Lead it and Weep

Rachel Reeves cried in public. So did Jesus. Maybe more leaders should.

Only one of these Big Ideas books opens with a story about me crying.

This week, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves was spotted crying in the Commons chamber and was promptly torn to shreds. I won’t bother to reproduce the bile spewed by Piers Morgan and Piers Morgan wannabes, because you can imagine it. The braying dinosaur reactions were predictable, but I found the “defences” also disappointing. No one knows what she is going through, they tended to explain. Maybe she has just had a terrible diagnosis, or a family member who had. Have more empathy. Clearly, nothing except from whole-sale personal catastrophe could sanction such an unusual (historic?) display of human emotion in political leader.

Also this week, I was speaking at the Realisation Festival, hosting the opening Keynote conversation with

Sarah Wilson

. We were discussing the “metacrisis”, the collapse of the complex systems we have built to sustain us, and what might be asked of us in this moment.

Clearly, it was heavy and heady stuff. I have been in and around those discussions for a while, including on here, and the approach tends to trend analytical. Is it a metacrisis or a polycrisis? What are the drivers, sociological, anthropological, intellectual? What is modernity, what are the features of “the machine?” What is the new model, ideally with diagrams, that we need to act as maps for reality, now?

I have benefitted from some of this thinking, but also often feel illegitimate in those spaces. I neither know nor really care what metamodernity is. I keep forgetting what the hole in the doughnut of doughnut economics is supposed to represent.

I have sat in panels and conferences when the potential breakdown of democracy and the extinction of the human race were discussed in the same entirely calm, distant tones used for obscure macro economics. The anxious, tearful threat reaction spiking in my body as I listened felt somehow shameful, a useless distraction from the real work of figuring out rationally what to do. Occasionally, in the more enlightened types of events, there were separate strands you could go to to deal with the body-and-emotion stuff, the sessions coded “personal development” or “spirituality” where you could do yoga or write a poem about climate grief or go in the sauna. The main sessions, though, they were for the high status, rational stuff.

My session with Sarah was different. It is still unusual for two woman to open an event focused on ideas. A few minutes in, after Sarah offered an analysis of how all complex systems and civilisations eventually collapse under their own weight, we found we were both crying. The wave of tears swept from the stage back through the rows, washing over the 150 people in that book lined room. They seemed appropriate and even necessary. Then we carried on naming reality.

That session was a revelation. Something expansive cracked open which helped make the rest of the weekend radically more productive. Sarah modelled so clearly how bullshit the fake binaries are. She is intelligent and brave and strong and also cries. She is helping many, many people process the situation we find ourselves in and figure out how to be some actual use, rather than indulging in purely analytical displacement activity, that anxious desire to control and command.

I have written before about being a public woman in the world of ideas, about my increasingly stubborn refusal to deny that I have a body and emotions in order to be taken seriously. I spent so much of my working life dressing up in suits and hiding my figure, because boobs = bimbo. I learnt to speak fluent oxbridge debating society male because that is who the world of ideas deems worthy of respect. I imbibed a binary which exists in so many places: I could be emotional and embodied and intuitive, or I could be intelligent, but I could not be both. Even just at this festival an earnest and otherwise lovely young man into metamodernism explained to me that male represents order and female represents chaos. I failed to argue with him.

I have no particular feelings, negative or positive, about Rachel Reeves. I am not qualified to judge her economic policies. I do know that having a cry in the chamber does not make me trust her less, no matter what the reason. Not least because the person I am trying to pattern my life on, my key model of leadership, wept too.

The picture of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” is not a biblical one. Jesus spoke sharply, raged against injustice towards the poorest, destroyed property in a religious building and yes, wept. He is recorded crying at least twice in the New Testament, once over the death of a friend and once over the state of the city of Jerusalem. He both named reality and experienced it emotionally. Of course he did. If we believe he was fully human, he must have done.

Because humans have emotions. We can suppress them, numb them, train ourselves out of them, displace them onto others, create some kind of artificial wall between our “public” and “private“ selves as certain kinds of education and family systems do spectacularly, or we can learn to navigate them with wisdom. Not to surrender to a self-indulgent emotionalism, trusting every passing affective spasm, but to discern what they are telling us about reality. This is part of what all the great spiritual and wisdom traditions do. As we become literate in the emotional weather of our souls we begin to know where to take them, how to express them humanely and fruitfully. Religions have psychologically astute “spiritual technologies” for all this. Collective lament, collective celebration, collective storytelling and singing. Healthy spiritual practice can help us understand that yes, some emotions cloud our thinking, and some deepen it, that ultimately the difference between “feeling” and “thinking” is much less obvious than we thought it was. I want leaders who are fully human, who have reckoned with these biological facts, not ones who are pathologically afraid of an unavoidable part of our embodied experience.

If you are reading this, whatever your gender, worrying that I am judging you for not being sufficiently emotional (and tempted to dismiss me because of that), I am not. We do not all need to be the same. Sometimes a cool, detached analysis is exactly what is required. We need each other, in all our particularity and diversity. My point is that we have historically overvalued “unemotional“ approaches and undervalued those that weep and rage. It is still coded, frankly, female and therefore weak and chaotic. This denial has made us collectively less attuned to reality, less fully human. Less alive. So, please, will someone pass Rachel Reeves the tissues then let her get on with her job.