Two thoughts on activism

How persecution affects consciousness

"Any temptation I had at age twenty-three to categorize oppressed people in binaries, as either heroic resisters or unjust victims, was ended." Wonderful to see this new piece from Natalie Zemon Davis, with forward by Stefan Hanß #OpenAccess #EarlyModern 🗃️ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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— Brodie Waddell (@brodiewaddell.bsky.social) September 23, 2024 at 3:37 AM

Quote: "I was without a passport and not part of a university community for years. This article reflects on the impact of this experience of persecution on my work as a historian, and the relationship between politics, activism, and what Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre called ‘the historian’s craft’ and ‘consciousness’."

Experiencing Exclusion: Scholarship after Inquisition Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2024. Natalie Zemon Davis and Stefan Hanß.

People feel that standing up for a cause makes them 'happy'

You shouldn't take action because it will make you feel good; you should do it because it's the right thing to do.

I believe the concept of "happiness" in this discourse functions to say that people are intrinsically motivated to do what we feel is right, and that this intrinsic motivation delivers a long-term "reward" in terms of brain chemistry.

From a 15-year-old article by Drake Bennett:

At least if recent research is to be believed, political activism, no matter the cause, seems to make people happy - even if they don’t win an election or triumph in a ballot initiative. Psychologists curious about what fuels human happiness have looked at political engagement and political activism, and they’ve found that it provides people with a sense of empowerment, of community, of freedom, and of transcendence.

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It’s not just a life of self-denying dedication to a larger cause but a pursuit with immediate and enduring psychic rewards.

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They gave their subjects, again college students, a survey about the food in the dining hall. Some were given questions that primed them to think about what Kasser and Klar call the “ethical-political aspects” of the food: For example, they read a statement asserting that the cafeteria should offer fair trade products, then were asked to rate the importance of two different rationales offered for that decision. Another group was given suggestions that focused on apolitical aspects like the variety and the taste of the food. Both groups were then asked to write a note to the cafeteria director about the aspect of the food that was most important to them. ... “What we found,” says [Tim] Kasser, “was that the activist felt significantly more vital and alive and energized than did the nonactivist group.”

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Other studies, including one in 2001 by the psychologists Holly Hart, Dan McAdams, Barton Hirsch, and Jack Bauer, found that activism was strongly correlated with a quality called generativity, a sense of responsibility for others. And generativity, several studies have found, is in turn correlated with happiness.

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The power of political activism, says Kasser, is that it manages to provide so many of the requirements for human happiness. It gives people a sense of efficacy and a conviction that they are changing their world. It provides an often rich social network. Because political causes are freely chosen, activism enhances a person’s sense of their own independence. And it gives a sense of self-transcendence, of being a part of something larger than your own individual concerns. All of these things, Kasser says, have been shown to make us happier.

Other researchers question whether there’s anything special about activism’s ability to make us happy. Tom Sander, the director of the Saguaro Seminar, a Harvard initiative studying levels of trust and civic engagement in American society, points to Saguaro research on religious belief, another reliable predictor of happiness. What’s interesting about religion, he points out, is that the actual believing part doesn’t seem to account for the greater happiness. What does account for it is the deeply social nature of churches and synagogues and mosques.

“It’s not how often they pray or belief about the afterlife or any content from the pulpit,” he says. The best predictor of happiness is “the number of friends they have at church.”

"The upside of 'down with.'" Drake Bennett. The Boston Globe: Ideas. October 11, 2009.