The Personal is Political
- Parami
- May 13
- 5 min read
I have had a fairly ‘political’ week since the last blog. I canvassed for the Scottish Parliament election, meaning that I chatted to a number of people about who they would vote for and why. I stood outside a polling station for a few hours with Iris Duane a Green Party candidate who won a regional seat for Holyrood. She is the first transgender woman to be elected to the Scottish Parliament. We had some great craic and, not surprisingly, found more in common than we had differences even though we were holding placards for different parties. I was struck by the number of young voters who stopped to talk with both of us. They were generally well informed, curious and committed to a better world.
As someone conditioned by the second wave feminism of the 60s and 70s, I still firmly believe that ‘The Personal is Political’. My understanding of that has changed but I think there is still mileage in it. At its core, it means that experiences often treated as “private” individual problems are actually shaped by social structures, power relations, and political systems. At its inception these “private” issues were seen as marriage, housework, sexuality, domestic violence, childcare, beauty standards. Over the decades, that understanding has changed sociologically, particularly with the introduction in the 80s and 90s of the concept of “intersectionality” and what has become thought of as “identity politics”. Intersectionality argues that race, gender, class, and other identities overlap in shaping lived experience. Critics of the original slogan also argued earlier feminism sometimes assumed a white, middle-class, heterosexual perspective. While the meaning of the phrase has evolved and changed I think it still means that many private troubles are actually rooted in social and political structures. It also means that the choices we make in our seemingly “private” life will have profound effects in the world around us.
By this point, if you have carried on reading, you might wonder why I am talking about this. What, you might wonder, has all this to do with my practice and my life as a committed Buddhist practitioner? I think it has everything to do with it. Maybe I wouldn’t use the exact phrase but I think the concept holds. As you will know, we have been revisiting Bhante’s lectures: Buddhism for Today and Tomorrow at Mandala night. Next week I will be in Brighton giving the third of four talks revisiting the original talks given 50 years ago. They were originally given in Brighton and are often referred to as The Brighton Lectures.
I will be revisiting the talk The Nucleus of a New Society. The New Society was not an unusual concept in the 1970s. It was something talked of often in alternative looking groups. There is even a magazine with that name founded in the 60s which, according to Wikipedia, “became hugely influential among academics, journalists, planners, reformers, social workers, and the emerging “new middle class” of teachers, therapists, sociologists, and public-sector professionals.” There was also Peace News, a magazine started in the late 1930s between world wars. Although circulation declined from mid-20th century peaks, Peace News remains active in print and online. On its website it claims that “it has consistently connected activists across generations, providing education on nonviolent strategy and documenting movements from Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to climate action. Its long history gives it an enduring role as a chronicle of pacifist thought and practice in Britain.”
Alongside the intellectual version was a more radical and lived idea of a “new society.” This came from:
the hippie movement
anti-war activism
feminism
environmentalism
alternative education
communes and co-ops
radical Buddhism and spirituality
anarchism and libertarian socialism
People began speaking not merely of reforming Britain, but of living differently in the now. Not a vision of utopia but a way of life.
Bhante gave those talks within that culture and climate. We all had an idea of what he meant when we saw a talk called the Nucleus of a New Society. Bhante’s vision, however, was different, I would argue more radical. The nucleus of a new society for Bhante was a spiritual community so the values on which it would be based, while having much in common with the political idealism and ideology of the times, were spiritual values. They were based on a deep understanding of the true nature of human existence. It is no coincidence that the talk immediately preceding the New Society talk was A Vision of Human Existence. The new society needs to have, at its heart, an analysis of the human condition and a vision for living alternatively in harmony with the true nature of things.
In a couple of talks I have given recently I have been thinking of the Nucleus of a New Society as creating transformative community. I have asked the question ‘what makes community transformative rather than merely a group?’ I think the answer lies in:
shared values
mutual challenge
truthfulness
generosity
collective aspiration
The New Society has always been aspiration mixed with imperfection. The point is not whether we have realised it fully, but whether we continue to practise toward its creation.
For me the question is now - What does a New Society mean amid:
ecological crisis
fragility
loneliness
fragmentation
polarisation
Perhaps the question becomes newly urgent. We don’t need 1970s idealism revived but to see this as a living question. That way the personal is recognised as political, the political as personal.
So, I make no apologies for bringing in the political. I am a Buddhist first and foremost and any activism I engage in I try to do from my understanding of the Dharma. I see greed, hatred and delusion writ large in the world and I want to help create a community with transformation at its heart. A community that can influence and even change the world around it.
Another talk given by Bhante in the 70s was Evolution or Extinction: current world problems.* I often quote this talk and it is reproduced in edited form in the book What is the Sangha. In this talk Bhante enumerates a raft of problems facing the world - all of which are still with us. He comments that often, due to overwhelm at the scale of these problems
we try to forget the problems of the world, the problems of other people, and with a greater or less degree of hedonism we try to get on with our own personal lives.
Now, in my opinion, thinking all this over, this sort of attitude, of just retreating from the problems, retreating into the personal in a rather narrow sense, is really an attitude not worthy of a human being, one who's trying to be a human being in the full sense of the term.
He goes on to suggest four things we might do to work with this: find a method of personal development; find a community that supports your values; withdraw from the forces that work against your values; where you can’t withdraw, influence. I see these very much as saying in Buddhist terms that the personal is political, the political personal. We need to know how to work with our own mental states and attitudes. That is supported by a transformative community and from that community we can create alternative structures so we can withdraw as necessary and take steps to influence the world around us. I see this as my personal manifesto and it is my aspiration for our community here in Glasgow.
Meanwhile, as always
May all beings be well, may all beings find true happiness and its causes and may all beings be free from suffering.
Where the Bodhichitta has not yet arisen
May it arise
Where it has arisen
May it flourish
Where it flourishes
May it never die
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