Happy New Year!
I have been thinking for various reasons lately about things that don’t work out – things that you put a lot of effort and time and care into that seem in the end not to amount to much.
This got me mulling over the 2018 repeal referendum. I was less involved in the referendum itself than I’d have liked to be (I was out of the country at the time) but I was quite involved in the broader Irish abortion debate for years, and in particular the debate over the Protection of Life Act. A lot of my family were involved pretty seriously too, as were a good number of my friends. Pro-life activism was, as it still is, one of the central projects of my life.
Most of my activism failed. One can of course mean many things by success and failure, but I just mean that the hours of effort and time that I and my family and friends put in failed to achieve the goals we were pursuing. The legislation passed, then the referendum did. Abortion got legalised, abortion rates went way up, and as a result thousands more people have already died and are dying every year. The fact that the referendum removing the offence of blasphemy from the Constitution passed later that same year by a lower margin made it feel like the work we did was almost useless. (I don’t think this meant much for what it’s worth: the margins were similar but the turnout for blasphemy was 20 percentage points lower and thus far more “naturally” tilted towards a No vote. But it felt bad, and in poetic terms it’s a neat illustration of something that was quite real.)
After the referendum, and in the years since, I’ve often found myself asking a question like, “What am I supposed to do with this?” It’s a question that straddles the line between the personal and the political. What do you do when things just don’t work out? When those are really massively significant things that consume large chunks of your life? Our culture has a lot of scripts for challenges and trials: things that you put a lot of effort or sweat or pain into achieving that you eventually achieve. You pat yourself on the back, you say, “It was all worthwhile” and you seamlessly integrate the whole business into your life story. It’s a pretty good script for a lot of purposes! It encourages hard work in the pursuit of the good, and it encourages you to put in more hard work the next time there’s a chance to do good. Movements can fit themselves into these scripts just as well as people. I’m sometimes quite jealous of the way it must feel to have campaigned for Repeal. The people who did this really think they were doing something really good and important: many of them worked their asses off for it over years, and they succeeded! They think that women are freer, happier, more genuinely equal because of their efforts and those of their friends and allies. That must feel fantastic!
But what do you do when you put the same effort in and it amounts to nothing? I reach for a script from the shelf and find it much barer.
I can’t hope to actually write that script in this blog and actually answer the question I’ve raised either for myself or for the pro-life movement. I think any general answer would be somewhat false anyway. All I can really do, having pulled back the curtain to reveal the existential vastness, is timidly shut it again with a couple of hesitant and probably trite thoughts.One is that it’s a mistake to, as the kids say, huff copium: to pretend that nothing could have been done differently, refuse to learn any lessons, and to keep on making the same mistakes. That’s in many ways the whole point of Minimise. Sometimes people can retreat (for very understandable reasons) to slogans like “witnessing, not winning”. I reject that in the strongest possible terms. For a cause like this we (that is, the movement – individuals can do all sorts of things that depend a lot on their own circumstances) cannot actually accept defeat in any broad or universal sense. We must always begin anew, always again make the case for everyone’s dignity, always again actually put it on the line and try to save lives.
That’s one thought. Another is a bit more positive and a bit more specific. It helps, I think, to see myself as part of a grand coalition of pro-lifers, one that extends through time and space. Each of us is to some degree stumbling around in the dark. We don’t know exactly where to put our energy or how much of it to put in. We’re unsure about how much our efforts will be rewarded with lives saved and dignity recognised. But amid this fog of ignorance one thing is for sure: we can’t achieve anything unless we help one another. I can help change one person’s mind now because Josh Brahm put up some incredible articles about conversations fifteen years ago, and because Daniel K Williams didn’t let the progressive history of the pro-life movement be forgotten, and because Muireann kept bothering me to write blogs and schedule another workshop. I am here because I saw a tree and dug up the treasures under its roots, treasures that others buried. And perhaps that one person who changes their mind will themselves bury a treasure under a tree, or draw a map, or hold a hillock against a siege. And that might (in any number of ways) make all the difference.
I think you basically need to be religious to really believe that nothing done in the service of good is ever truly wasted. I am religious, and I take great comfort in that belief. But all of us, religious and non-religious alike, can say this: you never quite know how things will go, and to presume to know that any one piece of goodness you put into the world is now and forever spent and exhausted is often presumptuous indeed.
Ben
The Minimise Project 