Necessity of Preaching to the (hidden) Choir, Re: [PEN-L:13474] Re: lighten up

[Carrol Cox]

For many years I have argued against the commonplace wisdom that we
(leftist, "the left" when it appears) should avoid "preaching to the
choir." I have argued this on a number of grounds, but chiefly on the
basis of the proposition that no one else but "the choir" will listen to
us long enough to hear what we have to say. To stick with the clumsy
metaphor of preacher and choir, for the left there is no one in the
audience but the choir, and if we don't preach to them we will be
preaching to the empty air. The choir is enlarged through person to
person activity by its present members and, more importantly, by action,
which causes ears to prick up of those who would not otherwise be
listening. And what will engage those extra listeners: telling them what
they already know but were afraid to admit they knew because they have
been isolated. That is where Rob's post quoted below comes in. Those
members of the radio audience who "heard" him in any significant sense
were those who already agreed with him, but had never before heard their
own thoughts expressed in terms that revealed to them what they had been
thinking.

Rob Schaap wrote:

 
<<<I remember prattling away on the radio about pay TV a few years ago -
found myself talking about what 'choice' had come to mean . . .and
asking why it was I had ever more of it in my constrained role as a
consumer at the mall, but ever less of it in my temporally much more
significant roles as worker and citizen. I [then] shut [up]. . . . It
was about 9.00 in the morning, and most of the audience seemed to be
housewives. . . . A surprising, but deeply gratifying, hour of female
voices ensued - always beginning with 'I thought I was the only one who
thought that stuff'.  Something bigger than the wisdom we have is
driving us, and one of the things it does is shut its individual
possessors up to the point of making 'em feel lonely deviants in the
having of it.>>>

"Something bigger than wisdom" is mere chatter. It takes a good deal of
wisdom, that is a good deal of historical understanding (in Ollman's
sense of first system, then history) to perceive the obvious --
particularly what is or will be obvious to others when it is thus
articulated. And that "something" is not at all mysterious: the internal
contradictions of capitalism, which bind even when not perceived.

(Probably humanist Rob will ascribe it to some sort of human essence;
over on lbo several will ascribe it to the id or the ego or something,
but these are merely 20th century variations on religion and of no
theoretical interest. That those who believe in these myths can
nevertheless have the perceptions Rob shows above exhibits, among other
things, that anti-capitalist practice can absorb the most varied
theoretical perspectives.)

Carrol