No idea if this is the Sixties but group processes like these were common
There’s something that was alive in the Sixties and Seventies and died in the Eighties, which I’d like to bring back to life.
We called it “consciousness raising.” It was a dialogue around people’s issues – women, blacks, gays, etc. The idea behind it was that people lack information on which to make an informed decision and, if information were provided without blame and shame, the best outcome for society would result.
People handed out well-reasoned pamphlets. Public lectures were held. It became more and more confrontational when sit-ins began and gradually lost its moral leadership, from whatever causes.
I miss consciousness raising.
The desired result of consciousness raising was just what happened to me the other day. I realized that I was an adherent and supporter of what had once been an empire founded on slavery and foreign rule. When that knowledge hit me, I was stopped in my tracks.
The actual information that caused my awakening was a combination of videos and articles on Francis Drake and the slave trade. I had never heard of this before and I was initially shocked.
Nonetheless, I didn’t need someone to hit me over the head with it. I was capable of coming to my own conclusions, once I had the information I needed.
I could have chosen to remain asleep on what I’d just learned but that would have come at a high cost to my awareness. I would have voted for density thereby. Countenancing out-of-integrity behavior exacts a cost in awareness. As the lack of integrity goes up, awareness goes down.
For my own sake, I needed to wake up.
Now I feel pain because I feel a strong kinship with other Commonwealth countries. I felt it when I was in India. I feel it with friends in other Commonwealth nations now. I actually don’t want to lose that.
But I do feel an urgent push to divorce myself from glorifying our imperial/colonial beginnings. They were founded in the exploitation of human misery, a fact I need to face up to.
This outcome comes about as result, not of relentless pressure, but of simple consciousness-raising.