ground for understanding and cooperation?
Crafting Gentleness?
The notion of crafting is often associated with activities like pottery, knitting, woodwork, quiltmaking and so on. Engaging in these sorts of crafting can be a great way to remind ourselves that we can make a difference, to remind ourselves that we can learn to listen more carefully to how we make the differences that we make. Crafting materials can be a way to align ourselves to think more in terms of the consequences and effects of what we do, to consider that helpfulness and appropriateness might be friendlier values to live by than rigid rules of right and wrong. By sculpting, shaping, moulding, guiding, building, and by listening and responding as we go, we can become more aware of how we make a difference. Crafting can be a reclamation of the power of life.
On this site, crafting activities aren't just promoted as opportunities to experience empowerment. Here, crafting activities are understood as reminders that we can become aware of how we always-already make a difference, at any time, in any situation. We are always-already sculpting, shaping, moulding, guiding, building. We always-already have an influence on how we and others experience life. We can become more aware of how we always-already matter.
The notion of crafting can refer to every moment of our lives. Crafting can be a way to speak about how we experience experience, about how we negotiate our way in and through different situations, different relationships. Crafting can be an easy way to work with the assumption that we are always-already operating within a play of influences. Crafting can be a way to speak of the dynamic, fluid ways that we move and shift and play as people among people and as people in relationship with whomever or whatever we encounter.
We get to work it out for ourselves, we get to learn from what works for us and from what doesn't work for us.
But we don't have to do that on our own. We can look to those before us, around us. We can draw on wisdoms, on ways of thinking and doing that other people have found helpful. We can try them out to see if they work for us. We can learn to listen to helpful and discerning critique. We can learn to discern and critique helpfully.
An important principle of the work on this site is that there is nothing more personal, political, or relevant than attending to the character of our own attitude as we engage in crafting our experience and our relationships.
Also, in doing this, that there is no attitude more personal, political, or relevant than an attitude of gentleness. An attitude of gentleness can allow us to live the possibilities of hope as a realistic engagement with the here and now of our relationships and circumstances. Crafting gentleness can remind us that hope works better when it's here.
It helps to have a general yardstick in doing that, though. This is where it maybe gets a little counterintuitive, because here it's not so much about what gentleness is as about what gentleness is not. By becoming aware of how we can crowd gentleness out of our lives we can maybe leave room for ourselves to live gentleness a bit more. If we're careful about it, maybe gentleness can simply happen. Maybe gentleness simply happens when when we don't expect that uncertainty can be or should be eliminated?
We can learn pretty quickly in the process of crafting that seeking to eliminate uncertainty tends not to be very helpful. Absolutes seem to have no place as we surf the play of influences. Resistance is often quick to manifest, as the power of what actually happens asserts itself. Expecting that uncertainty can be or should be eliminated tends to block out our power to listen, and tends to block out many of the political possibilities of the moment.
The Power of Gentleness?
Trying to work towards more gentleness in your life does not have to mean condemning oneself to a path of political ineffectiveness. Rather, working towards greater gentleness can mean working towards a greater presencing of oneself in the world, towards a greater awareness of the political possibilities in your life.
On this website it's not about trying to say what gentleness looks like. The emphasis isn't on 'acts of gentleness' as much as it is on 'attitudes of gentleness', and how those attitudes work out in practice depends on each of us in our own particular circumstances.
One of the key principles behind this whole project is that gentleness is always-already available to us as an attitude, that gentleness is a baseline of human possibility in relationship and politics. If gentleness is understood as an attitude, then we work it out for ourselves as we go along. It's the crafting and honing of gentle attitudes that is being promoted here.
Crafting can be about listening to myself and listening to my situation, where listening doesn't have to mean waiting to speak. Crafting can be about a greater respect for what actually happens.
To speak of life and living in terms of crafting can be a way to reclaim the power of possibility and the power of politics for every moment of our everyday lives. In crafting, the personal can maybe become the political and the political personal, in more approriately helpful ways.