At Byline Festival the venues heaved with urgency and importance. Panels on Gaza, ‘doughnut economics’, the algorithmic rage of the manosphere, ecological collapse, and creeping authoritarianism offered relentless witness to a world in crisis. Such truth-telling is indispensable. It feels undeniable. It gives shape to shared indignation and a righteous zeal.
Yet by the end of my Saturday visit I sensed another current running beneath the clamour, an exhaustion born of perpetual resistance, a hardening of moral muscles into an oppositional rigidity that, paradoxically, begins to resemble the very forces it rejects; and the single echoing question of the habitual fixer: ‘What do I do?’.
An exchange recounted by Nazir Afzal crystallises the dilemma. The former chief crown prosecutor confided that he had few male friends because “As soon as they say something sexist or misogynist, I tell them to **** off.” The audience laughed, then fell uncomfortably silent. Afzal’s zero-tolerance stance exposes complicity; it also closes the door on transformation. His story is not offered here as a reproach but as a mirror: our instinct to repel harm is right, yet the method can trap us in the dying grammar of domination.
Resistance and its shadow
Oppositional resistance is morally attractive precisely because it clarifies the battlefield: truth against deceit, justice against oppression. Over time, however, a movement that defines itself solely ‘against’ risks becoming over-identified with what it opposes. Muscles of critique strengthen, empathy atrophies. The enemy shrinks to caricature; dialogue collapses into slogan. In Freirean terms, the oppressed risk “becoming oppressors of the oppressors”.
Moreover, resistance often empowers the very structures it contests. Repression breeds counter-repression; censorship drives martyrdom narratives; each new sanction confirms the persecutor’s claim to embattled virtue. As Czech playwright-turned-prime minister Václav Havel warned, power “feeds on every gesture which looks like submission”, but it thrives equally on every gesture that confirms its power – legitimate or not. By locking attention onto the decaying edifice, opposition inadvertently supplies it with oxygen.
From opposition to ‘relational disobedience’
What, then, might a different politics look like, one that resists without reproducing domination? I call one alternative ‘relational disobedience’: a quiet, patient refusal to participate in practices that dehumanise, coupled with a disciplined commitment to remain in relationship, even with those whose views offend. Tronto’s ‘ethic of care’ reminds us that moral life is not merely a matter of judging from afar but of staying in the messy middle, attending, responding and taking responsibility for the effects of our actions. Whitehead’s ‘process philosophy’ adds that reality itself is relationally constituted; every moment is a negotiation between inherited patterns and creative advance. To resist in a processual universe is, therefore, to re-pattern relationships, not simply topple regimes.
Relational disobedience differs from Afzal’s expletive in tone, though not necessarily in moral seriousness. Where opposition shouts “**** off!”, disobedience sometimes says, “Sit down, let us risk a harder conversation.” It refuses complicity with sexism, racism or violence, yet it also refuses to exile the perpetrator from the field of care. Practically this may involve structured dialogue circles, restorative justice processes, or the slow, awkward work of co-operative projects in which people must rely on one another despite difference.
The work of listening
Central to this posture is listening. Audre Lorde cautioned that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”; relentless critique conducted in the vocabulary of domination merely erects a rival mansion. Listening is a different toolset: it suspends the reflex to categorise, allowing hidden fears and unmet needs to surface. Listening is not surrender; it is strategic curiosity. It widens the field of possibilities so that creative responses, legal, artistic, communal, can arise that are unintelligible within the binary scripts of war, cancel culture or algorithmic outrage.
From manifest to manifesting
Here we touch the deeper movement: resisting the manifest world must be complemented by aiding what is manifesting. The manifest world, industrial modernity with its extractive logics, is visibly dying, lurching from crisis to crisis. If our politics remains fixated on opposing its every symptom, we risk tethering our imagination to a corpse. Far more generative is the task of midwifery: discerning and nourishing the still-fragile forms of a kinder civilisation already stirring within community gardens, mutual-aid networks, citizen assemblies, co-operative tech and regenerative art. And this too was present at the festival with sessions on doughnut economics and citizen journalism.
“Hope,” wrote Vaclev Havel, “is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, whatever the outcome.” Relational disobedience enacts this hope. It plants micro-cultures of care inside the cracks of the old order, refusing metrics that flatten value, refusing speech that corrodes dignity, refusing speed that crushes reflection. It rescues politics from performance and re-roots it in presence.
Practicing the new world now
What might this look like after the festival has been packed away? Here are some things we might do:
- Host brave meals. Invite ideological opponents to break bread under a covenant of curiosity. Share personal stories before opinions; agreement is optional, dignity compulsory.
- Seed repair initiatives. Pair activism with trauma-informed spaces where campaigners process grief and prevent burnout, turning outrage into resilient solidarity.
- Create a prototype. Experiment with citizen juries or sociocratic circles in workplaces, schools or neighbourhoods, modelling decision-making premised on voice, equity and iterative learning.
- Create art that listens back. Commission works that ask audiences to stay with complexity rather than delivering cathartic certainty – poetry readings followed by dialogue, participatory theatre that refuses neat endings.
- Slow down metrics. In organisations, complement KPIs with qualitative narratives of mutual flourishing; invite staff to name where targets harm relationships and co-design kinder indicators.
Each practice is small, imperfect and easily dismissed by the machinery of ‘serious’ politics. Yet history suggests that tectonic shifts often incubate in marginal experiments before cascading into consciousness. The point is not immediate victory but trajectory, aligning daily conduct with the kind of society we yearn for, even while the old order shouts louder. The process we use to get the future determines the future we get: division and hatred or healing and care. It took us a while to recognise that belittling or attacking Brexiters might have been easy and gratifying fun, but it wasn’t helpful.
Bylines: after the noise
As a newbie writer for Yorkshire Bylines and first-time visitor to the Byline Festival it seems the great Byline(s) gift is its unflinching honesty: the world is burning, and the arsonists are well funded. Our responsibility is to ensure that such honesty does not calcify into a posture of perpetual combat. Resistance must mature into relational disobedience, and disobedience must widen into acts of cultural midwifery, listening the new world into being.
When next we are tempted, like Afzal, to eject the offender with an expletive, let us pause. Sometimes the door must indeed close to protect the vulnerable. Yet whenever safety allows, we might keep the threshold ajar, trusting that neither the other nor we ourselves are finished products. For in that uncertain doorway, between the manifest and the manifesting, politics is reborn as the art of shared becoming.
