INACTION AS COMPLICITY: What's Enough?
Viewing newly accepted levels of violence in the U.S. is overwhelming and frightening. A few people have posted lists of things we can do to help, but I wonder if, for many people, it's asking too much. This might be a controversial view at a time when it feels like we all need to get on board to shift the world back to a less selfish and violent place, but the perspective that we all are complicit if we don't act might do more harm than good.
Martin Luther King Jr. expressed the sentiment in Stride Toward Freedom: "He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." However, the paragraph before gives that statement context: fighting evil includes "withdrawing our coöperation from an evil system" in the bus boycott. They didn't just stop riding the bus, but people organized carpools, and cab drivers charged the price of bus fare to Black passengers, and others collected money. He also said: "Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest." The type of work we do to help has to suit our capacity.
If we follow Peter Singer's argument for action: "If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it," it allows us some wiggle room. It's not just about the courage to be on the front-line, but about our prediction of our own effectiveness in the situation (if it's in our power). Will protesting actually work? It also allows for self-preservation, and we've seen what happens to people just trying to drive away from a protest site or trying to protect others. But Singer doesn't let us duck out of doing something from a safe distance. The context of his argument persuades us to donate to charity, which is safe and easy. Is that enough when danger is at the door? And how do we predict our level of effectiveness and sacrifice?
I've been to relatively safe environmental protests over the years, but this is different. I'd like to be a person who stands in the way, but I don't think I am. My sense of self-preservation overrides any impetus to protect others (except for my kids), and that feels decidedly selfish. Except it feels less of a choice than just what is. To get some temporal distance from it all, if Anne Frank knocked on the door, and we said "No" for fear of our family's safety, would we be complicit in her death? Letting a family move into the attic is incredibly courageous and noble, but Singer appears to allow the defense of protecting ourselves from harm if we can't manage in the face of potential danger. I'd like to think I'd open the door wide, but I'm pretty sure I'd meekly apologize from a crack at the threshold. Even so, the people complicit in her death were the soldiers who took her, those who ran the camps rife with disease, and those who gave the orders all down the chain of command. Those people deserve the internal suffering that comes with causing harm. This gets complicated by the reality that some soldiers following orders possibly also did it to save their own lives. When danger was further away, I might have argued that closing the door to a family in need is immoral. Maybe it's just my own rationalization, but now I'm less convinced that acting for preservation of self and family over others, acting cowardly, is necessarily immoral despite the lack of virtue. Something like that.
Putting that can of worms aside, I worry that we're hoping to rouse people to action by provoking guilt, which can backfire. Guilt for not doing enough can be motivating, but it can also turn dark and provoke people to double down on their behaviour despite their original stance. That can sometimes lead to rationalizations to excuse what we've done. A child might argue that, "Sure I broke his window, but his house was already falling apart, so what does it matter?" An adult might argue, "They should have complied" or "They shouldn't be here anyway." If someone in a state of overwhelm feels the need to justify their inaction, any stance that suggests the victims deserved the abuse can help them relieve that inner turmoil. It may not be useful to provoke guilt when it's on top of fear and overwhelm.
We don't need everybody to do all the things. The people in Minneapolis came out in full force with 30-50,000 people out on January 23rd. That's 2-3 times the suggested 3.5% of a population to make a difference. These protests are next level both with individuals and businesses. Author Margaret Killjoy wrote,
"I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what's happening here. … It's genuinely a leaderless (or leaderful) movement, decentralized in a way that the state is absolutely unequipped to handle. … Another friend put it to me like this: 'ICE has made the classic Nazi mistake. They've invaded a winter people in the winter.' I don't want to paint a rosy picture, because it's a city under siege. People are being abducted all the time. One person told me about watching 1-2 abductions a day, just in her own work following ICE. But when I asked an organizer what they wanted to see out of press coverage, they told me they wanted people to see the beautiful things they are building here, and not just the worst stories of the worst of ICE's crimes. What people are doing here is beautiful. It's a tragic beauty, but a real one. … I've never seen a population more united."
Avoiding the fray doesn't determine complicity. That's not to say be complacent, but neither should we feel ashamed if we can't bear to be on the front lines. We have to find our own capacity to act.
"Fear is a very contagious emotion. It cripples societies. When societies live in fear, nobody does anything because everybody's too frightened to do something. But courage is contagious. Very contagious." ~ Betty Williams
GENEROSITY AND COURAGE
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| Aristotle's golden mean illustrated by Austin Kleon |
I typically appreciate videos and articles from Robert Reich, but most of the things in his list of things to do to prevent being complicit require an unacknowledged level of courage and effort to pressure heads of corporations, universities, and organizations to act. A New Hampshire bishop recently urged his clergy to draw up their wills for "a new era of martyrdom." These are laudable sentiments, but jeez!! People can't always just shake off their fear and start behaving in ways completely unfamiliar to them. I'm good at generosity, but I suck at courage, so I've ranked potentially helpful actions by the level of time and energy commitment they might take and the level of safety, more or less, they might afford. I mainly land in that second camp below, but there is no shame in the fourth category, either. Choose your adventure!
1. Difficult and Higher Risk → Boots on the ground protest, observe, and document: go to where ICE is kidnapping people and get between the predator and target; go towards the danger to film; write/create controversial things from within the US; mark the names of people where they were taken or murdered like an ad hoc Stolperstein; mobilize your employers, organization, university, or congregation; take an EMT course to learn how to treat tear gas and gunshot wounds on site; fight to maintain voters' rights…
2. Difficult but Safer → Protest in states where ICE hasn't yet infiltrated; refuse to shop from complicit corporations (it's hard because there are so many); create in safer spaces by writing, painting, performing*… Art matters in times of upheaval: Rene Magritte, who lost his mother to suicide and lived through both world wars, called painting "a counter-offensive."
3. Easier but Higher Risk → Refuse to answer questions about who lives in your neighbourhood; share the news with neighbours and colleagues who still see some merit to this faux immigration sweep…
4. Easier and Safer → If you're outside the US, shop locally; boycott the World Cup and Olympics; stay aware; write to your representative or sign a petition; post on social media to raise awareness and solidarity (clicktivism can help); re-post event times and locations; donate what you can to candidates who can flip their seat or to families in need; hang a poster of Norman Rockwell's "Spirit of America" or put it on a shirt; smile at your neighbour or offer tiny acts of kindness and compassion to help each other; vote the monsters out when the time comes; wear a button, hat, shirt, or nails to show solidarity…
It's really hard to admit that it was too hard for us to help in the ways we thought were necessary so we did nothing. All of these tactics are necessary, but they're not necessary for each of us to do.
It's also vital to replenish. If we're tired or hungry, all the terrifying news reports hit harder. Feeling like part of the solution reduces a sense of powerlessness, but it's also necessary to sleep and eat. It doesn't help the cause to stay up late to watch every angle of every video. We don't all have the "power of facing unpleasant facts," something George Orwell recognized made him different and well-suited to writing. For many, if not most people, it's too hard to face the calamity directly. We don't need to see the videos to know this needs to be stopped. Look for good news as well. "Find the helpers" is not a message to lean back, but that this is a good vs evil fight, and there is still a lot of good in the world. It's also reenergizing to find joy to remind us what we're working towards. It's okay to enjoy our lives while suffering is in the world. Suffering will always be there, and avoiding pleasures doesn't make other people's lives better. Finally, if you're aware of the problem but surrounded by people who seem oblivious or in collusion, seek out support groups.
"Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. The warrior's approach is to say 'yes' to life." ~ Joseph Campbell
BE A FORCE FOR GOOD
Up against a force of evil this powerful, quieter actions can feel like throwing a cup of water at a forest fire. But if we all do it and keep doing it, we can be the light that conquers the darkness.
Years ago I watched a documentary about Bernice Johnson Reagon, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, in which she was asked about what to do with anti-Black song lyrics out there. Her response was not to censor them, but to make sure to put something else out there in the airwaves. It reminded me of Tolstoy's story "The Godson" about a boy who encounters evil and learns he can't stop it with violence or outrun it or hide from it. All he can do is to add more love to the world to help to balance things out a little. Evil never leaves, so we always have to be there to counter it. Many of us have lived a very long time without having to face it so closely.
An interesting 2004 study on airline accidents requiring evacuation found that people in danger tend to have one of three reactions: flight, flight, and freeze. 10-15% calmly escape; 10-15% flip out with counterproductive behaviours that adds to the danger, and 70-80% are stunned, bewildered, and have such impaired reasoning that they're unable to follow simple instructions. "Shock is so disorienting, it doesn't allow us to think clearly." In light of this, we need to mentally prepare our response, not just to provoke some action, but to avoid acting rashly. That could include Epictetus' negative meditations: Take a moment daily to imagine the best action you're likely able to take when observing or confronted with a threat. We have to thaw out the 70-80% who are too petrified to at least be able to better care for themselves and their families. "Don't succumb to fear," as Reich suggests, isn't enough; it takes practice to be ready when people knock at the door.
Put something good out there and highlight others who do the same, and don't add to the evil. In other words, don't take the bait.
Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote,
"The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights for the Black population in the U.S. He accepted it “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president sixty years later, saying that “what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”
According to The King Center,
"Dr. King believed that the age-old tradition of hating one’s opponents was not only immoral, but bad strategy, which perpetuated the cycle of revenge and retaliation. Only nonviolence, he believed, had the power to break the cycle of retributive violence and create lasting peace through reconciliation."
After a bomb was thrown into his house in 1956, MLK said,
"If you have weapons, take them home; if you do not have them, please do not seek to get them. We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. … We must meet hate with love."
A few years ago, Judith Butler was on Philosophy Talk to argue in favour of non-violent resistance. They discussed how Angela Davis changed her more militant views after Ferguson and said we need to lay down guns and think of the world we want to build. Loosely paraphrased, Butler says that if we want a less violent, exploitative world, we have to enact principles we hope to realize. Non-violent tactics include protests, blocking transportation, strikes, and disrupting the economy. It's an enormous inconvenience and a way of saying this is NOT business as usual. There are disruptive consequences, but they're not violent. We need to work with hate in such a way as to not replicate the enemy we're resisting, otherwise we lose the battle.
"It's most beautiful when police lay down their arms. That's when everyone cries. When solidarity happens between police and the populace, that's the beginning of a different order when we see that systems we thought were closed are really open."
I won't hold my breath on that last bit, but absolutely we need to reconfigure the policies of the oppressor. Helpless in the face of this much violence, but that can be reduced with small, everyday actions. Let's see what we can do.
________
*Lyrics to Sasha Allen's song:
Tell me what terrorism looks like
Does it have color, a creed, or a name?
I think terrorism is the anger that it takes to kill a stranger
for the simple act of trying to drive away.And I'll tell you what terrorism looks like
It's a sickness we cannot seem to outgrow
It's shooting point blank range into someone's face
when you don't even have the guts to show your own.And I do not say it to be shocking. It is simple; it is true,
that where good once stood, a red river now runs through,
and they will take and take and take until there's nothing left to give.
And if that's not terrorism then what is?And terrorism loves to repeat history
Terrorism says go door to door
And terrorism bets on you and me and all the people
acting like we've never heard that phrase beforeCause terrorists call human being animals
They kidnap, kill, and sit above the law
And terrorism feeds off of your own indoctrination
And not caring which side of history you're onAnd I do not say it to be shocking It should simply be said,
that where good once stood, a river now runs red
and "What is done cannot be undone,
But one can prevent it from happening again."
That final quote is from Anne Frank. It once seemed so obvious to most of the world that this should never happen again. It's a reminder how easily our rights and democracy can slip away if we're not standing on guard for thee.
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