30 not out

Photo by Martin Reisch on Unsplash

Last week I celebrated 30 years working as a lecturer on the very same day I had my annual work appraisal. Both events put me into a reflective mood. And the thought I have kept coming back to has been how important solitude has been for me.

For as long as I can remember I’ve thought of myself as semi-detached from my colleagues: somewhat adjacent to them, if you will. Either because I was interested in breathing problems when most everyone else was into necks and backs, qualitative research when evidence-based practice was the thing, or left wing politics when no-one wanted to think about Marx, I’ve always felt something of an outsider.

But that’s not a source of sadness for me: quite the opposite in fact. For me, having a working day alone to think, read, and write (perhaps with a bit of gardening thrown in), is my idea of paradise (paradise coming from the Arabic word فردوس meaning ‘walled garden’). And there have been many times in my life when I’ve felt hemmed in by convention when I’ve needed to create solitude and distance. I’d even go as far as to say that I think it’s why I’m where I am in my career today: close enough in physiotherapy and health professional education to know their foibles and inner workings, but removed enough to bring a bit of critical distance.

Engineering just the right amount of distance has been an unconsciously important part of my work even as a physiotherapy student in the 1980s. I did an MA not an MSc in the early years of qualitative health research just as quantitative research became the thing in physiotherapy. I did a PhD with some actual philosophy in it when most of my colleagues were concentrating on controlling polluting study variables. I decided not to apply for research grants or do any classical empirical data collection in my research (a principal I still uphold). And I gave up an office on campus to work from home two years before COVID forced everyone else out.

But solitude and distance shouldn’t be read here as solipsism or misanthropy. Sure, I’m often incredulous at some of the antics of the people we share this cosmic trailer park with, but I’m equally astonished by the generosity of friends and family, colleagues and complete strangers. And I’m absolutely sure I wouldn’t be able to do the things I do, or work the way I do, if I weren’t a comfortable, white, straight, English-speaking man. So the privilege I feel in being able to do this is as ever present for me as my desire to do it justice, and to do that I know I need solitude.

Everything you see if you read this blog, read a book, a chapter, or an article I’ve written, is a quite votive offering to the good fortune of being able to do this day after day. And all I can really hope for is another year, maybe another five, or even ten, to continued doing this, because I really do love it.

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There’s nice illustration of this idea in a piece on living and working at ‘the edge of the inside’ on The Living Philosophy blog. Being at the edge of the inside means being brought up in a tradition that you then become the insider critic of. Being at the edge of the inside is a defining feature of the kind of prophetic work of people like Marx and Nietzsche, but there are also contemporary examples in the work of Contrapoints, Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump. These people are prophets rather than members of the priesthood.

What differentiates prophets from one another, however, depends on what they do in their marginal position. For instance, if you have narcissistic tendencies and want to become famous, you can use your edge-of-inside position to speak radical truths to your own base and mobilise quite astonishing levels of personal support and gratification. Equally, if you’re driven by injustice and the desire to right social wrongs, you can become a culture warrior par excellence.

As someone who self-identifies as an edge-dweller, I have to think carefully about my own motivations. Am I standing apart only in order to stand out? Have I found a niche within my professional life only in order to perform some sort of elaborate ‘impression management’ (Goffman, 1963)? The truth of that may only become clear to me when I can look back not only on the decisions I made in search of distance during my career, but also the reasons for those moves.

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There’s something about a resistance to all forms of domination that I think makes me want to sit not entirely outside social order, but in liminal spaces. Darren Allen puts this beautifully in his explanation of anarchism here. He suggests that there are seven forms of domination we are all prey to (we should perhaps add another one here if we are also dominated by listicles!):

1. The [autocratic] monarchy.
2. The [socialist-democratic] state (which includes its money, law, property, police, etc.).
3. The [totalitarian-capitalist] corporation.
4. The [mass] majority.
5. The [professional-religious] institution.
6. The [technocratic] system.
7. The [mental-emotional] ego.

‘It is indisputable that the seven dominants are coercive’, Allen argues, and ‘that they control individuals, and nature, against their will’ Link. It follows that the central tenet of anarchism is that ‘all forms of domination are wrong must’ and that, allowing for ‘inevitable lapses and compromises’, anarchists must set themselves ‘against the autonomous power of states, corporations, property, professionalism, money, law, democracy, monarchism, industrial tools and the inherently needy and violent, obsessively wanting, worrying and planning, mental-emotional false-self’ (ibid).

This is very much a living philosophy and something to be worked on. It also runs counter to the approach taken by a lot of my critical theory friends and colleagues, who also sit at the margins of the professions and healthcare education. For a lot of these people, their primary motivation is to find compelling ways to critique the miseries of biopolitical neoliberalism, racism, misogyny, hatred, intolerance, and discrimination in all its forms. Theirs is an active pursuit of (in)justice that places a premium on community; on shared values; and on the spirit of collective action in the face of unrelenting bigotry. Here again I find myself on the edge of another inside; neither opposed to the work my friends are doing nor aligned with it.

Would I do this work if I weren’t in a secure academic position that affords me the luxury of being able to position myself so? Will I still be doing this in 10 years time? I don’t know. For now, though, it feels to be the place where I can do my best work, so I’m enormously grateful for that. So that’s what I told my boss.

Reference

Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs; Prentice Hall.