When the political cartoon from which the movie Be a part of or Die attracts its title was first printed by Benjamin Franklin, it was a name to unite American colonists within the twin function of self-protection and the bloody seizure of Indigenous land. It was 1754, the start of the French and Indian Warfare, which Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes in her e book An Indigenous Individuals’s Historical past of the US as “mainly a British war against the Indigenous peoples, some of whom formed alliances with the French.” The cartoon is a potent however extremely malleable visible image that was later adopted by these combating the British throughout the American Revolutionary Warfare and, many years on, by either side of the American Civil Warfare.
The obvious contradiction of a cartoon calling for unity being utilized by either side will get at a key level in Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor’s 2024 e book Solidarity. Early on, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor are cautious to notice that the concept they’re exploring is a two-sided coin: “reactionary or counter-solidarity emphasizes given identities (usually racial, religious, class-based, or national identities) and aims to benefit a small group by excluding those who are different, transformative solidarity aspires to create systems that benefit everyone.”
This e book and the above documentary pair nicely, particularly at this second. Each discover important points of what it means to come back collectively at a time when ever extra persons are feeling deeply remoted and nationwide politics have grow to be fearsomely polarized.
Political cartoon printed in The Pennsylvania Gazette, 9 Could 1754, attributed to James Turner for Benjamin Franklin (picture by way of Wikipedia)
Be a part of or Die is precisely what its tagline guarantees: “a film about why you should join a club.” However, in fact, it’s about far more than that. It’s a part of a cresting wave of cultural manufacturing circling across the deeply intertwined problems with loneliness, isolation, disgrace, divisiveness, political intransigence, staggering inequality, mis/disinformation, and the enlargement and emboldening of far-right teams motivated by baldly racist, sexist, heteronormative, and xenophobic beliefs.
The “die” within the movie’s title isn’t a metaphor. It’s a literal invocation of statistics displaying that individuals residing in social isolation die sooner than these with stronger social bonds. The movie’s pitch is easy: get on the market and get entangled in some type of membership or group. It’s the American manner, they inform us utilizing copious historic examples, and it could be the one factor that saves democracy, along with saving your life.
The movie’s protagonists are two White males who come throughout as center or higher class: an elder, bearded professor (Robert Putnam, writer of the extremely influential e book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Group, revealed in 2000) and his former scholar, Pete Davis (who directed the movie along with his sister, Rebecca Davis). The movie feels very self-conscious in its try and current itself as well-meaning, attempting exhausting to strike a word of apolitical affability whose tone is one in all assuring audiences that these males’s earnest want to be useful could cause no hurt.
Robert Putnam being interviewed in Be a part of or Die
I deliver up this level not as a result of I feel the protagonists’ race or class negates the message, however as a result of there actually is not any such factor as an apolitical method to speaking about politics. The truth that they believed this technique was crucial is, for my part, tied to the up to date push for documentary filmmakers tackling tough matters to be extra “approachable” or lighter, to please funders and/or streamers by presenting their work as having a “broad appeal,” which frequently interprets to content material that facilities White audiences whereas skewing generic and politically muted in tone. I additionally elevate this level as a result of packaging issues in our consumer-driven tradition. It signifies who the filmmakers and their funders take into account to be their most essential viewers, a notable element when the subject material is bringing individuals collectively. The techniques used to advance these discussions are simply as vital because the discussions themselves.
Ways are, actually, an enormous piece of the interlocked points this e book and movie discover. How we discuss to one another about thorny matters, and what approaches we do or don’t take, have all the things to do with our capability to efficiently type bonds and resolve our issues. A related essay on that very topic is Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s “How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth?” Whereas ostensibly about political organizing, the essay touches on one thing the Proper appears to be higher at publicly acknowledging than the Left: Persons are afraid to talk, afraid to danger presenting their concepts and emotions publicly, for concern of claiming the incorrect factor. The Proper wraps this level in diatribes in opposition to political correctness or “wokeness,” exploiting fears to additional divide everybody, however in my expertise individuals on the Left carry their very own fears of talking and sense of isolation.
After I facilitated a consciousness-raising group on the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York earlier this 12 months, which was deliberately multiracial, intergenerational, and trans-inclusive, I selected Hayes and Kaba’s textual content as our preliminary studying exactly as a result of I frightened about how fears and judgment may forestall us from being current and open with each other. Many expressed gratitude that it was our first shared textual content, a attainable indication that they felt a few of these anxieties themselves. We people are primates in any case. Our programming is fundamental — we’ve got deeply held fears about being ostracized, a lot in order that once we really feel we’ve got been rejected socially, it disrupts our total mind operate.
Be a part of or Die promotional poster
However fears round talking are usually not all that preserve us aside. Be a part of or Die proves to be a helpful replace to Putnam’s well-known e book Bowling Alone as a result of it seems to be extra broadly on the downside. Using intensive information, the e book confirmed a precipitous decline in group bonds, however it targeted totally on the interval from the Nineteen Sixties to the late Nineties. Because the movie reveals, for those who stretch the interval of study again to the late 1800s, the so-called “Gilded Age” within the US, when wealth inequality had reached what was then believed to be a peak (good day soon-to-be trillionaires of the twenty first century), and hundreds upon hundreds of immigrants have been arriving within the nation, you may see the start of an enormous, decades-long enhance in civic and group participation. That dramatic progress precedes the later decline mentioned within the authentic e book.
A delicate however notable overlap between Be a part of or Die and Solidarity is the work of the late Jane McAlevey. She seems as an occasional commentator within the movie and Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor quote her and dedicate their e book to her. A union organizer, scholar, and author who died simply this summer time, McAlevey is broadly revered for her observe of and writing on “whole-worker organizing,” which acknowledges that employees are additionally members of communities outdoors the office, and the realities dealing with these communities must play a task in union organizing.
McAlevey’s commentary within the movie is most salient when the filmmakers discover critiques of Bowling Alone, significantly that Putnam uncared for to acknowledge that People have been deliberately divided from each other. As McAlevey says within the movie: “I believe a deliberate strategy of cultivating individualism begins in the early 1970s, to roll back the gains [of] the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, and the Trade Union Movement, with a strategy of downgrading the concept of the communal and the collective, and elevating the idea that the individual is supreme. People do have less connections. What I try to argue is, it wasn’t accidental.”
One level that neither the movie nor the e book acknowledges is how the push towards the person and away from solidarity amongst individuals dealing with related points is intertwined with individuals feeling personally liable for their very own isolation and loneliness, a painful byproduct of the false concept of meritocracies by which an individual is solely liable for their successes and failures. Our hyper-individualized society propagates the fiction that it’s a person’s personal fault that they’re alone and, accordingly, one thing is incorrect with them. I do know this as a result of I’ve felt it, and I do know others who’ve as nicely. As I’ve written elsewhere, even with all of the structural evaluation on this planet, the sensation of being alone is hard to take care of when our society teaches us that the answer is to both flip inward or to purchase stuff, neither of which is able to clear up the issue. One secret to the success of the Proper’s present message within the US is the popularity of individuals’s fears and isolation, providing up numerous boogeymen because the trigger and answer, fairly than attending to the techniques which can be failing us all. In the meantime, the Left hasn’t completed an awesome job of providing a collective imaginative and prescient of a path out.
Nonetheless from Be a part of or Die of members of the Impartial Order of Odd Fellows Waxahachie Lodge 80, Texas
At screenings of my very own documentary about US areas that heart LGBTQ+ ladies, I’m typically requested by viewers members: What teams can I be part of? The place can I’m going? Essentially the most trustworthy reply is that you’ve many choices, and in addition only a few. In Be a part of or Die, we meet just a few males who we later study are members of an Odd Fellows lodge in Waxahachie, Texas. On the finish of the movie, we see them laughing, hugging, and dealing collectively to enhance themselves and their city. It’s exactly the type of benevolent civic group that Putnam boosts in his e book. However the group has just a few property that a variety of different teams lack: entry to a devoted non-public area that they personal (I can not overemphasize the significance of this); a acknowledged ethic of mutuality, together with a politic of nonviolence and non-discrimination; and a set of bonding rituals and traditions to embrace and stick with it. It’s the type of group that Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor may outline as being engaged in transformative fairly than reactionary solidarity.
Many individuals I meet who’re looking for areas of their very own are hoping for communities related in some methods to the Odd Fellows lodge. The difficulty is that they typically look to consumer-reliant companies like bars and bookstores to meet wishes which have little to do with consumption.
I not too long ago got here throughout a sequence of studying occasions organized by Studying Rhythms, the place persons are requested to pay $20 to sit down collectively and skim books individually whereas music performs, they usually can later have interaction in elective conversations. I’m certain these occasions are well-intentioned, however they illustrate how we regularly replicate techniques that reinforce individualism over collectivity. In the end, contributors are requested to pay a fairly excessive worth to sit down in a room and skim on their very own, with the chance however no assure of connecting with others. To state the apparent, these occasions may simply be hosted free of charge or a nominal price at venues like public libraries, parks, or group facilities.
So why aren’t they? My impression from the Studying Rhythms web site is that, along with the sensible must pay for areas and labor, they really feel the necessity to model themselves and their occasions so as to garner consideration, sponsorships, and extra funding. Branding and an internet following may permit them to supply extra fascinating “experiences,” however all of this finally cultivates a shopper mannequin greater than it satisfies a want for significant, sustained connection.
Nonetheless from Be a part of or Die of an occasion hosted by the Los Angeles-based indigenous mutual support and advocacy group CIELO
So why aren’t all of us pushing for extra publicly managed areas the place occasions can occur with out the excessive price and must “sell” one thing? Useful resource- and info-sharing throughout loosely aligned teams, together with utilizing and advocating for extra and higher native public areas, may create avenues for significant involvement, civic engagement, and connection past handing over some money and displaying up. (An occasion sequence just like the above referred to as Quiet Studying appears to do a few of this.)
Within the final essay of her assortment Belonging: A Tradition of Place, bell hooks writes about her rootedness in Kentucky, her household, and the fashions they supplied for her. At one level, hooks says, “Communities of care are sustained by rituals of regard.” I feel rather a lot about that after I’m attending yet one more Zoom or in-person occasion the place people lack the possibility to be current with each other in any significant manner. A couple of years in the past I used to be instructing a workshop about artists and fee the place I foregrounded the necessity for info sharing and solidarity, and an attendee requested why he ought to spend his restricted time serving to others (a real if telling query). Earlier than I may cease myself I mentioned one thing like: Why ought to anybody care about you and your work for those who don’t care about them?
Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor current a extra tactical perspective in Solidarity: “…the twenty-first century has witnessed the biggest protests, and the most popular petitions, in history, yet they have produced comparatively small effects. … What might have happened had a larger fraction of the tens of millions who demonstrated been channeled into member-based organizations to work toward common goals?”
That is the place that malleability of the Benjamin Franklin cartoon that impressed the movie’s title comes again in. In that case most of the occasions that promise collectivity are consumer-oriented or are protests with out clear, ongoing organizing, there actually aren’t methods for individuals to affix these efforts past displaying up, which, by itself, isn’t sufficient. And we all know nicely sufficient at this level that teams engaged in reactionary solidarity are all too prepared and prepared to supply longterm connection and involvement. Invites into and methods by which individuals can discover a place for themselves in a bunch are massively essential, and anybody focused on making a extra livable and welcoming world needs to be contemplating them. At any time when I spend time enthusiastic about this matter, the phrases of bell hooks echo for me: New rituals of regard are wanted.
Be a part of or Die is at present streaming on Netflix.
