As the topic of what is or is not appropriate within civil discourse circulates the miasma of outrage that suffuses the Internet, I think on the days when I called for civil discourse within my smaller communities.
If you’re a fan of astrology, you might know that recently Uranus, the planet of revolutionary change and innovation, had until very recently spent the past seven years in Aries, the domain of self-assertion, leadership, and courageous and foolhardy impulsivity. As someone with Sun in Aries, I’ve come to appreciate that this sign carries with it a sort of perennial crankiness, impatience, and tendency to see disagreements or obstacles as a personal attack.
With this lens, I observe that Uranus in Aries presided over an era of increased mistrust and polarization, along with the increased politicization of identity. While this politicization has been widely noticed and critiqued on the Left—for example, the explosion in bespoke gender and sexual identities—the rise of “white identitarianism” and Men’s Rights activism on the Right, or the twin arising of “Blue Lives Matter” as an identity-based adversary of “Black Lives Matter,” suggests that the politicization of identity is not a unique feature of one political ideology.
Perhaps there is relationship between so much emphasis on the validity and rights of identity and the Aries-flavored combativeness that has grown so much that jokes about a looming civil war feel more like gallows humor and less like referencing an absurd impossibilities. The language of “allyship” in identity-based movements carries this Aries flavor—a sense that we’re in a conflict, and you need to pick a side.
What seems noteworthy to me is that the language of allyship and identity-based conflicts places those in the position of allies in uncomfortable roles of practicing quiet discernment around ideological conflicts within those communities. There are valid yet conflicting guidelines in allyship, one for example being to trust and defer to those within the community that they know their experience; another being not to treat people within one identity group as a monolith who agree on everything.
Both of these are reasonable suggestions that are true for every human community—people are authorities on their own experiences, and there is always a diversity of opinion within groups. (In some groups that diversity gets tamped down under collective pressure for conformity, but you’ll find it coming out in unguarded moments of gossip or body-language.)
But for an ally who wants to support a particular community, at times they must decide which faction of a community to support. Any time a politicized identity gets put forth as though it has a coherent set of political interests and values, there’s going to be someone or many within that group who disagree and get let out of the picture. One might think of pro-war and anti-war veterans.
“Allyship” thus cannot be about uncritically and unequivocally supporting all members of one community. Within terms of politics and war, one’s allies are the people who are fighting against the same enemy. The Soviet Union and the United States were allies in World War II, and once they defeated their shared foe, became adversarial.
If I am to be an ally of a political community, then it behooves me to name the specific values, principles, and political goals that I want to achieve in alliance.
Without this personal work and distinction, without a sense of collective purpose, what we have are conflicting personal interests. That some of us lack that sense of discernment or ability to tolerate conflict is not necessarily a failing of the identity movements themselves—Black Lives Matter groups, for example, have advocated for white victims of police killings—but it does seem to get in the way of having honest conversations about what we’re for and what we need.
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