Loving Corrections

June 3, 2024
In this refreshing and earnest meditation, bestseller Brown (Emergent Strategy) draws on her work helping to reconcile differences in activist circles to ruminate on unhelpful patterns she has observed in those communities. These range from cannabis overuse and internet addiction to the heated debates that can break out when pro-Israel liberals are involved in organizations with anticolonial values. To disrupt these patterns and mediate conflict, Brown proposes a strategy of “loving correction”—a tactic of “checking in” rather than calling out or canceling, which she most saliently describes as “learning to attend to the quality of connection,” and most evocatively demonstrates via an extended transcript of a conversation between herself and her sisters as they resolve family conflict. Throughout, Brown both continues in her project of composing something like Robert’s Rules of Order for modern progressives and adds depth to her theory of emergent strategy, which posits a state of interdependence in humanity’s shared mental landscape (“In the same way we have lost so many precious and unique species... we are losing valuable cultural gifts and distinctions, losing our capacity to understand which differences are good and healthy for us, and which are too dangerous to tolerate”). Organizers should take note.