Power and love: why women hold one of the keys to social change

Last week I went to hear a representative of Extinction Rebellion talk about their demands for government action on climate change. He didn’t hold back: the world is facing a crisis of ecosystem collapse that is almost beyond comprehension, and time is running out. If you’re feeling strong enough, you can read Jem Bendell’s prediction of imminent collapse and see just how bad our situation is.

And yet, as other speakers at the event said, we have known this stuff for a long time and it hasn’t made much difference. We are still addicted to oil, still locked into consumerism and infinite growth, still expanding our territory at the expense of the soils and oceans on which our life depends. Why is this? One answer is that people simply don’t care enough, and that’s true, if only by definition. But it is a view of humanity that leads to a dead end. If we don’t care enough to save the planet, then we deserve extinction: so what?

We need a better way to talk about what’s happening. In a wonderful book called I’m Right and you’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean it Up, Canadian publicist James Hoggan considers this point at length. Along the way he interviews another Canadian, Adam Kahane, who has travelled the world facilitating dialogue in difficult situations. These have included some very challenging situations, like the aftermath of Apartheid in South Africa, and so he has learned a thing or two.

Kahane, who also has a TED talk on the subject, finds meaning in the balance between power and love. He draws here on definitions given by the American theologian Paul Tillich, who sees power as “the drive of everything living to realize itself with increasing intensity and extensity”. Love, on the other hand, is “the drive to unify the separated”. Our task is to hold both of those necessities at once, and our confusion arises from the way that we fail to honour both sides, leaning towards one at the expense of the other.

As Martin Luther King put it, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic.” The abuses of power are visible everywhere, from genocide and totalitarian regimes at the top, to corporate exploitation of labour, corruption in local government, workplace bullying and domestic violence. What is less obvious however is the damage done by love without power, and Kahane makes the fascinating point that this is actually worse, precisely because it is hidden.

What does he mean by that? The starting point is that love and power are actually two aspects of the same thing – human nature – and so where there is love there is always power, but when it is disowned it becomes distorted. Think for instance of the way a false consensus arises when a group is unwilling to face up to internal conflict, leading to groupthink and the suppression of individual voices. Or consider the way that by failing to stand up for ourselves we fall into a state of victimhood, where we make other people responsible for our misfortunes. It happens too in our personal relationships when love is a cover for unhealthy forms of power such as manipulation or entitlement.

So where does that leave Extinction Rebellion? Kahane sees environmental activism as “absolutely critical” to keep up the pressure for change. He even recommends scaling it up. But as the environmental movement seizes power by speaking the truth of the moment, he argues that it must honour the drive and energy of others, even those who oppose it. Because nothing else will work: we have to take everyone with us. In this most global and total of crises, we cannot have an us and a them. Power must be balanced with love.

Achieving this balance in order to find a way through climate breakdown is a huge task. But the good news is, we can all be part of this through our everyday actions. We are like so many billion laboratories in which to practise the art of combining power with love, learning how to balance our individual drives with the good of the collective. Kahane points out how the division of the genders makes this visible, giving us a reference point in our everyday lives.

Boys are brought up to value power, broadly speaking, girls to value love. Thus, men do great things in public life, but are prone to neglect their families, while women devote themselves to holding the family together but can undermine the power of its members, including of course their own. There are of course plenty of exceptions to this generalization, but on average, men still earn more and women do more child-rearing, and such observations shape our experience of what it is to be male or female, however our individual lives may turn out.

Following this analysis to its logical conclusion, we arrive at the arresting insight that women hold an important key to social change. We are the experts on love without power, and so it is up to us to show what love looks like when it achieves its fullest and most powerful expression. This is not quite the standard model of equality. The ‘empowerment’ of women has tended to mean women imitating masculine forms of power, finding their fulfilment in paid work and professional advancement, and it is measured in terms of the gender pay gap or the proportion of women in senior management.

For many women that has been a good way forward, and it has probably been necessary, but it has come at the cost of devaluing the domestic sphere and women’s traditional strengths. What if we tried another way? Instead of assuming masculine forms of power based on achievement and control, we might decide to own our talents for care, connection and receptivity and act from there instead. We could develop our concern for the well-being of the collective – something the world sorely needs, after all – and allow the pain of that to drive us into fearless action.

Women have had centuries of training in people-pleasing and holding communities together. Let us now take that impulse to its limit, discovering the full extent of our strength. There are plenty of examples if we know what we are looking for: let’s celebrate them and shape a new way forward.