Hi, Dr. Dyann Ross here! I’m the love theorist!
It's really good to have you with me today. I'm wanting to make another set of fairly full on comments, about how I'm thinking at the moment about what's important to consider in building a theory of love. For a theory of love to be relevant to you and everybody else who might want to draw on it for some guidance, it needs to be quite nuanced and quite layered, and at the same time, readily accessible for you, in your every every day, every night situation that you might be in.
Ideas are really big, slippery things, there's no doubt about it. For this podcast, I'm still in the realm of ideas, not so much yet getting into what to do with the ideas and giving guidance around that. If you bear with me, what I wanted to do today is bring a focus particularly to the issue of what I call the problematics of violence. I'm actually interested in love because of the problematics of violence in our world. There are so many dimensions to what violence looks like, why it's a problem and who it's a problem for. It sometimes gets talked about as wicked problems and things like poverty, war, structural unemployment, climate change, domestic violence, and anything we can think of that involves violence toward human beings, other beings, and Mother Nature. Different types of violence kind of get bundled up in this term, wicked problems. We know what's happening on the planet and in people's lives around us in our own lives. But it's not always clear what to do about it. We can get quite disempowered and quite disheartened, in fact, this is what I call broken-heartedness, the witnessing and being aware of violence.
A theory of love really needs to delve into what power is all about. Because it's really saying that some types of power are not okay, namely, the types of power that do harm to others, even if not intended. It may be done in the name of love, but it is not love.
The answer is love.
The problem is violence.
Within both those statements, understanding, knowing how to work with power, in all sorts of different situations, is really crucial. It can put us in some pretty tough situations, no doubt about it. I've got some notes that I was going to draw on, because I just find this topic, fairly overwhelming to know where to start and where to stop. I'm also wanting to still keep myself in the picture. It's not like I'm saying violence is all out there, over there, and nothing to do with me. I do try and bring it back to myself as well.
I'm a social worker, and I've been a social worker for many decades now. One of the original motivating factors for me to become a social worker in my late teens, was what I experienced and observed when I was a little person growing up in a large family. I've talked about this before. Just to make a couple of summary comments here. I was very aware of how unfair things were sometimes. The unfairness really ran along gender lines, this is in the 50s and 60s, into the 70s when I was growing up. From a young child’s perspective my understanding of fairness was in very simplistic terms. For example, for me it was about who was given the most food on their dinner plate at night. It was assumed that boys needed more food, particularly meat. It's interesting what you'll notice especially when you are hungry. I've talked also before about the lack of love that I experienced in how I understand love now. As a child I felt cared for and part of my family. You know, it was hard to get hold of that idea that it was love that I was really craving and missing. I didn't really know or understand love as I do now. There's a lot that happened in my childhood though where I started to ask questions such as –
* What does this feel right?
* Why does this feel so uncomfortable or so unfair or so lonely?
* What's missing here?
I just was puzzling about it and never put it into words to spoke to anyone about it as a child. I was looking for answers and I couldn't find the answers. Becoming a social worker was born of that desire
to understand and find the answer to those kinds of questions, of wanting to make the world a better place. That's a big concept, isn't it ‘make the world a bigger place.’ Just what that means is obviously different for each of us. There are so many ways we can contribute in the world. Being an academic, at this point in my career, it's very much about the passion for thinking through how our ideas can help us in the complexity and richness of what life is. In particular, it requires us to think about what violence and harm can look like, and how we might be able to contribute around that. I believe ideas are really, really important. They could sit as a kind of unspoken hope, or a precious belief, for example, that people are inherently good. I have that belief. I do believe people are inherently good, that much can happen, that can make it seem that they are not so. But I actually believe, as a starting ethical point that people are inherently good. This is one of those ideas that I've just refused to let go of all my life. I believe you will have ideas and beliefs that are ultra important to you as well that you just hold on to, like being honest matters. You know that you just try hard in every situation, even if it doesn't always work out that you're as honest as you might want to be, that you still really believe in honesty. I think that these ideas, these beliefs that we hold, often without even expressing them, and maybe sometimes just below a conscious level of thinking, are still influencing us. I think they help us hold a vision in the darkest of times, of what we're trying to achieve, even if we're not achieving it. These ideas and beliefs can be kind of a mixed blessing, in fact, because not acting on our values and our beliefs can be very painful and disabling as well.
Now I'm here with you because I am wanting to explore the idea of love, which you know, is a big project. I don't understand why, but actually I do understand why, it's taken me all my career, all my adult life, to come into a space like an academic space or professional space and say love matters. It is a word that is typically used in a romantic or sexualized way or for personal relationships. It is not a word typically found in professional codes of ethics. This word, love, is something that should be in the curriculum, we need to be talking with students about this in ways that they can get some guidance for their practice as social workers. I think that's an interesting point to wonder why it has taken so long to feel that I can speak it first, or that I had troubled and thinking it as a child, then speaking it as an adult and understanding how it can be used as, as a revolutionary force, I believe, for change in the world.
Just a quick comment on that word ‘revolutionary’ which I'm using in a very particular way. In terms of the peace revolution, the love revolution, and obviously it has to always be about nonviolence. When violence is happening it not the kind of revolution I'm talking about. I like the word revolution because it helps keep a big picture sense of the major levels and layers of change we need to undertake, to really have a loving world, and to have no violence and no harm being done to the most vulnerable people, animals and landscapes in the world. I believe a commitment to contributing to the love revolution by practicing being revolutionary love, is important for our survival on the planet.
I'm looking for an expansive multi-dimensional way of thinking about love to guide personal and planetary healing. Justice work is integral to that. I think certain ideas become important to us and then become values and guidelines for our behaviors. Love is very much a value of mine, it's actually maybe though surpassed by nonviolence. I think nonviolence has to be right up there. For me, it's one of the most important values I have that inspires me towards justice work to enable nonviolence for others. And of course, even though I say nonviolence is possibly my primary value, it is equal first with love, because to really care about and be concerned about others, we need to be coming from love position. When in doubt what a loving response might be in a specific situation, it is nonviolence that informs my actions.
Okay, so this is just an opening comment as I want to talk about why I particularly at this time want to be developing a theory of love. It's because I want to be able to give guidance in the most complex, ethically challenging situations that we could imagine ourselves being in. Especially when we're in work situations where we are needing to be of service to others, but not only. You might also want to think about it when we are citizens and see violence and injustice happening. I've had to keep kind of trying to figure out what is it? What is it if I had to say, in a nutshell, what is the most concerning issue on our planet at this time? And I think it's about the use of coercion and other forms of violence. I think it's pervasive in all types of care for others, including animals and nature. I've obviously commented a little bit on this already. For me, it's particularly distressing and heartbreaking for individuals, whether that's human beings, other animals or Mother Nature, seeking or needing care, wanting to be loved and looked after, hoping for kindness, perhaps needing safety. Yet for any being, any individual, to experience lovelessness or coercion, even trauma, and possibly death as part of that care. I find that so disturbing to think about. And the more vulnerable the social group, or the species group or the landscape, the more distressed I get when I think about that.
I'm just going to make some other comments now, rather than going too deep into that feeling, because it is so disabling, for me to think too deeply about it. But to know, this is what I'm committed to try and understand and contribute around. Thus, we come to the concept of violence. It's also one of those really complicated concepts, and it has multiple meanings to people. One of the ways I find it helpful to think about violence is as a spectrum or a continuum of what violence can look like. The range can be from perhaps a slight, embarrassment that we cause someone in not being careful how we say something in front of other people, where there could be a loss of face for them. I think that can be a painful thing for a person and is a form of violence. I put that up one end of the spectrum. Right up the other end would be things such as war crimes, refusal of refugees, asylum seekers, safe haven, and total destruction of landscapes and waterways, to the point where all the living creatures in that space are annihilated as well. And of course, violence as the mass slaughter of some animals for human consumption, right up that other end of the continuum, and everything in between. Also, when we're thinking of violence, it can be about a failure to act, that can be as much a cause of violence and harm to people and other beings. The failure to take responsibility, when you're in a position of power, can be very insidious, because it's not like somebody has acted directly in a situation to cause the harm, but have kind of stepped back. Maybe they should have acted or could have acted to save that violence from happening.
When we think about violence as a spectrum or continuum of actions or failure to act, it involves force, pressure, or attempts to influence actions that hurt harm, intended to hurt or harm, maybe don't intend to, but still do that. It can cause discomfort, fear, loss of personal safety, loss of autonomy and control of our own body or lens, body or landscape, and risk to life. You know, it's hard, isn't it to get hold of it? I think most of us would be able to fairly readily draw on some examples of what we think about when we think about violence. But not to forget the more subtle forms in the workplace such as gossiping behind people's backs in a way that demeans them or undermines them. To do so can impact peoples’ confidence in their competence in the job and is very damaging. This is known as organisational violence, and is a very serious issue. If you're the person being gossiped about, you can often feel something is not OK but you can't always get your hands on it. Gossiping is an example of a subtle form of violence that does extreme harm.
The impact of violence can be linked directly to experience of broken heartedness. There are many ways the impact of violence can happen. One of the reasons that I want to stick with the concept of broken-heartedness as explaining the impact of violence is because typically in Western societies, the kinds of ways people can act when they have a broken heart can look like they have a mental illness. It can feel like they have a mental illness, or their experiences get termed that. Again, mental illness is a complex contested concept. It means many things, I'm going to lose it use it fairly loosely for now. When I'm talking about broken-heartedness it can involve experiences of being mentally unwell, physically unwell, this, this is true. I actually think one of the problems that happens once we label people as having a mental illness, we can forget to look carefully at the issues of violence and trauma that have led to the situation where a person is so impacted and so heartbroken. Thus, I use broken-heartedness to try and encompass the kinds of harm and pain that happens to people who might otherwise be given labels of mental illness. Broken-heartedness includes the whole range of emotional, physical, spiritual, social and environmental pain and injury and trauma. The distress of being brokenhearted is part of the human condition, you know, there's loss and loss and harm as part of the lifecycle. However, the kind of focus that I'm wanting to bring us to is not what might be expected in the life cycle, when a loved one dies from natural causes, for example. What I'm interested in is broken heartedness when it is caused by the lovelessness, and for lovelessness, to be present, violence is occurring. This also can be understood as a type of injustice against the person. This is what causes distress and this distress, the experience of violence, and lack of love, and unfairness that this causes distress. This is what I'm calling broken-heartedness. I believe people, other animals and the landscape, experienced distress and broken-heartedness in a myriad of ways. Just some examples here which I am not going to elaborate on, but just to give a sense of the sort of complexity I'm talking about. If you would be careful here. It's quite explicit –
* The mental patient in seclusion is paralysed with deeper loneliness and fear. This is someone in a mental health facility who's locked in locked in a room on their own. Very, very distressing. Some would say a situation of torture in the name of care
* The pig on the kill floor of an abattoir when they're screaming in pain, deeply disturbing situations
* And the clear-felled forest which fills the atmosphere with deep vibrational groans as it is dying. Heart-breaking beyond words.
Now coming back up off those particular examples, which are pretty powerful and hard to kind of keep your breath when you think about them. Just coming back up to a broader comment. Some of this violence is done in the name of care. This is a particularly insidious, deeply distressing kind of way of thinking about violence. When violence is done in the name of care and is legitimated in society and accepted by the public. It's done in the name of care and for the good of society. It serves the actors, self-interests, and the elite dominant interests. Many tyrannies occur with legal sanctioning and the implicit support of the community. In fact, some tyrannies can be constructed as necessary to control deviant others for the safety of society. I see the use of power to harm and destroy and the failure to acknowledge and address this harm and destruction is the core issue of society.
I have this idea of wanting to practice being revolutionary love. This capacity is not pre-existing and not something that we are educated to know how to do. We maybe don’t even agree that's what we should be focusing on to have a moral loving society. Nevertheless, I would want to hold to the position that the practising of revolutionary love is a higher order ethical literacy that's requires public education, and ongoing personal education and dedication. I want to make a note here. The weight of the discussion may already be sitting pretty hard on each of us. Keeping this in mind, it's important that we're not overly naive about what this capacity of wanting to make a difference in the world, perhaps in this idea of being revolutionary love, just what that's asking all. It is big and can create moral pressure which mixes with the outrage of what we witness, that it paralyses us. We might be agreeing and saying to ourselves, yes, yes, I'm wanting to be revolutionary love. I find myself doing that at times. And then I take another moment, to think some more. For example, we need to appreciate how this includes be empathic to the powerful. This is having empathy towards individuals, sometimes ourselves, who may be causing broken-heartedness, who may be acting violently. Not to forget that we need to place ourselves I believe in this in this situation to really be able to make some contribution in it. This is very troubling to acknowledge that we may be involved in violence ourselves, and at the same time to be empathic towards others and the reasons why violence is happening. Understanding how people have acted for that violence to be so is not an easy thing to do. It's not seen as a socially acceptable to demonstrate love for the people who are causing the violence. You only have to think of how Vladmir Putin is constructed in the media at this time. He's definitely seen as the villain, and we understand why he is constructed like that. It doesn't though help us know how to act differently, it really closes down the options.
This big task is to have a willingness to see violence in ourselves, to check and change our own behaviors that may be causing harm to others, and to have an empathy as a first step toward people who are causing violence. It's not to say that's all that we need to be doing. But we need to build an empathetic connection and rapport to be able to have the dialogue to do something about who's acting in violent ways. The willingness to engage people, organisations and companies who are in positions of power and authority, who you believe are the causes of the violence, and the heartbreak, this is a very hard thing to do. This can involve us navigating some of the hardest and most threatening circumstances.
Certainly in my career, I've had to be willing many times to step into extreme violence and unsafety for myself and other people to try and do something about whatever the issue was, that was confronting us. The task was to try usually to try and bring about safety in the first instance for whoever was being threatened and harmed, and to try and build dialogue and respect to work through what the issues are. In one situation, I had to respond to a community members concern that one of their neighbors was going to blow up the local alumina refinery management offices. The neighbor had guns and was one of many residents who were distraught and outraged by what the mining company was doing to their town. Many of the residents also felt very aggrieved with the payment for their property, which they felt forced to sell to the company because of pollution concerns. This was occurring in a very charged environment where the adverse impacts on the community were intensifying in the early 2000s (Mayman, 2002). I was privy to that situation, in fact, invited into it to see if I could make a contribution when I was working at a university in the area. I will talk about this more at another point. I’m referring to the story of the small town of Yarloop in Western Australia, and its troubled relationship with Alcoa World Alumina. It was first documented in a book by my colleague Martin Brueckner, which was called Under corporate skies: A struggle between people, place and profit (2010). The neighbor was enabled by his community with me supporting to avoid responding to the injustice issue he was witnessing and feeling in his own situation and seeing his whole community collapse. Here, what we're saying to him is, hey, look, you acting violently toward Alcoa actually does not achieve anything, and will cause more harm to you. It is not about going soft in an ethical sense regarding the extreme adverse impacts that the mining company was having on the community, which is what I was trying to make a contribution around.
Looking back about my involvement, it was interesting to me was that when Alcoa came to the University looking for a sociologist, sociological researcher, to help them with the community that was starting to put very explicit media releases out and affecting Alcoa’s reputation. They wanted a social researcher to come and see what the problem was with the community and sort it out. Long story, but just at the moment, what was really interesting is how none of my other colleagues were willing to touch it, it was already a hot potato in the media, very politically sensitive. In my naivety, but I'm so glad about this as well, I just had just had a sense of what was needed, right from the start. This was because I had grown up in a mining town myself, and I had direct experiences of what that's like for people. A different situation to what was happening at Yarloop. But I felt that I had some level of affinity, a very primitive, I guess, understanding of what could be going on. Also, I knew that it was a diabolically complex situation. Thus, I was the only person who was willing to step forward to see if I could make a contribution in that situation. Interesting how our life experiences can make us more amenable to what I saw as an opportunity, most of my colleagues saw it as ‘Whoa, don't go there. Not good for your career’.
History has given us some incredible examples of people who resist violence in the most oppressive situations. Situations that hooks (2001) would call a culture of domination which is reinforced with extreme control that causes de-humanization and extreme suffering. I just want to bring a focus to asylum seekers across the planet at this time, it is a major complex issue of human rights and survival struggles and to bring the situation to Australia in a not so distant past, and, in fact, how we treat asylum seekers currently, I believe, against their basic human rights to seek asylum. Anyway, I just want to use this one example of Behrouz Boochani, who you may be aware of, because he certainly got some media attention when his book won an award here in Australia. Boochani is a Kurdish journalist and writer who sought refuge as an asylum seeker in Australia. He was taken to an offshore detention centre in Manus Island, where he spent six years, six years! As part of his resistance to the suffering he experienced and witnessed towards others, he wrote No friends, but the mountain: Writings from Manus prison (2019). You may have heard of it. It's a really important historical, political book. He won several significant Australian book awards. The Guardian newspaper (2019) reported that his book was praised by the award judges and I'm going to quote what one of the award judges said, “profoundly important, an astonishing act of witness and testament to the life saving power of writing as resistance”. Boochani wrote the book in secret on a hidden phone by sending segments on WhatsApp to supporters in Australia. It remains a major indictment of the lovelessness and violence by the Australian Government. Boochani was not permitted to attend the award ceremony in person and was subsequently given safe haven in New Zealand. He's continued to write and publish since that time.
While we keep the Boochani’s experience in mind, I make now make some points about power, and then tie it to my theory of love. I don't know how we've got this far in the podcast series and not directly talked about power, but it's all about power. This is needed this focus on power, because I'm needing to describe it as inseparable from the exercise of any intention in the world, any action or failure to act. The theory of love includes use of power. Obviously, what it's arguing is it's only certain types of power that are to be accepted within the logic and ethics of a theory of love. As we see in the Boochani’s example, in the name of protecting the national interest and presumably for the public good and for what seemed to be good action, good intentions, the Australian government enacted, with legal authority, the offshore detention for people seeking asylum. This was done in the name of love and care for the many which is very consistent with consequentialist theory, to act for the good of the whole. By protecting Australia's borders, harm has been done to a minority status group. The harm to asylum seekers is morally unsound. I believe this has been argued by many people, including Boochani and highlights to me that love is not necessarily an innocent idea or action. The people who enacted the offshore detention policy and whole apparatus and structure of oppression that happened with that, in their own way believed they were doing the right thing, the good thing.
During my social work career, it took me too many years to understand that having goodwill toward clients, the people I was working with, was not sufficient to ensure the best outcome for them. This is a kind of segue obviously from a major national and international issue, but down taking my personal responsibility here. I saw myself as a good person and failed to appreciate the authority I wielded in my professional role, even as I used it every day. I also didn't give sufficient credence to how people seeking help would perceive my role. For example, in a public mental health services, that I was part of the state system that could lock them up and throw away the key. This was a classic kind of way people were thinking. I was aware of the stigma of mental illness thanks Goffman's work (1986), and I had held doggedly on to fragment of an idea by Szasz’s (1972) book, that mental illness is a myth. These were kind of gems of ideas that helped influence my practice. But I didn't take this further to place myself in the picture. I was part of the state apparatus of controlling certain groups of people, often against their will, with many worse off as a result of the state intervention. It's one of the most disturbing understandings I have of what violence looks like. Only as I'm doing these podcasts have I gone back and have a look at Szasz in more detail. And I found a quote that I needed to take more heed of in my practice. This is a direct quote of Szasz, “being psychoanalysed, like any human experience, can itself constitute a form of enslavement, and affords, especially in its contemporary institutionalised forms, no guarantee of enhanced self-knowledge and responsibility for patient or therapist” (p. 272). This was Szasz writing in 1972 and I believe this still is the case now. We need to take note of what we're doing it in the name of love, when we're seeking to use incredible amounts of authority.
I just want to say a little bit more about how we understand power because how we understand it really affects how we then act. As I've just explained in my naive understanding of being a good person and using power, therefore I believed in a fairly benign way, but actually not. Embedded in my comments and reflection so far, but not sufficiently accented as it is often invisible, is this idea of power. So I am calling out power here, as part of holding myself accountable for my own theorising that is not power neutral or without affect in the world. I'm taking this seriously trying to stand in the ideas I'm talking about and own my part in how I view power. Because for some people, the implications of a theory of love are unwelcome and even threatening. I will just give one example very briefly here. I believe an implication of a theory of love is that we all need to be vegan. Now, that would be perhaps one of the most contentious statements I can make. And I'm not making it in a judgmental way at all to anyone who may be listening. But if veganism is the practice of non-violence toward other beings, you can see why at least from an ethical positioning, a purist ethical positioning, why I would say that. It would not be a welcomed comment, it would be a very, in fact, possibly even distressing comment for some people to hear. I'm very aware that the implications of the theory of love, ask a lot, ask a lot of us morally. And there are lots of qualifications that can be made to those kinds of comments I've just made.
Thus, we come to the recognition that power is a complex to describe, at least as complex to describe as the idea of love. Lukes (1974) says power depends on who the person is thinking about power. And he described it as being value dependent, it depends on your values. This means how power is exercised is related to how power is understood, as my example showed, and who is doing the acting. Like all complex ideas it has been described in a myriad of ways. But the main theme that goes through most all of those definitions of power, is that it's about some amount of influence, possibly even force, where that force or influence is used against people and other beings. Weber (cited in Cowden & Sansfacon, 2014) identified three types of power, traditional, charismatic, and rational legal. Traditional power, if you think about it as what is occupied, or exercised by someone such as the Prime Minister or the Pope or the Queen, really obvious examples. Charismatic power is about power related to an individual's personality. As much as I don't want to promote the ideology of this person, Trump would be in terms of contemporary world politics, a significant example of a charismatic leader. And we possibly would struggle to see that as a good example, especially if we don't agree with what he is about. When it comes to rational-legal as the third type of power that Weber was talking about, this is the one that is particularly significant for most of us, I would suggest. Rational-legal authority is not about power possessed by virtue of who I am, per se, but it's actually by virtue of the role that I'm in or that you are in. From my example, the Mental Health Act is a significant piece of legislation for mental health practitioners. It gives me the legal authority to act, no doubt about it. Of course, legislation is based on rational thinking, rational arguments of logic. The Migration Act of 1958 is the legal authority that the Australian Government used to take people asylum seekers to offshore detention centres and can constrain them there basically sometimes for many years.
So power is a slippery concept and can also be operating in a situation as an implicit or direct threat of harmful consequences if certain actions occur or don't occur. Power is always present in any interaction from the intimate personal realm to the public realm. We can't get very far talking about power, before we come to Michel Foucault (1980) who explains that all actions or non-actions are imbued with power. Just as we are trying to get hold of how that can look how our actions can be understood, the idea of discourses comes here. This is about the collectivities of ways that we make sense of the world and act and, and the language that we use. What we're interested here in terms of power is the idea of what is often talked about as the influence of dominant discourses in society. These are the dominant ideas that power elites of society used to normalise what is said to be truth. And this matters. The truth that was being promoted at a certain flashpoint in Australia's political story, was that asylum seekers who come by boat to Australia are dangerous and threaten national security. This was promoted as a truth in many ways and followed up by action that had rational-legal authority. A very profound use of power and implications. The dominant discourse was not necessarily how everybody understood it but in the public realm, that is what holds sway. This is about how the power to influence and achieve goals and certain outcomes is closely understood closely tied to how power and ideas are understood. C.W. Mills is another famous sociologist and in 1956 he was writing about the power elites of society and how their ideas are the dominant ideas. One of the comments that I thought really got ahold of this idea of dominant discourses and who it serves was when he “families, churches and schools adapt to modern life, governments, armies, and corporations shape it” (1956, p. 6). Now, we might want to have a robust conversation about that. But I think it's interesting to think about what are the social structures in our society that hold power, and they all do in different ways, but what are the dominant ones that really hold sway in matters of the public interest. You only have to think of the military to know how powerful they can be, especially in circumstances of military coups. The key point is the elites have the resources to employ and to promote ideas that serve their purposes. Foucault (1977) describes these resources as the mechanisms of control and surveillance in places such as prisons and mental hospitals, but not only in those places - we've been talking about offshore detention centres. The aim is about the use of power, what Foucault talks about as “disciplinary power” because it disciplines and controls the objects of its interests, and compliance of undesirable social groups - who have less value, who may be threatening to the power elites. This is part of sociological theory, and I just think it's important to hold this sociological and political perspective of power. We need to see how it looks on the public stage and know how to interpret into the interpersonal space, and local situations that we're in. We also need to be aware of how we use our own power toward ourselves, often talked about as self-esteem and confidence to act in the world.
One of the one of the contributions Foucault had on power was to really try and challenge the idea that power is a zero sum phenomenon. This is where someone or an organisation or an institution has all the power and others don't have it. I think this idea of the zero sum notion of power is very dominant. And there's good reasons for it, because it can actually feel like it in the lived experience. When you're being exposed to violence and domination, it can feel like you have no power. And it could be that you have very little in fact, it could be that your life is at extreme risk. This in itself, nevertheless, is part of the dominant ideas to make it look as though people don't have power, even when there's that lived experience of that being true as well. It's part of how to keep people feeling fatalistic and defeated and not challenging what's going on. Foucault (1984) talked about that experience of feeling challenging, challenged, and defeated, as being docile bodies.
It just makes your head hurt, doesn't it try to think about this. One of the ideas by Dorothy Smith (1990), one of my favourite social theorists, is about the indirect forms of power. These are the kinds of power you can't get your hands on, but you know, it's having an effect on you. For example, Centerlink rules for payments, you can't get your hands on that set of rules, but it absolutely affects you the moment you try and make an application for a benefit of some kind. Smith talks about these indirect forms of power, that are often located in legislation, but not only as “extra local relations of ruling”. For some reason, like, you know, when you read something that something that really stays in your mind, this has stayed in my mind now for gosh, 30 years, oh, my goodness, since I read that idea. It's been very helpful to not be naïve about how power operates, and who is gaining from that and who it's serving. When Smith is talking about extra local relations of ruling, she's trying to accent the power is layered throughout society, and is far from a benign force, especially in unequal societies and relationships, which is, of course, what I'm interested in. Whenever power is considered, it needs to be also tied to the possibility of resistance to the exercise of power. It's an idea from Foucault, it's a really crucial idea. We come back to it in later podcast, when we ask people, we interviewed a whole lot of amazing people on what love means for them in their practice and their lives. Where the very least, we can do in situations where we feel very powerless to make a difference, and we can see injustice and tyrannies happen, is to at least in some part of our mind refuse to accept it as okay. It may not feel safe to speak up, it you may not feel safe or able to act. But we can refuse to accept, or example, that the way Australia has treated asylum seekers and continues to treat asylum seekers often is not okay. It is a thought that we need to hold on to and when possible, act around. I find this idea of resistance to be incredibly important. To get hold of the idea that wherever power, especially dominant power that is used to harm and hurt and surveil people is being used. Then the ability of the party on the wrong side, let's say you're on the receiving side of that power, dominant power, knowing how to resist and refuse to accept that it's okay, it's not morally okay or okay in any way, is the least that we can do. I would say that's part of our moral obligation in situations of violence to find some way of resisting it.
Against terrible odds Boochani resisted the surveillance and control of the elites in Canberra and the managers in the offshore this intention centres. First of all, by surviving and that's an incredible act of resistance. And then by writing a protest book of historical significance. And getting it out there into the media and speaking back to the Australian people about the tyrannies that were happening. He actually compares Australia's behavior around offshore detention as a type of prisons and that it was absolutely illegal and an extreme form of violence and torture.
A theory of love then has to be relevant to guide responses to experiences such as Boochani’s, and through to situations for practitioners like myself where in the name of care, we may be intervening and using force and legal control against people. If love is the answer, it's form is far from clear. When its absence is related to violence and injustice it is a very troubling moral challenge that needs to be addressed by society. As Gandhi said, the moral fibre of society is to be judged by the quality of life of its most vulnerable members. For me, issues of lovelessness, violence and injustice, issues of the use of power or the failure of the use of power by the responsible actors and institutions, when power is used or withhold, and the impact is harm, trauma and even death, such as abuse of human rights, exploitation of other animals, degradation of nature, this power is the anti-thesis of love as power.
When the Australian Government legislated The Border Force Act in 2015, it was attempting to silence concerned parties who are bearing witness to the human suffering on Manus Island, and other offshore detention centres. The threat in the legislation was that people speaking out would be acting illegally and dealt with under the provisions of the Act. This was resisted in a range of ways. And one of the most impressive was by a group of people called Doctors for Refugees, who spoke out against the Act, arguing for the rights of detainees to receive medical care, and to be able to speak if they were concerned about that not happening (Kaldor Centre, 2018). The government interestingly, despite the threat of the legislation did not invoke the Act against them and subsequently under public pressure, removed that stricture for many, but not all the parties. Doctors can now speak publicly if they have concerns about what's happening in detention around peoples’ medical well-being. The legislation did not extend to social workers who remain unable legally to speak out about what they might witness in offshore detention centres. An implication of the love theory is that immoral legislation needs to be resisted in every way possible. Also, as doctors for refugees showed, doing so can be successful. As Boochani showed against the odds, the silence the culture, the silence that can happen around tyrannies of justice can be broken through incredible acts of bravery and through political resistance in a form of writing. Resistance against harmful use of power is, I believe, one of the most impressive forms of power as love. Always, it has to be nonviolent.
Now just as some concluding comments, because you know, this talking about power and violence is pretty full on isn't it? What I have been suggesting so far basically is that the absence of love can often involve violence, and be experienced as harm in our bodies, in landscapes and other animals. What I'm interested in is how love can make the difference. I absolutely believe that and refuse to let go of that idea. The idea of how love can be a guiding ethic and force in our daily lives in the tradition like Gandhi, for example, to bring about a more peaceful loving world. I think the idea of trauma, which I talked about in a previous podcast, helps us translate across multiple situations what the experience of violence can look and feel like. Trauma gets embedded in our whole bodies and relationships and affects everything. I have talked the idea of broken-heartedness when harm has been done. Broken-heartedness is where the emotional aspect of our heart has become deeply harmed by the violence or unfairness done to us or that we're witnessing done to others, including other animals and nature. Thus, I've struggled with this notion of violence and what it means. And while I'm saying it's the opposite to love. I'm not that comfortable with that dualism and simplification. But I actually do not equate violence with love, that's for sure. I also believe that we have to know how to understand violence and function in violence situations, to come into them and to engage the people and institutions and policies and legislation involved, to find ways to make a contribution. Now, not everybody needs to be directly involved in situations of extreme violence. Some people do, it's kind of like inside the system, we’ve got to be inside - there's no outside society, there's no outside the system - and just where we locate ourselves, is really important. And it may be that our role at times can be allies to others who are doing the frontline work, of trying to address direct more directly the impact of violence.
I just really appreciate that you've taken the time, if you're still listening to this podcast, you know, it's been a fairly heavy duty one. It brings us pretty close to I think to a close for the first set of five podcasts of the main points I want to make about the love theory, the main guiding ethics, principles and ideas. Very shortly we'll be moving into a series of interviews with interesting, amazing people who are using the idea of love in their practice and more broadly in their in life. I think this will help us really tease out and get a much firmer grip and appreciation of the value of a theory of love for being able to contribute in the world.
Okay, thank you so much!
Bye now, my best love,
Dyann
References
Boochani, B. (2019). No friends but the mountain: Writing from Manus prison. [Trans. O. Tofighian]. Picador Australia.
Brueckner, M., & Ross, D. (2010). Under corporate skies: A struggle between people, place and profits. Fremantle Press.
Cowden, S., & Sansfacon, A. (2014). The ethical foundations of social work. Pearson.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. (Trans. C. Gordon). Harvester Press.
Goffman, I. (1986). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Touchstone.
hooks, b. (2001). All about love. William Morrow.
Kaldor Centre (2018). Casenote: Doctors for refugees case. https://kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/sites/kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/files/Casenote_doctors%20case-final.pdf
Lukes, S. (1974). Power: A radical view. Macmillan.
Mayman, J. (2002, 11 and 12 May). The stink of Uncle Al. The Weekend Australian.
Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. Oxford University Press.
Smith, D. (1990). The conceptual practices of power: A feminist sociology of knowledge. Northeastern University Press.
Szasz, T. (1972). The myth of mental illness. Harper & Row.
The Guardian (2019). Behrouz Boochani wins National Biography award – and accepts via WhatsApp from Manus. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/12/behrouz-boochani-wins-25000-national-biography-award-and-accepts-via-whatsapp-from-manus
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