Ethics as a liv(ing) experience

“Can an institution reflect my values?" Farhan M. asked in that big room, back in 2019.

The question echoed over the years, in my very different environments. As a sense of time and place kept on visibly changing, rooted in the knowledge that even our own identity is dynamic and subject to the natural fluidity of our own Sense of Self and “imagined communities”, I can’t help thinking that no single organisation, collective, institution, can reflect our own values fully (when you haven't created it yourself first hand). Because #values are generally quite encompassing across the board; but the ambition of how we wish to express each one of our values, how we strive to see them projected within our family, community, associates, is inevitably going to look substantially different for each one of us.

Take Respect. We all wish to be respected. We all thrive to show respect of other people’s spaces, beliefs, uniqueness. But the minute we perceive as disrespectful something another person is enacting as their own rituals or home habits - and only then, do we question what representations, in actual fact, embody a form of disrespect to us personally.

This, in essence, is the intrinsic difficulty in nurturing the full potential of diversity.

Now, same goes with ethics. The ethics of a certain group or community may be more than familiar to each member of that group, in form of narrative, wording, concept. However, ethics is something which pops up continuously in our daily lives. Do I help my neighbour through their difficult day and miss my family lunch or needed rest (which will enable me to function efficiently tomorrow)? Do I respond to my child’s need to just cuddle as feeling fragile, and miss my important meeting? Do I leave the position I truly love, to avoid exposing other fragilities of those people’s wrongdoings? Do I call out harassment in order not to damage a crucial Civil Society organisation from potential reputational attacks? This is when our value scale challenges us and when our own ethics are put to test.

When I was a teenager, they used to call us “rebels”. Later, society reframed us as “activists”. I have recently heard it as “human rights defenders”. And I still had to think about what it meant to me and what I actually wish to do for a greater good. It is a way of life that never leaves us, no matter what position we occupy.

Today, I was invited to hear about a process my collective of activists is going through within the organisation I formerly chaired. The process started when I resigned from a position that allowed me to promote some needed minor changes, and continued to contribute as a regular backstage associate. Our absence is sometimes necessary to trigger change; our silence, is sometimes also a form of activism. And this absence could have been in my professional environment, in a job, within a community. In my case, retreating from environments over the last 3 years has been about self-protection and a set of ethics which I am still grappling with.

As a Capacity Building professional at core, I feel less hurt today. Because I am proud of my collective's process… I am proud of their questioning ethics, of developing stronger values. It's what I call growth.