Pay attention to the glimmers

Ruth Taylor on the values we swim in

“All flourishing is mutual”

Robin Wall Kimmerer

There’s a volunteer-run cinema near where I live called The Star and Shadow. I find it’s existence unreasonably exciting, though I rarely use it. Alongside film showings, it’s home to all manner of community goodness and conviviality. Here’s a list of what’s going on - amongst which you’ll see a ‘fix it’ cafe where you can take your broken toaster, a sewing club for making and mending clothes, and the community kitchen where you can get a hot meal for next to nothing.

Usually, the thought of “local people doing good things” elicits a sense of guilt in me. I should go. I should support it. I should be better. But this feels different. What excites me about The Star and Shadow isn’t anything it does, exactly, but the way it rearranges the furniture of what seems possible.

We are so steeped in the transactional - swipe here, tap there, keep moving. It's easy to forget life could be arranged otherwise. The dominant values of our institutions - efficiency, productivity, security - are not the governing laws of nature. They are choices. Often unconscious ones. We’ve become so fluent in the grammar of suspicion and extraction that we forget there are other languages we might speak, and have done at different times and places. The Star and Shadow, in its slightly shambolic way, speaks one of those other languages.

The values that inform it feel distinct from the norm; cooperation instead of competition, sufficiency instead of scarcity, belonging instead of branding. When I visit, I have a sense of recognition, and from somewhere deep in my bones, I notice: I believe in these things. Not abstractly, but viscerally.

Paying attention to the glimmers

There’s a word for this kind of moment, it’s been termed a glimmer. A small flare of recognition. It’s the opposite of being triggered: not a wound reactivated, but a value remembered. Something in you that had fallen asleep, or gone back underground, briefly chimes and says: Ah, this is how it’s meant to be. I remember a similar feeling during early parts the first covid-19 lockdown, which felt like a liminal moment where values of care seemed to supplant those of productivity. Albeit fleetingly.

We swim in the invisible values of competition, consumption, control, not noticing their presence until we catch a glimpse, or even a glimmer, of something different. Implicit cultural values are, in words of Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix - ‘the world that’s been pulled over your eyes’.

Ruth Taylor

, who I spoke with for the podcast episode below, has made a vocation out of helping people to pay attention to and question the values they are steeped in. Through her work at the Common Cause Foundation, she asks the question: what if the problem isn’t just what we’re doing, but what we’re valuing? It’s upstream work that many well intentioned activists fail to notice the need for. Listen to the podcast here, or via the youtube link below.

I really enjoyed our conversation, and think the work Ruth is doing is immensely valuable (no wordplay intended). It’s also a conversation that has a number of cousins among previous episodes, I’ll link to three below:

• Dacher Keltner - How can awe help us live more meaningful lives? Dacher studies the emotion of awe, which he says is universally activated by moral beauty, and it chimes with what we find meaningful in life. I think this relates to what I mentioned above in relation to ‘glimmers’ - values being activated.

• Elizabeth Oldfield
  - who am I becoming? In this podcast Elizabeth talks about paying attention to the way we are being shaped and formed by the culture around us. It’s a running theme in her work (and indeed her fantastic book ‘Fully Alive’) - how do we trellis our lives so that we become the kind of people who are shaped by the values we need at this cultural moment.

• Alex Evans
  - what do we do about the religion shaped hole? This was a fascinating conversation with Alex where explored the vacuum left by waning religious observance. Religion is a profoundly formative on its followers, so when that’s gone - what values rush in to fill that existential hole.

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You can read more about Ruth’s work and musings through her excellent substack

Culture Soup

.

In the next episode I’ll be speaking to the journalist and writer

Rosie Spinks

. We talk about what it means to live at a time when of great upheaval and collapse, as we dig into her question ‘what do we do now that we’re here?’ I’ll leave you with a clip which has a resonance with today’s episode on values.

Thank you to all those who read, listen, and get in touch - I really appreciate it. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, then please consider sharing it with others. If you listen to the podcast and enjoy it, then reviews and shares can help others find it. Thanks for reading!