Timothy Stacey, "Saving Liberalism from Itself: The Spirit of Political Participation" (Bristol UP, 2022)
58:33 Share

Now more than ever, Lowe's knows you don't just want a low price. You want the lowest price. And with our lowest price guarantee, you can count on us for competitive prices on all your home improvement projects. If you find a qualifying lower price somewhere else on the same item, we'll match it. Lowe's. We help. You save. Price match applies the same item. Current price at qualifying retailers. Exclusions and terms apply. Learn how we'll match price at Lowe's.com slash lowest price guarantee.

Hey guys, have you heard of Goldbelly? It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic, famous foods from restaurants across the country, anywhere nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food. Goldbelly ships Chicago deep dish pizza, New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls, and even Ina Garten's famous cakes. So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code gift. That's goldbelly.com.

Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Moitazo Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Timothy Stacey about his book, which is called Saving Liberalism from Itself, The Spirits of Political Participation. The book has been published by Bristol University Press. It was published in 2017

Dr. Timothy Stacey is a researcher in the Urban Future studio at Utrecht University. Timothy, welcome to New Books Network. Thanks for having me. Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly give us a short introduction to yourself? What's your field of expertise? How you became interested in that field? And more importantly, why you decided to write this book?

Yeah, sure. Okay. So I'm a very sort of broad interdisciplinary scholar. I did my master's in philosophical theology, a PhD in the intersection of sociology of religion and social policy, then moved more into anthropology. And today I call myself more of a cultural sociologist. The thing that's always linked my research to

is broadly a question of how do you actually make people care about those that it's not in their immediate interest to look out for? So what are the kind of cultural techniques that you can draw on to...

uh, create a sense of solidarity in society. So then the book itself, um, I mean that, that really led out of a series of, I guess, my own reactions to theoretical critiques of liberalism that I increasingly found were just not paying attention to human experience on the ground. And so quite rarely for, uh, political science and international relations, uh,

And that's the kind of series the book's in. I take this ethnographic approach, which is really emphasizing listening to people intensely, getting to know them, understand their lives and motivations, and thereby offering some tangible insights into how we might save liberalism, I suppose.

And I really like the title of your book. And that's what kind of drew me to the book, which is Saving Liberalism from Itself. Do you think liberalism is in crisis? Hmm. Yes, I do. I think that's led simultaneously by the rise of populism and the radical right and also the confrontation of the climate crisis. Hmm.

Yeah, we'll get to talk about it in more detail as we go ahead, because I've done a number of podcasts on liberalism, and I'm really keen to kind of get more into the details of why we think liberalism is in crisis or what's the way out of it. And you have a lot of interesting ideas in the book as well. But I really like your research methodologies as well. Can you talk about your research methodology and the interviews you did?

Yeah, sure. Okay, so maybe it helps if I go back a step. So it was actually during my master's in philosophical theology that I became interested in this topic, right? So I was raised around post-liberal critiques of liberal modernity. In deep theoretical terms, you're talking about people like

John Milbank in much more recent popular writing thinking about people like Patrick Deneen and they were kind of suggesting that liberalism as its politically practiced fails to actually resonate with

something like the human soul or perhaps the religious dimension of human engagement. And that really spoke to me. But then the answer they always gave never did, which is, and therefore, you know, in some sense, we have to restore some kind of vision of Christianity to the center of political life. What I started to notice, first of all, just hanging around with my friends, but then increasingly through

ethnographic research as well with community organizers was that actually funnily enough this critique about liberalism as politically practiced not speaking to the human soul is even true for some of liberalism's most ideal citizens so that's secular university educated highly inclusive what you might even call woke people now and

And yet that recognition, and I think this is the unique perspective that the book provides, also suggests to us that the means by which we're going to save liberalism doesn't have to come from outside. We just need to really attend to the soul, in a sense, of these people who are doing good community-oriented work from a liberal perspective. So that...

That's why I started taking an ethnographic approach. I have worked with community organizers in both London and Vancouver in Canada, two highly liberal cities.

And I really just spent a lot of time with them, doing the work with them of bringing people together across differences to build solidarity in society and trying to understand, well, how do they actually do that? What narratives do they draw on? What practice do they draw on? And in particular, that the

special angle that the book takes is to emphasize categories from the study of religion in what shapes these people's lives. So that's magic, myths, rituals and tradition. And if I want to come up with a definition, I know that if I ask 10 different scholars of liberalism, I get 10 different answers, but I'm keen to know how you define liberalism in the context of your work.

Yeah, so to start off with, I guess it's important to say that I have this instinct that there is really something to be saved in the liberal project. There was something about life in a liberal society that I was inspired by and wanted to hold on to and did not accept in the critiques of these post-liberal scholars.

And so I was trying to whittle down and get a sense of how I might define that thing that I wanted to save. And so for me, it became more about an impulse. I started to think of liberalism as ideal, as the notion that people have equal dignity regardless of

of their background and positionality. And that's really what's driving, that's what's at the core of the liberal identity, I guess, as I see it. The notion that people have equal dignity regardless of background and positionality. Then there's liberalism as political project. And this is where I start to have problems. And this is really

what the root of the book is about. And those who are interested in liberalism will then notice very quickly the connection to these post-liberal scholars. Because liberalism as politically practiced or the means by which this equal dignity for all is achieved is very much from that kind of rulesy imposition of trying to transcend subjective ideas of the good in order to come up with universally recognizable ideas

that need to be saved and then rational and fair systems for safeguarding those qualities. And my feeling was, in a sense, and that's what the book's really rooted in, the kind of premise of the book that's laid out, especially in the first and second chapters, is that it's not just that that's not possible, right? This standard critique of a kind of rationality

rational political objectivity not being achievable. It's also that it's not sufficient because ultimately what it turns out when we look at what is it that actually drives people to respect that equal dignity of other people, people who don't share their religion, who don't share their class background, who don't share their interests or ideological perspective,

It's not so much like a principle of fairness, but I would talk about things like love, magnanimity, sympathy, empathy. You know, it's these deeply emotional things that are cultivated through stories and shared experiences and not through hard principles. There is also, you know, this idea, this misconception, let's say, that there is no alternative.

And I really liked how you addressed this by saying that it's a failure of imagination. I'm keen to know more about this. I'm keen to know more on your thoughts on this.

Yeah, thanks for asking. That was a really crucial element for me. And I think it's, I'm in a lot of activist circles, but also culturally constructivist circles, theoretically speaking. And there is no alternative is something that comes up a lot, let's say, almost as much as does, you know, the notion that it's easier to imagine the world than it is the end of capitalism.

And I think one of the unique insights of the book is to stress that there is a deeper blockage to the imagination rooted in secular liberalism that needs to be addressed. In order to address this, there is no alternative politics.

So to go back for listeners who don't know, you know, this was a phrase coined by Margaret Thatcher and then was reused by David Cameron and, you know, God knows how many others. And the idea is that essentially, you know, you may not be happy with this set of economic proposals normally around cuts to taxes.

welfare or public spending in some way, but there simply is no alternative. And the idea is that in some sense, the economic systems we create are wedded to

the human condition, an objective human condition. And kind of what I tried to suggest is that the reason that secular liberalism provides an extra blockage that's not being addressed here is that it's rooted in the idea that there is an objectively discoverable human condition, right? That our politics are

can be based on a shared idea of what a human objectively is. And there's only then a short step from there

to claiming that our economic systems are intimately entwined with the human condition and therefore could not be otherwise. And what I would beg for from more of a, let's say, broadly post-secular perspective is to recognize that all of our politics, all of our economics are deeply rooted in an act of faith about who

who we are, what we're aiming for, what the human condition really is. And because it's rooted in an active faith, then simply put, we could equally start believing in something very different and through doing so change our politics and change our economics.

And you were right. There's no alternative. It's such a catchy phrase and everybody has repeated it somewhere. Anybody that hates any sort of alternative, practical alternative, that it has led to that failure of imagination that you've mentioned. You know, earlier in the interview, I asked if you believe

is in crisis and that is somehow, I guess, implied also by the title of your book, Saving Liberalism from Itself. And you know that in the past couple of years with all the turmoils that is going on around the world and wars and how a lot of liberal governments have failed to

or let's say live up to those monsters of liberalism. So I'm keen to ask this question or maybe open it up a little bit about shortcomings of liberalism and how it has paved the way for the emergence of right-wing populism again. Yeah. So,

So I guess the title of the book, Saving Liberalism from Itself, comes from that very idea that I set up earlier, right? That there's a core of the liberal spirit that I believe is worth holding on to the idea that we all have equal dignity, regardless of background and positionality. And then there's that kind of liberal step that goes into safeguarding that equal dignity.

which is thinking of politics and political practice as fundamentally rooted in a kind of

for objectivity or for neutrality. And it's that impulse that the book is designed to try to save people from. And so on one level, the crisis of liberalism is in that failure to speak to the spirit, right? I talk about the spirited elements, magic myths and rituals through which people really experience politics and political aspirations. And

So one crisis is that at that level, the fact that we are now seeing the rise of a radical right that is much more comfortable with those spirited elements and much more fluent in, say, manipulating them. And I think if we're going to save liberalism, then we need to get back in touch with them.

I mean, I also have broader concerns about the Liberal project, which is perhaps not addressed sufficiently in the book. But perhaps that's for another time. Perhaps that's for another...

I'll let you lead. If you went on a road trip and you didn't stop for a Big Mac or drop a crispy fry between the car seats or use your McDonald's bag as a placemat, then that wasn't a road trip. It was just a really long drive. At participating McDonald's.

Distance isn't the problem. Misunderstanding is. Phrase helps global teams speak the same language, literally. With Phrase, you get clarity, connection, and content that adapts to your audience automatically. Our AI-powered platform helps your brand sound human in every market, so no one feels lost in translation. Reconnect at phrase.com slash Spotify. That's P-H-R-A-S-E dot com slash Spotify.

What makes a great pair of glasses? At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras without the extra cost. Their designer quality frames start at $95, including prescription lenses, plus scratch-resistant, smudge-resistant, and anti-reflective coatings, and UV protection, and free adjustments for life.

To find your next pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to find the Warby Parker store nearest you, head over to warbyparker.com. That's warbyparker.com. Yeah. I'm not a political scientist, so you might be an uneducated guest. But you mentioned Patrick Deneen, who's one of the critics of liberalism, and he's a proponent of liberalism.

something called post-liberalism, and I'm guessing his post-liberalism might be different from. Post-liberalism could also be defined differently depending on who uses it. But I quite like the fact that there has been, I guess, a resurgence of those advocates of liberalism, people like you, people like Matthew McManus or

uh alexander laferva if i'm not mistaken who are writing about liberalism or trying to make somebody like alexander laferva i guess who's trying to make liberalism as a way of life and that's the title of his book in a way they're all trying to address uh these this crisis of liberalism uh and i'm guessing you were more or less part of more or less part of that wider project of uh

or maybe reviving liberalism, but at the same time acknowledging the crisis that it already has or it's already facing. So let me ask you about this. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Let me ask you about post-liberalism. That's another term that is thrown around. And you did mention Patrick Deneen. And I'm guessing he's post-liberal. He doesn't like liberalism at all. And he's more of a conservative person. He sometimes, I guess, also wants...

a government or a society that is somehow, some aspects of religion are, let's say, institutionalized there.

I don't think that's the way vision of liberalism or even post-liberalism that you envision. But can you tell us what is meant by post-liberalism? Is it a return to conservatism? Yeah, it's funny that you should ask that. I think that's a really hard notion to describe. Also because on some level I might identify as post-liberal, but I certainly wouldn't identify with the work of Patrick Deneen. And actually in the book I describe...

the approach of the likes of Deneen as pre-liberal, right? So they call themselves post-liberal, but actually there's a kind of nostalgia for a way of organising society that was prior to many of the advances of a liberal society, often rooted in religious or ethnic superiority, homophobia, patriarchy. The

these are not the things that I am seeking. I think to be truly post-liberal, though I think the word is already so lost that I do not try to reclaim it in the book and I don't believe I ever will. But what it would mean to be truly post-liberal would be closer to the current discourse around post-secular. So it's really genuinely recognizing and embracing some of the achievements of liberalism, but

but also suggesting that something has been lost. And I think that's rooted in this idea that liberalism is often so geared towards liberation from

structures of oppression, that there's almost not enough time to think positively about how to cultivate something else. And so a post-liberal response for me, what I would want post-liberalism to be, but as I say, I'm not going to try to use the word,

would be rooted in a rediscovery of the more than rational sources of human fulfillment and engagement in looking for those magic myths and rituals that can serve as a source of solidarity in a society that respects the dignity of all. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I really like that.

What the point you mentioned about post-liberalism, because conservative figures like Patrick Deneen that you mentioned, and I quite enjoyed the fact that you said it's actually pre-liberal, not post-liberal, and you're right. But you also have people like John Gray who also advocated for post-liberalism at one point, but that's completely different from what Patrick Deneen said. There is this organization that you discuss in the book, Metro Vancouver Alliance, MVA,

That was completely new to me and I'm really keen to know more about it. I'm sure our listeners are keen to know more about this organization and how it could be

I mean, similar organizations could be this kind of sweet spot, that middle ground between those liberal ideas that you mentioned, equality, justice, happiness, and also at the same time acknowledging the shortcomings of liberalism. Yeah, thanks. So if I've talked about this problem being that I like the notion of liberalism as the equal dignity of all, but I'm addressing this highly rationalized response to that issue,

I see Metro Vancouver Alliance and the wider network that's part of, which is the Industrial Areas Foundation, rooted in the early work of Saul Alinsky in Chicago in the 1930s. I see organizations as that, as exactly these kind of intermediary institutions that are able to reconnect people

uh liberalism as politically practiced with you know that soul of liberalism rooted in the equal dignity of all and i kind of say unashamedly that if we are going to save liberalism from itself we need to do this long-term work of reaching reaching out across differences in our communities

it's not good enough in a sense to think of solidarity as rooted purely in communities of shared interest. You know, that's a whole debate that goes back to the origins of social theory, whether there's a deeper sense of solidarity in say traditional or modern societies. And I kind of tried to stress that

But there always has to be this aspect of reaching out across differences in your local community and building solidarity from the ground up. And I think that's a broader crisis that we're dealing with today in terms of populism and polarisation. Because how are you ever going to address that increasing cleavage in society if you're not connecting across differences?

Anyway, that's the kind of broad but also vague response. So Metro Vancouver Alliance, as I say, is rooted in the Industrial Areas Foundation. And essentially, the idea is building power in communities in order to fight for shared interests. So...

You work with any institution with power in a community. So it could be a mosque, it could be a church, it could be a trade union, it could be a school. And power is generally defined as simply the ability to bring people to an action.

And you bring all those communities to get there and you simply start asking questions. You know, what's bothering you? What's making life hard for you and your members? And you slowly try and whittle that down and you find areas of common concern. So it could be that there aren't enough streetlights on a street. It could be that people don't have access to health care. It could be that public transport is too expensive. And then you collectively...

Once you've chosen a mission, you identify a shared target. So it might be the local government. It might be a particular business. And you turn them into your adversary and try and get a small win. So get, say, a living wage for this group of cleaners in this bank.

And you slowly, once you've got one small win, you try and build towards further small wins and eventually try and get legislation around that. So the great success story in London, for example, was the Living Wage campaign where they first targeted people

I think it was a bank. Then they started targeting universities and eventually they got the national government to create a living wage, which was higher than the minimum wage. But if you measured these institutions purely in terms of those kind of wins, I think you would have to say that their successes were modest.

But deeper than that, underlying that work is a much more important work. And that's about building solidarity across differences of ethnicity, class and ideology at the local level. You know, Benedict Anderson talks about imagine communities and this important sense that you can imagine your connectedness to this community of people, most of whom you will never meet or see. And

And community organizations like Metro Vancouver Alliance or industrial areas, foundation organizations help you to thicken out that imagination and recognize in this person who looks very different to you, sounds very different to you, um, praise very differently to you to see in them, your fellow people.

citizen and through seeing that more importantly be able to sympathize with the population as a whole it's um i'm really keen i mean advocate of this version of community building that you mentioned because it doesn't have those grand visions of doing starting a global movement

but it has more potential for success. And if I'm not wrong, there were a lot of such community building in the 1970s or 80s among different communities at the local level, but then they gradually grew as well. Liberalism is normal. It was usually conceived of as a secular, let's say, ideology movement.

but you also talk about embracing myths. What do you mean by myths in this context? Why do you think myths are important to, let's say, maybe supplement liberal ideology? Yeah. So I think it's important to say that

I try to define myths and magic and rituals in ways that transcend differences between religious and secular. And that's also rooted in a longer history of research by myself and others that finds the boundaries between religious and secular ways of engaging with the world much more fuzzy and complex.

of seeing there being often greater differences in belief and ontology between two Christians or between two atheists than there are, say, between broadly speaking religion and secularity.

And so I try and think about myths and magic and rituals as simply categories beyond that religious secular divide that can help draw out what makes life meaningful for anyone. And so myths in modern society are often thought about in terms of,

say Greek myths, right? Or they might be thought of in terms of simply untruths. So the myth of the criminal immigrant, for example, um,

myths are these things that are either fun to tell to children or they're things that need to be busted. You know, you'll see all over LinkedIn or the Internet the myth of this or the myth of that. And if if anything has myth in the title, you know that its purpose is going to be to bust that myth and tell you the truth.

I think about myths very differently. So first of all, it doesn't matter whether empirically they are true or false. They're just stories of great events and characters that have a transformative or agentive force over people. And so that could be a perfectly true story, right? It could just be the story of the rise to success of Barack Obama. That's an important one among communicators.

community organizers the point is simply that it becomes so important to people that it ends up shaping their orientation to the world and i know it sounds strange to suggest um that the myth of barack obama could have the power of say the myth of um jesus and i know that yes uh the

the Jesus story has been broadly much more successful, say, than the Barack Obama story. And yet there are plenty of people who hold faith with the story of Jesus that don't do very Christian things. And there are people who hold faith with the story of Barack Obama who spend their lives devoting themselves to others. So, yeah,

I'm just interested in listening to people and understanding the kind of stories that inspire them and then try to identify the kinds of stories that are likely to save liberalism. And do you think that maybe conservatives or right-wingers are better at using or creating or embracing these myths for their own purposes, of course? So I think visibly they are.

They're very good at it. But I don't think that's necessarily, say, structurally the case, that it's impossible for that to change. I think it just happens to be the case that...

Liberals are so focused, as I suggested earlier, on liberating people from the social structures that build up around the oppressive social structures that build up around particular myths that they haven't necessarily thought to consciously articulate what the alternatives might be.

And conservatives have the benefit of enjoying the myths and rituals and so on that are already embedded in society. And so it's not necessarily that they're better at it. It's just that the stories that they tell are more recognizable because they're already dominant. This was a good explanation about myths. And another aspect...

Another thing you talk about in the book is rituals and the importance of rituals. It might be good to start again because there was a sudden digital weird sound when you started talking. All right. So I'll start again.

So another part of, you just described the importance of myth. And another aspect that you discuss in the book is rituals. I'm keen to know what you mean by rituals and how rituals can create solidarity among groups. And I think in your book, you discuss three types of rituals, but maybe you could just very broadly talk about the three types and tell us what they are.

Yeah, okay, so put simply I think of rituals as kind of myths brought out on stage and performed, but then more specifically I define rituals as processes by which people are transformed to

to step in line with how the world is, should or could be. And so, again, you see I'm giving it this kind of broad definition that allows us to observe it in both religious and non-religious spaces.

The three rituals I talk about are, let me see, public drama, solidarity games and subtle gestures. So public dramas are these much grander ritual processes. They might be a public political event, a rally or rally.

broadly speaking in terms of Metro Vancouver Alliance and the Industrial Areas Foundation, these kind of citizens assemblies. So they are processes through which a real drama plays out on stage in which there'll be a real hero in the form of

a disaffected member of the public, a potential villain in the form of a politician who may not accept the demands of the organization. And these are these kind of transformative processes whereby people feel themselves members of this larger group

and more importantly feel that as a group they can be heard as individuals and transform society. Solidarity games are the processes

through which individuals initially start to form part of a group. So I talk about these small exercises that go on in a number of activist organizations in which you try to cultivate a sense of shared responsibility. So I think one of the ones that I talk about in the book is this actual process whereby individuals

somebody's asked to stand in the middle of a group and everyone screws up a piece of paper and they chuck their piece of paper at this person. And then a number of people from the group are asked to stand around them. And again, you chuck the paper and everyone's asked, okay, well, what happened here? And of course, what happens is that the paper hits the people who formed a ring around them.

that individual. And it's just this small performative exercise in learning what happens when you stand together in solidarity. And that's supposed to start help preparing people for fighting one another's issues, right? So when you're fighting for

a living wage campaign, you always start off by fighting for the living wage of particular cleaners in a particular company. And that may be of no interest to you personally. In fact, you might not even be concerned about a living wage. You might be more concerned with access to healthcare. But the idea is that we'll get there eventually as a group. But first, we have to stand in solidarity with this one institution.

individual with this one sector. And then subtle gestures. The example I give of that is these one-to-ones where people are supposed to sit down and tell their story of how they ended up joining this organization. And what you always end up with is this deeply human story, right? So

Going back a second, when you step into a room of one of these community organizations, you'll have people that look very different from you, who are from very different organizations, who you may never cross paths with in ordinary life. And then you're supposed to sit down.

down with them and tell them some of the most intense personal stories about your life and your struggles. And in that process, you start to feel not only sympathy for the other person, but you also start to feel perhaps even more intensely heard than you've ever felt in your life before. As you sit across from somebody and tell them

the things that pain you most, the things that make you most angry, the things that make you want to fight, and they sit and listen and sympathize, that's this really powerful transformative feeling. And it's actually in those one-to-ones, a point that I haven't really conveyed yet in this conversation, that you really begin to save liberalism because

It's not just any myths, any rituals, any magical moments that are going to save liberalism. What I constantly refer back to in the book is that this idea that there's no point in having freedom of speech, no point in having the right to say whatever you want to if there's nobody who's willing to listen.

Right. And in these one-to-one rituals, that's the transformational experience that happens. It's this recognition that it only matters being able to say what you want. If someone hears you, if they really listen, take in your pain and stand with you in solidarity. And that's what happens in these groups. And it's wonderful. And, um, I mean, you can probably hear the emotion in my voice as I describe it. It's, um, yeah. Yeah.

Hi.

Get IKEA whenever, wherever, however you want. Cheese from thousands of pickup locations, affordable delivery options, and more. And I guess I'm taking it a different direction now, but this power of conversation with people, like you said, that you may never ever come across. Now, we have a lot of misunderstandings about people of different races, cultures, even religions. And at the end of the day, it just comes to the fact that we have never really even met one. We have never really spoken to them. This is the power of conversation.

And then when you open up and talk about yourself, you hear their stories. That is exactly what you're talking about. That builds these relationships and understandings, which is core of liberalism as well. One of the core values of liberalism, let's say. We talked about myths. We talked about rituals. The other thing you discuss in the book is magic.

Yeah, magic to imagine alternatives. Now, I'm sure a lot of people might have a misconception of what magic is, but tell us what you mean by magic in the scope of your research.

and its role in imagining an alternative alternatives yeah well i have to say i think i'm probably describing this better in a paper i've just finished writing than than i do in the book i just want to go with the definition i've been working on there and come back to what's then described in the book because there's this anthropologist who's

exploring magic as in actual magic shows, you know, when you go and watch a magician on stage. And he offers this very simple definition that a successful magic trick is where something impossible appears to happen. Right. And clearly what he means by that is something according to recognize laws or physics in a particular culture, right?

something impossible in those terms appears to happen. Right. And so then what I started thinking about in terms of political magic is when something heretofore thought to be politically impossible appears to happen. And that's always the magic in activist communities. That's why there's always such a sense, a strong sense of,

of magic in those spaces because people believe in the impossible. You know, who could have predicted the Russian revolution before it came? Who could have predicted the Iranian revolution before it came? There's these moments where suddenly everything changes and up until it happens, he genuinely thought that it couldn't. And so the way I put it much more poetically in the book is,

which is a phrase I've continued to use, is magic is a slit in the thin veneer of there is no alternative. So it's explicitly set up against that Margaret Thatcher phrase we visited at the beginning of this conversation. So if you can build a whole politics around an idea that

that our economic and political systems perfectly align with reality and that that can never change. The magic is the moment where you suddenly see that another world, even if only for a second, that another world might be possible. And it's that feeling that activists and change makers are constantly trying to capture. Yeah.

And what about the role of tradition and past? I guess liberalism is more or less a forward-looking ideology, but to look at past and traditions in a, let's say, in the mind of an uninitiated might look as counter-effective to liberalism, but liberals might conceive of it as undesirable. How do you think we can reconceptualize past and tradition as well?

Yeah, so indeed, liberalism is often seen as a forward-looking, progressive, say, political ideology, right?

And I think part of the problem there is that we see tradition as simply the inheriting of objects or ideas or patterns of behavior from the past. But actually, anthropologists of religion for a long time have been describing tradition as a much more active, dynamic process, a process of, with discernment, discernment

deciding what from the past you want to receive, how you want to

reshape it and make sense of it uh for your own life and then what in that you want to pass on to the future so drawing on others work in this regard uh i really try to emphasize that for me tradition is both what is being inherited from the past and passed on to the future but also the process by which those decisions are made so who gets to decide what's taken from the past um

And how will you do that? So in terms of Metro Vancouver Alliance, Vancouver is a very, say, a very hot political space, right? Because it's the frontier of colonial capitalism, a frontier of it, where still the city is expanding into unceded indigenous territory. And yet it's also a deeply...

let's say, liberal in the social sense of the term place, a very left-wing place where people are waking up to the realisation of the colonial implications of their existence in that space. And so there's a strong clash between those things. And the Industrial Areas Foundation is broadly rooted in a kind of Havnet-Arendt or Aristotelian vision of

politics as participation as of humans as political animals and that's the story that's often told right that we are political animals we can go back to the Greeks and their vision of uh democracy and so on and yet you know even Aristotle's um ideas uh

were problematic or rather the Greek vision of democracy was. So from one perspective, you might say, okay, all of this is problematic in some way. We just need to move beyond it. But what Metro Vancouver Alliance were beautifully doing in my time there was trying to weave together the best of these traditions while acknowledging the worst aspects of them too. So trying to tell a story about the history of democracy

democracy or political participation in that space that drew simultaneously on indigenous thought, on Greek tradition, and indeed on Christianity, because there are a number of churches involved as well, and really trying to weave those together. And so that's really, you know, live tradition making. And I think that's something that we have to start

thinking about again how do we creatively weave together the best of our traditions to tell a convincing story about who we are and I guess to recreate that story that's where also the idea of myth ritual and magic also come into play which you have already discussed yeah yeah absolutely another maybe a final question that I have is about the role of truth in

And that's an idea that is very common these days, you know, truth, post-truth, information, misinformation. In your book, you discuss three types of truth, rational, confessional, and compassionate. Can you briefly tell us what they are? And I'm personally more interested in the idea of compassionate truth and how it can help us

especially in this age of, you know, disinformation or misinformation, would be great if you talk about it. Yeah, okay, thanks. So how do I tell this without going too deep into social theory again?

I think that liberalism is broadly defined in terms of these two types of truth, rational truth and confessional truth. So on the one hand, rational truth is essential because it's about upholding a society based on fairness, right? That's the rational truth I talked about before, that move that we make. Once we recognize the equal dignity of all, regardless of background and positionality, then we can do anything.

then we try and build our political systems on the basis of a rational truth, an objective understanding of humans that transcends any subjective ideas of a good life or how a life ought to be lived. And we often wield that rational truth around, right? So that's the rational truth we deploy when Trump says something problematic, for example, or when

When any political adversary says something that we consider problematic, we try to hit them back with rational truth. Well, in fact, this is what the research says. This is what the data says.

The other side of it, and in a sense what that rational truth is designed to protect, is confessional truth. So that's the my truth. I'm speaking my truth, right? That's something that's deeply strong now. And that's rooted in an idea of authenticity and your orientation to the world. And rational truth and confessional truth are things that...

You know, liberalism has an abundance of. But the third idea of truth that I think that's really missing and that we need to rediscover and what organizations like Metro Vancouver Alliance bring to the fore is this compassionate truth. And that's the truth that emerges when you sit down and really, really,

genuinely deeply listen to the story of the person next to you and when i go back to that discussion of subtle gestures and and one-to-one conversations from our brief chat about ritual

I talk about in the ritual chapter, this process of kind of undressing the individual story to get to the deep core feeling human underneath. So if rational truth maybe tries to rise above subjectivity and provide this kind of objective lens.

I think what compassionate truth tries to do is drill down below those subjective experiences to get at the deep,

human yearnings beneath and the only way you can do that is to actually be in a space with someone look into their eyes and truly listen to them and that's a hard thing to hear in you know this post-covid ai driven technologically driven society that in order to truly grasp

Where someone is coming from, you actually have to sit next to them in a room and look into their eyes. Before we come to the end of this conversation, I'm keen to know if there's any other project you're currently working on, any book that we might expect sometime soon?

um i'm afraid you won't be expecting a book from me anytime soon i have two young uh children now and i made a promise to my partner that i would have started a book project um but my my thinking has uh moved on to some extent so i'm still very interested interested in magic myths and rituals but i've also started uh thinking about dramaturgy so

I recently wrote an article called Dramaturgies of Change, which is thinking about the dramaturgical techniques that social and political movements employ, the theatrical techniques that they employ in order to convince people that another world is possible and indeed is desirable. So I'm very interested in dramaturgical perspectives and kind of symbolic politics.

And then I'm also increasingly looking into belonging. How can we try and reconceive belonging in a way that... So I'm working on something called the Ecology and Belonging Project, which explores ways of reconceiving belonging that can speak across differences or across the emergent polarised political divide. Mm-hmm.

And I think it also echoes a lot of the themes that we just discussed in this podcast as well, in your current book. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's really formed the basis of my ongoing work. Great. Dr. Timothy Stacey, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. The book we just discussed was Saving Liberalism from Itself, the Spirit of Political Participation, published by Bristol University Press. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. It's been lovely talking.