When the political cartoon from which the movie Be part of or Die attracts its title was first printed by Benjamin Franklin, it was a name to unite American colonists within the twin goal of self-protection and the bloody seizure of Indigenous land. It was 1754, the start of the French and Indian Battle, which Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes in her guide An Indigenous Individuals’s Historical past of america 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 Battle and, many years on, by each side of the American Civil Battle.
The obvious contradiction of a cartoon calling for unity being utilized by each side will get at a key level in Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor’s 2024 guide Solidarity. Early on, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor are cautious to notice that the thought 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 guide and the above documentary pair effectively, particularly at this second. Each discover crucial facets of what it means to come back collectively at a time when ever extra individuals 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 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 will not be a metaphor. It’s a literal invocation of statistics exhibiting that individuals dwelling in social isolation die sooner than these with stronger social bonds. The movie’s pitch is simple: get on the market and get entangled in some sort of membership or group. It’s the American manner, they inform us utilizing copious historic examples, and it might 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, creator of the extremely influential guide Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Neighborhood, printed in 2000) and his former scholar, Pete Davis (who directed the movie together with his sister, Rebecca Davis). The movie feels very self-conscious in its try to current itself as well-meaning, making an attempt exhausting to strike a be aware of apolitical affability whose tone is considered one of assuring audiences that these males’s earnest need to be useful may cause no hurt.
Robert Putnam being interviewed in Be part of or Die
I deliver up this level not as a result of I believe the protagonists’ race or class negates the message, however as a result of there actually isn’t any such factor as an apolitical method to speaking about politics. The truth that they believed this technique was vital is, for my part, tied to the modern push for documentary filmmakers tackling troublesome subjects to be extra “approachable” or lighter, to please funders and/or streamers by presenting their work as having a “broad appeal,” which regularly 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 vital viewers, a notable element when the subject material is bringing folks collectively. The ways used to advance these discussions are simply as important because the discussions themselves.
Ways are, in reality, an enormous piece of the interlocked points this guide and movie discover. How we discuss to one another about thorny subjects, and what approaches we do or don’t take, have all the things to do with our capability to efficiently kind 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 threat presenting their concepts and emotions publicly, for worry of claiming the flawed 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 folks 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 yr, 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 anxious 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 potential indication that they felt a few of these anxieties themselves. We people are primates in spite of everything. Our programming is primary — now we have deeply held fears about being ostracized, a lot in order that once we really feel now we have been rejected socially, it disrupts our total mind perform.
Be part of or Die promotional poster
However fears round talking aren’t all that maintain us aside. Be part of or Die proves to be a helpful replace to Putnam’s well-known guide Bowling Alone as a result of it seems extra broadly on the downside. Using in depth knowledge, the guide 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, in case you 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 (hey soon-to-be trillionaires of the twenty first century), and 1000’s upon 1000’s of immigrants had been arriving within the nation, you’ll be able to see the start of an enormous, decades-long improve in civic and group participation. That dramatic progress precedes the later decline mentioned within the unique guide.
A delicate however notable overlap between Be 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 guide to her. A union organizer, scholar, and author who died simply this summer time, McAlevey is extensively revered for her apply of and writing on “whole-worker organizing,” which acknowledges that employees are additionally members of communities exterior the office, and the realities dealing with these communities have to play a job 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 guide acknowledges is how the push towards the person and away from solidarity amongst folks dealing with related points is intertwined with folks feeling personally answerable for their very own isolation and loneliness, a painful byproduct of the false thought of meritocracies during which an individual is solely answerable 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 flawed with them. I do know this as a result of I’ve felt it, and I do know others who’ve as effectively. As I’ve written elsewhere, even with all of the structural evaluation on the earth, 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 can resolve 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 finished a terrific job of providing a collective imaginative and prescient of a path out.
Nonetheless from Be 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 a part of? The place can I am going? Probably the most sincere reply is that you’ve many choices, and likewise only a few. In Be part of or Die, we meet a couple of 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 sort of benevolent civic group that Putnam boosts in his guide. However the group has a couple of belongings that plenty of different teams lack: entry to a devoted personal house 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 keep on. It’s the sort 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 just lately got here throughout a sequence of studying occasions organized by Studying Rhythms, the place individuals are requested to pay $20 to take a seat collectively and browse books individually whereas music performs, they usually can later have interaction in elective conversations. I’m positive these occasions are well-intentioned, however they illustrate how we regularly replicate techniques that reinforce individualism over collectivity. In the end, members are requested to pay a reasonably excessive value to take a seat in a room and browse on their very own, with the chance however no assure of connecting with others. To state the apparent, these occasions might 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 have to pay for areas and labor, they really feel the necessity to model themselves and their occasions in an effort to garner consideration, sponsorships, and extra funding. Branding and an internet following can also permit them to supply extra fascinating “experiences,” however all of this in the end cultivates a shopper mannequin greater than it satisfies a need for significant, sustained connection.
Nonetheless from Be part of or Die of an occasion hosted by the Los Angeles-based indigenous mutual help 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 have to “sell” one thing? Useful resource- and info-sharing throughout loosely aligned teams, together with utilizing and advocating for extra and higher native public areas, might create avenues for significant involvement, civic engagement, and connection past handing over some money and exhibiting up. (An occasion sequence much like the above known 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 believe lots about that once 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. Just a few 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 might cease myself I mentioned one thing like: Why ought to anybody care about you and your work in case you 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 folks to hitch these efforts past exhibiting up, which, by itself, will not be sufficient. And we all know effectively 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 during which folks can discover a place for themselves in a bunch are massively vital, and anybody interested by making a extra livable and welcoming world needs to be contemplating them. Every time I spend time fascinated about this subject, the phrases of bell hooks echo for me: New rituals of regard are wanted.
Be part of or Die is at the moment streaming on Netflix.
