The Difference Between Standing Up and Leaning In
“Stand up” is a rallying cry in today’s world, we are called upon to stand up for ourselves, for the oppressed, for the planet. It presents itself as a stark and urgent duty; the “very simple words” that Brecht beckoned us to acknowledge in his last poems “that you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself / surely you see that” . Simultaneously the political metaphor of standing up seems to face a potent contradiction: it tends to imply an individual’s distinct courage that can, as Susan Sontag highlights, “isolate the brave” even if collective liberation requires that “courage is as contagious as fear” . If the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg in her own words “never missed an opportunity to stick her neck out for trouble” , it is also true that this precise activity created, as her biographer Ettinger notes, “the isolation in which she would play out her final act” in the socialist movement. Standing up must serve a dual function: at once to expose society as it is by distinguishing yourself from it, whilst aiming to transform the social fabric to create the conditions where your current heroism becomes ordinary.
Standing up for yourself becomes a euphoric celebration of Judy Grahn’s “all the world we didn’t know we held in common all along” when the act draws attention to a shared humanity that has been made invisible by social relations of oppression and degradation. To stand up for yourself effectively is to question the subordination that has put you on the ground. It is to claim a parity between your interests and welfare and that of others, a parity you have been pushed to deny yourself. The act therefore anticipates a world that does not permit your brother’s foot to be on your neck.
Prefiguring new conceptions of our needs in an effort to change how we are treated is demonstrated by the twelfth century abbess Heloise’s correspondence with her former lover Abelard in which she challenges his understanding of their relationship by calling into question the marital bond in their society, arguing it may “seem more sacred and more binding” but “sweeter for me will always be the word friend” . Her argument for “preferring love to wedlock, freedom to chains” posed a critical blow to the linkage of wealth and power with spiritual merit common in her social order. By aligning herself with the honesty of the whores as opposed the wives of emperors, Heloise was not only pleading for sympathy for herself, but calling for fundamentally different relationships, unions based on mutual love and respect of two people “satisfied with each other’s merits” . Heloise articulated an alternative moral foundation for relationships, as opposed to the dehumanising social constraints which resulted in a chasm between genuine affection and the possibilities for it be manifest.
Concurrently, Heloise’s bold epistles highlight how the means by which we stand up for ourselves are moulded and constrained by our social contexts. It was Heloise’s fluency in the public mediums of philosophy and liberal arts that provided her the ability to speak and be taken seriously by male clergymen. As Peter the Venerable stated, in her commitment to intellectual pursuits, she had “surpassed every woman…and gone further than almost every man” . It was sensitivity towards and awareness of the binaries that characterised medieval theology that permitted her to posit her own binaries of the exterior effect and interior intention, and her position of female authority as an abbess enabled her correspondence to have wide-ranging ramifications and be preserved for posterity.
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Does the social context mean we should regard Heloise’s courage as analogous to the ‘lean in’ feminism of Sheryl Sandberg in the 21st century, the individualised assertions of a few women at the top of complex structures of power? This would entail isolation from the common lives of millions of women, as it is only a few who will ever get “offered a seat on a rocket ship” , in Sandberg’s words, whilst many more will be the ones immiserated whilst building the rocket ship. The challenge is: should standing up for your interests should be a collective task, or a personal one?
Heloise’s legacy demonstrates that there is no easy separation between our collective subordination and our personal circumstances. We are all complicit in reproducing the social constraints that cage us, and the boundaries we transgress and the boundaries we maintain are inextricably linked to the sacrifices we find acceptable. Yet this did not preclude Heloise from standing up in a meaningful and original way. The lasting value of Heloise lies in her willingness to tell herself and society as a whole: “You are a prisoner, and you’ll only get out of this prison if you’ll admit it’s a prison” . This was the challenge Raymond Williams described ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ as posing several centuries later. She marked herself out by refusing to valorise subordination or give credence to it as the inevitable condition of things. She saw it clearly: as a relation of power that was malleable and could be changed.
The distinction between standing up (winning humanity for ourselves) and ‘leaning in’ (winning authority for yourself) can be summarised as this: leaning in is a process of accommodation, whilst standing up demands transformation. Instead of asking for a seat at the table, we see the table itself as an instrument of oppression, and throw it out of the window. Social transformation is a difficult process because it entails subverting a seemingly fixed “reality” which is reiterated and reinforced at every turn, and which we ourselves reproduce. From where can we source the conviction that will allow us to stand up when “reality” seems to dictate submission and uneasy compromises?
This is where the collective nature of standing up becomes apparent. Our personal pain may seem trivial in a monstrous society, why should we rock the boat when we could just as easily have a quiet, if restricted, life? After all, it would not be the worst life, just look over there at all those other worse lives. It is only when we see ourselves as standing hand in hand with our sisters that we realize that our passivity not only condemns us to a life which is less than we would want, but it condemns our friends, lovers and comrades to lives that are so much less than any of us deserve. Pat Parker, in writing her poem ‘Womanslaughter’, horrified by the sheer magnitude of male violence and barbarism of a society which legitimised it, wrote defiantly “I will come to my sisters / not dutiful / I will come strong” .
Strength is therefore intimately connected to an appreciation of the common bonds of humanity we share. Without such a strength, it is far too easy to lapse into the isolated howls of despair or flash-in-the-pan acts which quickly dissipate. Standing up demands more of us than that: it demands a persistent struggle against the corrosive false harmonies that pour down on us every day. Those who wield authority in this world will attempt to either buy one or crush all; their authority hinges on the very subordination we are challenging. Those who are alone cannot fight the fight until the end. Standing up calls into existence new forms of kindness, compassion and friendship that are needed to sustain us against the mockery and cruelty of a world trying to claim our bodies and spirits.
The resonance of the call to ‘stand up’ lies in the physicality of the process: it cannot be flattened or ossified. It means incessantly declining the invitation to make a settlement with the way things are. It calls on us to believe in both our own power and our own humanity. Standing up, from challenging an unjust partner, to going on strike against your employer, to being part of a revolution, is rooted in the confident and humanising knowledge that our lives are worth transforming the world for. This knowledge is what commits us to obstinately getting up and challenging an unjust society, rather than accepting the common-sense of staying on our knees.
