Just back from PRIDE in Brighton with our kids. So great to see so much celebration: of diversity, of partying, of doing things differently and having fun. Creativity and pleasure and colour and experimentation; and people doing it and other people watching it and everyone enjoying everyone else doing things they love.
It's such a million miles away from so much of what's going on in the world today: walls, fear, wars, people fighting other people and getting scared of things that are different and new. Brexit. Retreating back into our homeland island out of fear of foreigners coming over and destroying what 'ours'.
In recent years, some psychologists have talked about their being two basic forces, two things that we strive for: 'approach' and 'avoidance'. Approach is about going out in the world. About learning and growing and diversity and fun. It's about moving towards things--things that we might not fully know--and embracing them in all their otherness. And then there's avoidance, which is about keeping away from things. Pushing things back. Trying to protect what's out. Pride and Brexit. Love and fear. Expansion and contraction.
Of course, we need both. We need to learn to love and grow; but if a rabid lion is coming at us, it doesnt do much good to embrace it with a welcoming grin. We need to protect ourselves and the ones we love. We need to have the ability to shut down. But there's reasons, psychologically, why taking an avoidance stance towards life tends to cause more problems than an approach one; and that's well supported by the psychological evidence. For instance, people who are more avoidant tend to have poorer mental health, and also tend to do less well in therapy.
So why does avoidance get trumped by approach? First, if you're focused on avoiding things, there's no real way of knowing when you've got to an endpoint. A person striving for more friends, for instance, can know when they've achieved that goal. But a person trying to avoid loneliness can never fully know if they've achieved that, as there's always the possibility that it'll return. Second, closely linked to this, we're less likely to be successful in achieving avoidance goals because the warded off state, in most instances, simply can't be eradicated. So you can try and 'get rid of foreigners', but you're never going to fully manage it: there's always that lurking feeling that it's never fully done. Third, the means towards avoiding something is often less clear than the means towards approaching something. How do I avoid loneliness, for instance, when there are so many different ways in which it might be evoked? It's like trying to hold back the tide. By contrast, if I'm trying to achieve something, I can create plans and goals and work out a way of doing it. Fourth, if I'm trying to get TO somewhere, there's likely to be a boost to my self esteem when I get there. But successful avoidance is unlikely to leave me with a sense of achievement. Finally, trying to avoid things is inherently problematic because it requires us to call to mind the thing we want to avoid, hence making it more salient. If I want to get rid of foreigners, for instance, I have to think of them, and then that gets me more fixated on what I'm afraid of.
So while we all get scared of things, and all want to be avoidant at times; it's a philosophy of approach that is generally better for us--and almost certainly for the people and the world that we're engaging with. And I do believe, perhaps naively, that over time our world will move in the direction of approach. I think it's a natural thing because, at the end of the day, avoidance so often just doesn't get us anywhere. Ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, there's no way that the police would have had a float at the PRIDE parade. But who does that benefit? Who gets something out of it? By contrast, today, seeing the lorries full of gay and lesbian police officers: they're having a great time, the crowds are having a great time watching them. They're off to a party. Is there really, any, sense at all in winding the clock back?
I guess, ultimately, what I'm trying to say here is that there's a good, strong, logical argument for why things like PRIDE and celebrating diversity make so much more sense than things like Trump's wall and ethnophobia. It's not just about being nice and sweet to people and rainbow flags, it's about a rigorous philosophy and ethic of what makes this place a better place for us all.