Deep roots and wide branches

Polarity Management and the tensions that aren’t resolvable, or, Be More Tree.

I can’t be the only one feeling the need for more spiritual core strength. I am managing two seemingly opposing instincts: I want to resist this reactionary moment by reaching out to those different from me, to model a hospitality I do not see playing out on the world stage. I’m also aware of a desire to pull back into safety, to shelter in sameness and unquestioned belonging. I do not have the energy to deal with Those Guys. Today I am writing about why these two instincts are not opposites, but might instead be poles in a healthy rhythm or two parts of a dance.

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Some jobs really make it difficult to be an ideologue. For a long time I was on the production team of The Moral Maze, a BBC Radio 4 ethical and moral discussion programme. I was young and eager, cycling to Broadcasting House every week in a pink neon tabard with my basket full of packed lunch. Every episode we’d pick some meaty issue like abortion, or if a just war is possible, or free speech, huddled over coffee and the papers on a Monday morning. I’d then spend two solid days on research calls with the four regular panellists (who held wildly opposing views) and up to twelve potential guests ahead of the live show on Wednesday evening. We were always looking for the best arguments from a range of possible perspectives. This process quickly made clear that the semi-concious mental model I was carrying (people who disagree with me are stupid or terrible or both) was not sustainable. If you’re reading this, you are probably already questioning that model, but I think we all start with it. Our own perspective is unavoidably our benchmark, the only place we can locate “normal and obvious”, because it is the sum total of all the experiences, evidence and people we have been exposed to. Working on that programme, the range of views I encountered diversified at warp speed. I met people who were kind, smart and thoughtful on all sides of basically every important issue. I discovered the occasional genuinely bad faith actors or actual ethical monsters were annoyingly evenly distributed.

I left the BBC to start running a think tank, and then launched The Sacred podcast. It shared some DNA with my BBC job because it enabled me to keep challenging my assumptions. I think that role left me slightly addicted to the sensation of my horizons expanding. It might just be nosiness, but I love the imaginative stretching that happens when I try and inhabit someone else’s “normal and obvious” for a bit. It really is like empathy boot camp. I listen deeply to guests from a wide range of backgrounds, perspectives and worldviews. I recently interviewed Jameela Jamil, a feminist and progressive actor, writer and activist on Tuesday and then conservative peer Baron Matthew Elliott, former CEO of Vote Leave and champion for business on the Thursday. I liked them both. Also, my brain was very tired afterwards. (Subscribe to The Sacred now to hear these interviews when they are out).

All of this listening often leaves me confused. I am adopting a deliberately non-adversarial posture. This means letting go of my desire to tell them why they are wrong, instead seeking to understand what has led them to believe what they believe. What I am often left with is this sense that for most questions there is more than one “right” answer. Some guests’ deepest value is freedom, a sense that something sacred is trespassed when we constrain another person’s autonomy. There is truth here. They might say that protecting freedom is worth the knock on effects of not preventing harm to some people. Another guest’s deepest value is about equality. They also value freedom, but might say that constraining the freedom (of action or speech) of some in service of equality is a price worth paying. I often think a guest may have overemphasised a value, or failed to discern what is most important in a situation, but I can rarely say their guiding value is completely useless.

While leading an organisation and now coaching and consulting with leaders, this “two right answers” theme keeps coming up. There are always those in a team who see the value of continuity, of patiently pursuing a goal over the long term. Then there are those who value innovation, who seek out constant change and adaptation. They tend to drive each other bonkers. The best teams don’t try to dissolve this tension but recognise it as a creative engine. They acknowledge that both change and stability are important values and that champions for both are vital, even as each will sometimes need to be primary. In congregational settings or political groups the tension is often around those who want to emphasise particularity and belonging, building a thick and distinctive culture, and those who are concerned with being welcoming and accessible to those outside the existing group. Churches bicker over how “seeker sensitive” to be, how much to nuance culturally uncomfortable doctrines. Groups like Extinction Rebellion become riven with factions, some pushing for more and more radical action and higher commitment, the others insisting on the importance of building a “climate majority” by appealing to those outside traditional activist circles.

Sociologists use the terms “bonding social capital” and “bridging social capital” to describe this. Groups with strong bonding capital often share language, assumptions, rituals. They have a thick shared culture with a strong sense of belonging. Bridging capital, as the name suggests, is about opennesss to those outside of the group. They are often spoken about as a see-saw: when one goes up, the other can’t help but go down. We can pull inwards, or we can move outwards.

This is, of course, another two right answers situation. For healthy societies, we need both bridging and bonding social capital.

I often find myself in this both/and position. The trouble with being able to see the benefits of several perspectives is that it can be paralysing, or leave you stuck in a bland and mushy middle. I am often accused of being a fence sitter, and worry that my ability to emphasise with a range of perspectives risks leaving me with no principles. This week I discovered a model which helped me articulate my intuitive sense of a different approach.

Polarity Management is a concept developed by Barry Johnson, and I came across it through Rabbi Shoshana Boyd Gelfand, whose Ted X talk is a useful introduction. If you’re working in social change or similar, this overview is particularly good at applying it there¹. The key concept is that while many problems have one right answer, polarities have two interdependent answers. They are unresolvable in that sense, so instead need to be managed. Johnson uses breathing as the key metaphor. Inhaling and exhaling are both essential processes. The mid point between them is not the place to aim for. We must instead do both at the right time. They both have upsides, and, if we only did one of them, major downsides.

Managing polarities (and I wish there was a more narratively satisfying term for this) is firstly about identifying them and becoming aware of the upsides and downsides of each pole. Leadership in this model becomes about discerning which pole should be primary in a given season and then staying alert to its downsides. When we see the early warning of growing downsides it is a sign we may need to tilt back towards the other pole. Inhale, exhale, repeat. Below it is worked out for change and stability.

Once you start seeing these pairs of polarities, they are everywhere. Almost every ongoing tension in an organisation or community (or a romantic relationship) is an unrecognised polarity. We need to focus on both our own needs and the needs of other people. A willingness to move fast and break things can be incredibly useful, and so can caution and attention to detail. This diagram depicts a social change project with a focus on education, and the polarity between widening access and maintaining quality.

The belonging/openness polarity which I am feeling, which you could also call bonding/bridging or distinctiveness/hospitality is playing out everywhere right now. I don’t have to point out the very obvious downsides of the belonging/bonding/distinctiveness pole. We can see where the downsides of an over focus on belonging often leads us, whether that belonging is to a nation state or an identity group. History throws up the exclusionary downsides of this pole again and again.

The trouble is, the response has often been to treat this pattern as a one-correct-answer problem and move instead towards an extreme openness. The aim becomes “neutrality” and “”objectivity” because belonging/bonding/distinctness are seen as inherently suspect. This is the parody of philosopher John Rawls vision of the public square which was baked into so much late 20th century political theory. Liberal secular democracy decided group identities (especially religious group identities) are dangerous, so they must be relegated to the private sphere. All distinctive cultures are viewed as slightly primitive, a regression to our irrational past. We must file down our edges in order to be inclusive, because we can only tolerate each other if we centre on our commonalities and tidy all the inconvenient differences out of sight.

The trouble is, the currrent sharp swing towards exclusive and excluding forms of group identity is partly because the downsides of openness were not well managed. When we over focus on hospitality and openness, put all our energy into bridging, we can lose ourselves. We are left with a bland, hyper individualised Esperanto, voided of meaning. It is boring as hell. Into that void rushes the market to hush our craving for meaning and belonging with consumer goods and routes to self-expression (Look over here, a toy! Post that pic so you can feel like you exist!) but it’s not enough. We are hyper social creatures, designed for thick communal cultures, small groups of distinctive belonging. Lonely, hypothetically liberal, secular societies are therefore vulnerable to the magnetism of the other pole, and not in its healthiest form. Poorly managed polarities will always swing like this, the downside of one pole forcing a move towards the upside of the opposite pole, which then rapidly degenerates into its own downside, and then swings back.

I see it in religious institutions. These unstable and anxious times are driving many people right out of congregations (hard into openness) or back into highly particular and uncompromising forms of spirituality. I am not interested in either of these extremes. I believe my tradition offers some wisdom which goes beyond these binaries, beyond even polarity management.

My most precious biblical metaphor is a tree. Polarity management is illuminating but still too machine-like for my tastes. I prefer to think in seasons, in the liturgical and narrative spiral of the year. It’s no accident the artwork for this substack is botanical. Trees never seem defensive or defended. They don’t get their strength from armour or weapons (though a thick enough bark-skin is an asset) but from their roots.

Trees are woven through my scriptures. The tree of life in Eden which Adam and Eve reject in favour of the tree of knowledge, a tree of execution at the crucifixion, a whole forest of trees of life in the final book of Revelation. There is one image that comes up multiple times like a leit motif, it’s repeated refrain calling back and forward through the centuries. Here it is in Jeremiah:

But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,

whose confidence is in him.

8They will be like a tree planted by the water

that sends out its roots by the stream.

It does not fear when heat comes;

its leaves are always green.

It has no worries in a year of drought

and never fails to bear fruit.”

The trees deep roots give it steadiness. It can thrive through hard seasons and continue to bear fruit. Tress do not grow fruit for themselves, or not directly. The fruit they bear blesses those around them. Their shady branches can shelter living things in rain and blazing heat. Their particular, rooted, distinctive selves are what enables them to be open and hospitable to others. These things are not opposites.

We have found this principe in our community house. The more relaxed we have become with our weirdness, our counter cultural beliefs and practices, the more at home in our skin, the easier hospitality has become. We go back and forth between the poles. Strong boundaries around time just for our household as well as regular practices of hospitality are both central to our monastic-inspired Rule of Life. We just dance between the two within every week. Inhale. Exhale. The hope is this might avoid the classic community living traps of insularity or burnout that you see again and again when this polarity is poorly managed².

We have found that being unapologetically ourselves gives others permission to do so too. Our distinctive Christian identity seems to be no barrier to people of radically different outlooks feeling at home in our space. Difference is not, as I am always saying, inherently a threat. It is often a gift. It is certainly more interesting. It is only when we become defensive and defended, anxious and triggered by that difference that it causes problems. Deep roots alone makes us rigid. My husband says “when we don’t welcome strangers, we become strange”. Wide branches without roots leaves us fragile, without the resilience to be of use, long term. The deeper our roots, the more sure of our own belovedness, the more open we are also able to be.

When I was leading a religion think tank we called it confident non-defensiveness. Neither cringing nor crouching, but curious.

When the tree shows up again in Revelation it is like an uber metaphor, picking up resonances from all over the Bible:

And he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

These trees are not just fruitful, feeding others via the depth of their roots. Their leaves are for the healing of the nations. It is, of course, a prophecy about Jesus. I don’t think it is doing too much violence to the text, given the other resonances, to read it also as about what is possible for humans. I want my leaves, my life, to contribute, somehow to the healing of the nations. They need it. They probably always have. I need this too.

Roots down deep friends. Spread those branches wide. Fruitful and faithful is what I’m aiming for. Successful is not within my control. We do not know how this all ends, at least in this world. We don’t have to. We just need to know what is being asked of us now. Heat will come, and storms. There may be trouble ahead, but underneath is a river, and we are going nowhere.

Upcoming Events

• I’ll be speaking with psychologist and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke at the UnHerd club on February 27th on Faith will solve the Meaning Crisis.

• The next day I’ll be at a Winchester literary festival in conversation (in the Cathedral!) with one of my writing heroes, Cathy Rentzenbrink about Fully Alive.

• On May 2nd I’ll be speaking at the Mockingbird Conference in New York City

• And in August you can find me in Chicago at Midwestuary.

If you are in the US and would like to invite me to speak around those last two dates, please do get in touch.

1. Polarity map images from Edge of Possible, used with permission.

Tree and breathe photos from Unsplash

2. Sabbath is another practice which helps with it, and is another polarity. We need work and rest, to do each fully, and cannot fully thrive without these back and forth rhythms.