the moment with Mike Rusch (ep 2b, 49).

This bridge episode sits in the tension of the current moment. Across two seasons, the underview has traced power in Northwest Arkansas from indigenous removal through racial terror to the displacement happening right now, asking what our institutions resisted and what they accommodated. The answer, consistently, has been accommodation: going along, choosing comfort over confrontation, narrowing the scope of who counts as neighbor. That history matters because we're watching the same choice play out nationally. 

When cultural agreement breaks down, when we lose our capacity to see each other, all that's left is force. The work ahead isn't shouting louder. It's the slow, patient labor of expanding who we see as "us" through stories, conversations, and relationships. Season 3 turns toward the faith communities of Northwest Arkansas to ask: where are the empathy makers, and how does faith create or breakdown belonging?

https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-moment-with-mike-rusch

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠
Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe
Host: @mikerusch

Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theunderview/message

Transcript

mike rusch.: 0:47

In 1937, an Italian cultural theorist named Antonio Gramsci died in fascist Italy after spending his final years in prison before World War II had begun. He'd spent years thinking about power, not just who had it, but how power actually works. Gramsci described two kinds of power. The first being a material power, political, economic, military force, coercion, brute strength, the kind of power that says do this, or else The other kind of power that he described is different. It's the ability to create consent agreement, a shared understanding of what's normal, what's acceptable, and what's just common sense. These two kinds of power, they exist in relationship. When you have more of one, you need less of the other. When there's agreement about how we should live together, you don't need force. The agreement does the work, but when the agreement breaks down, when consent dissolves, then material power is the only thing left, and that becomes control through force. I believe that this is what we're watching unfold in our country today. The executive orders, the deportations, the defunding, the dismantling, and the paralysis in Congress, and when you can't build agreement, you reach for the lever of material power. But this is a long process and the reality is, is that those building this kind of consent power have been working towards this for a very long time. Gramsci would go on to later be labeled a Marxist, but his ideas were picked up by French, far right thinkers in the 1960s who argued that cultural change must come before political power. The paradox is that here you have two groups at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum that are using the same theory. They agreed that rather than seizing power outright, you reshape what people see as normal, what feels reasonable, and then political victories will follow. There is evidence to say that this has been happening here for decades in our churches, in our schools, in media, through families. A slow work, a, patient work moving the window of normal until ideas that once felt extreme, they become mainstream. And over our first two seasons, this is part of what we've been tracing on the underview. In season one, I sat down with Dr. Nick Ogle and we talked about empathy, the subject of his dissertation. Not empathy as a feeling, but empathy as a practice. The capacity to understand another person's experience, to see the world through their eyes. Because empathy is the foundation of that second kind of power, the consent kind. You can't build shared understanding without the capacity to actually understand each other. So I started asking, where are the places in our region that grow empathy? What are the institutions that expand our capacity to see each other? To begin to even try to understand this, we began working to understand how one of the biggest institutions in our region, faith communities, views empathy. How does empathy work itself out from faith into the belonging of our community? Over the past year, we've looked at approximately 200 churches across Northwest Arkansas looking for the language of empathy, the scope of that empathy, and how far does that empathy extend? Who's included when we say love our neighbor, what we found, I'm sorry, is troubling. Our region has a chronically low scope of that empathy, a narrow scope of who counts as their neighbor. I believe this is the result of generations of choices about who we welcome and who we exclude. In season two, the story of northwest Arkansas, we traced power from its origins in our regions to today, and following that power, we tracked who held it, who is excluded, how it was maintained. From indigenous removal to enslavement, to racial terror, the fight for civil rights and sundown towns to the displacement that's happening right now. And through all of it, we asked what did the institutions we created, what did they resist and what did they accommodate? The reality is that Northwest Arkansas, like most of the country, has continued to move towards accommodation. We are very good at going along at choosing comfort over confrontation, and in many, many times the churches have stayed quiet or they've empowered that accommodation. Some of those civic leaders look the other way. Granted, not all of them, but enough to allow material power to operate unchecked. the consent held, and sometimes it simply said, "this is just how things are done here." Season three of the underview is coming and it's about the faith of Northwest Arkansas. We're going to dig deeper to understand where the empathy makers are in our community and how that long arc of power from our origin story to today has shaped how institutions of our region help enable or prevent belonging and placemaking. Because our institutions have a choice, it's the same choice that they've always had. Resistance or accommodation. The prophetic tradition or the comfortable tradition. And the absence of resistance. It's not neutrality, it's consent, it's agreement with the way things are. So here we are in this moment. What do we do? I know I can't control what's happening at the national level, but here in the unsettled Ozarks of northwest Arkansas where I live, my home, this is the kind of work that we can be committed to. I will admit that I didn't go to any of the protests that were held locally here in northwest Arkansas. I know so many did, and as our community, those voices matter. Our voices need to be heard. But for me in this moment, caught between anger and not really being sure what to do. Sometimes it feels like I'm just yelling into the wind.. And my assumption is, is maybe that you feel the same way also. But if culture change indeed comes before political change, then the work of culture making is work that really matters. It's slow work, it's patient work, shifting what seems normal through conversations, stories and relationships that expand our capacity to see each other. Because what's normal today has changed. We've created institutions to help us do this work. Churches, schools, libraries, community centers, our justice systems, those institutions, they follow our lead. They respond to what we require of them, what we will tolerate, what we hold them accountable to. But that is all an outflowing of our ability to find common ground and agreement outside of them. If we get lured towards the extremes, they will follow us there and they'll use whatever power they have, which increasingly seems to be a material power, but it doesn't have to be that way. We have agency in this, but can rebuild our capacity for consent and for civility, we can expand the scope of our empathy. We can widen the circle of who counts as our neighbor. And I'm reminded in our last interview of season two, Barbara Carr, someone whose family story has borne witness to material power across generations. She said that "there is no such thing as wholeness. There's always a slice missing," and I've wrestled with that statement for a very long time now, in those words, there is the admission that this work is not yet finished. We may not be able to achieve the wholeness that we want and the time that we need, however we can be faithful to the practice of it. In last season's interviews with Melissa Horner and Quapaw Nation elders, Barbara Kaiser Collier, and Betty Gaedtke the first people of this land, they began the process of teaching us what this deep relational work can look like. We have the invitation and the ability to pursue it relentlessly, and maybe just maybe it's there that this generational work of wholeness lives and thrives, when we stop shouting louder and begin listening deeper, when we move away from the extremes toward one another, when decrease the need for material power by building the other kind. That power that comes from understanding it is the slow work of expanding who we see as us. And that is the stronger form of power, A power that will endure. That's the path forward together. Not because it's easy, but because the alternative is force. And force is what happens when we've given up on each other. And I do know this. I'm not ready to give up on each other and I don't believe that you are either. This is the underview, an exploration in the shaping of our place.