[008] "They Can Slowly Learn To Object"
Nov. v3: On what separates loyalists from dissidents, and how to be "guests in our bodies"
Hello, Tired Ones,
Another week, another sign of life, another reason that showing up’s still worth it.
In my work as a writer and designer for culture change, I come across important stories about progress that’s actually working for people.
These are stories that refuse the false choice: sweet indulgence, or the bitter pill.
They help us to remember: before there was bureaucratic care, or self-care, there was simply care.
So come on in, sit down. For the next few minutes at least, there’s no rush. It’s a new week, after all.
November's care workers: You, showing up through crises
“Now that we are guests in our bodies, how do we survive?”
Sourcing notes: via Milad B. Fakurian on Unsplash.
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For the last week, I was writing a year-end letter to my friends and family. Re-stringing the year that was, the good news and the bad—like my engagement, and my Mom's passing, respectively. I thought it might take me a day or two, but I'm still not done.
Any time I need to account for my past, even the good parts, I tend to crumble (at least a little bit).
It makes sense, when I think about it. I can't reveal any story I'm proud of without revealing to myself that base desire, to be seen otherwise.
A song, for pairing
"dlp 1.1" by William Basinski, from the album The Disintegration Loops I (2002).
An American avant-garde composer finds an entire movement in an old loop of analog tape, which crumbles to literal dust before our very ears. Listen to more while you read.
A healthy idea, to chew on
“History Will Judge the Complicit” by Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic, July/August 2020 issue.
On the curious story of two childhood friends in East Germany—Markus Wolf, the Soviet careerist, and Wolfgang Leonhand, the collaborator-turned-dissident—and the search for a theory of complicity:
Both men could see the gap between propaganda and reality. Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals. Why? [...]
Separately, each man’s story makes sense. But when examined together, they require some deeper explanation. Until March 1949, Leonhard’s and Wolf’s biographies were strikingly similar. Both grew up inside the Soviet system. Both were educated in Communist ideology, and both had the same values. Both knew that the party was undermining those values. Both knew that the system, allegedly built to promote equality, was deeply unequal, profoundly unfair, and very cruel. Like their counterparts in so many other times and places, both men could plainly see the gap between propaganda and reality. Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator, while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals. Why?
In English, the word collaborator has a double meaning. A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense. But the other definition of collaborator, relevant here, is different: someone who works with the enemy, with the occupying power, with the dictatorial regime. […]
Since the Second World War, historians and political scientists have tried to explain why some people in extreme circumstances become collaborators and others do not. The late Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffmann had firsthand knowledge of the subject—as a child, he and his mother hid from the Nazis in Lamalou-les-Bains, a village in the south of France. But he was modest about his own conclusions, noting that “a careful historian would have—almost—to write a huge series of case histories; for there seem to have been almost as many collaborationisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration.” [...]
Like Hoffmann, Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, wrote about collaboration from personal experience. An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, serving his country’s Communist government. Only in 1951 did he defect, denounce the regime, and dissect his experience… Miłosz understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation. To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.” Miłosz is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants, the way that it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas.
We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires. I was reminded of this recently when I visited Marianne Birthler in her light-filled apartment in Berlin. During the 1980s, Birthler was one of a very small number of active dissidents in East Germany; later, in reunified Germany, she spent more than a decade running the Stasi archive, the collection of former East German secret-police files. I asked her whether she could identify among her cohort a set of circumstances that had inclined some people to collaborate with the Stasi.
She was put off by the question. Collaboration wasn’t interesting, Birthler told me. Almost everyone was a collaborator; 99 percent of East Germans collaborated. If they weren’t working with the Stasi, then they were working with the party, or with the system more generally. Much more interesting—and far harder to explain—was the genuinely mysterious question of “why people went against the regime.” The puzzle is not why Markus Wolf remained in East Germany, in other words, but why Wolfgang Leonhard did not. […]
So I asked [Birthler] about dissidence instead: When all of your friends, all of your teachers, and all of your employers are firmly behind the system, how do you find the courage to oppose it? In her answer, Birthler resisted the use of the word courage; just as people can adapt to corruption or immorality, she told me, they can slowly learn to object as well. The choice to become a dissident can easily be the result of “a number of small decisions that you take”—to absent yourself from the May Day parade, for example, or not to sing the words of the party hymn. And then, one day, you find yourself irrevocably on the other side. Often, this process involves role models. You see people whom you admire, and you want to be like them. It can even be “selfish.” “You want to do something for yourself,” Birthler said, “to respect yourself.” [...]
If, as Stanley Hoffmann wrote, the honest historian would have to speak of “collaborationisms,” because the phenomenon comes in so many variations, the same is true of dissidence, which should probably be described as “dissidences.” People can suddenly change their minds because of spontaneous intellectual revelations like the one Wolfgang Leonhard had... They can also be persuaded by outside events: rapid political changes, for example. Awareness that the regime had lost its legitimacy is part of what made Harald Jaeger, an obscure and until that moment completely loyal East German border guard, decide on the night of November 9, 1989, to lift the gates and let his fellow citizens walk through the Berlin Wall—a decision that led, over the next days and months, to the end of East Germany itself. Jaeger’s decision was not planned; it was a spontaneous response to the fearlessness of the crowd. “Their will was so great,” he said years later, of those demanding to cross into West Berlin, “there was no other alternative than to open the border.”
But these things are all intertwined, and not easy to disentangle. The personal, the political, the intellectual, and the historical combine differently within every human brain, and the outcomes can be unpredictable. Leonhard’s “sudden” revelation may have been building for years, perhaps since his mother’s arrest. Jaeger was moved by the grandeur of the historical moment on that night in November, but he also had more petty concerns: He was annoyed at his boss, who had not given him clear instructions about what to do. [...]
I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.
A way forward, to freeze for later
Almost Everyone Was A Collaborator—but... They Can Slowly Learn To Object.
There really are too many psychologies of collaboration to come up with tidy explanations for why people act against their values. Applebaum, the author of the piece, names at least seven archetypes—which she uses as subject headings while litigating the enablers within today’s Republican party:
We can use this moment to achieve great things. [...]
We can protect the country from the president. [...]
I, personally, will benefit. [...]
I must remain close to power. [...]
LOL nothing matters. [...]
My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse. [...]
I am afraid to speak out. [...]
In asking, "How come collaborators be collaborating?" the vaunted social scientists cited here are asking a question that's kind of naive at its core. I mean, it's hilarious that they spent entire careers investigating a question that didn't stand up to the least bit of scrutiny from a grassroots activist. After all, said the East German dissident Birthler, collaboration wasn't a deviance in her time. It was the daily norm. The majority weren't innocent. They were complicit.
Instead of crusading to change the more-powerful “others,” what if I turned that energy towards investigating myself? Something important changes when you look at the question of dissidence—“why people went against the regime”—as the phenomenon that matters. It kind of takes the mindset of White-liberal social change, and turns it on its head.
Over the summer, I followed a moving story that evokes this presumption of complicity. It began when the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation released a four-sentence statement about "[standing] in solidarity with the Black community." That prompted thirty poets, mostly former fellows of the foundation, to respond with an open letter of their own. It described a history of harmful practices towards Chicago’s local communities, among others, and made a powerful call to action for equity. But what most caught my eye was the response of poet Phillip B. Williams to the call-out. Speaking as a fellow who had been enriched by the foundation, he apologized for the ways he had enabled their harm. Rather than focusing on a call for corrective action by the foundation, he wanted to commit to five correctives of his own. He wrote:
I see this [apology] as working in tandem with a document that seeks to make a change but has not yet proven that those at the helm understand the figurative blood on our hands. [...]
I will not denounce anyone who has decided to remain in the counting for the fellowship. That's not my ministry and with what authority do I have to say not to apply? Get your money. Support yourselves. Pay your bills. Help your family. But please do not become loyalists. [...]
I’m not going to die a living death over the Poetry Foundation. I refuse to continue extending this institution’s will as my own. Reforming it will not stop my real and surreal death, or yours. I don’t want to save [the Foundation], which is merely a microcosm of America's obsession with power, capitalism, and privilege. I cannot keep allowing a place that means nothing to me to push me into a strange social death as I try to keep it alive in lieu of everything I believe in. We are already too small for this. No more insider bullshit. No more crews. Everything has to be open. I want to save myself. I hope you all understand and accept my apology.
Sourcing notes: Photo via “Letter of Apology from a Ruth Lilly Fellow” with additional commentary from Stacey Park.
It's easy enough for me to object to other people's lies, hypocrisies and indecencies. It's much harder to object to my own. Maybe decent people are the simply the ones who are intimately familiar with all the ways they are not. That's what I see in Williams' letter. I see him rejecting purity politics, and making the effort to replace it with something much more elegant: humility. Can I honestly claim to be above the "crews" and "insider bullshit"? I may not serve beneath the regime of Eastern Germany or Vichy France, but I do enjoy abundance within a settler nation—one made rich thanks to centuries of violations to their own founding treaties. (But that's a conversation for next week.)
Almost everyone was a collaborator. But they can slowly learn to object.
A poem, to cleanse the palate
“Europa Nostra” by Nathalie Handal, first published in The Irish Times, Mar. 11, 2017.
It begins:
Now that we are guests in our bodies, how do we survive?
On surviving "the past," and all the ways we return there:
Bina stole prayers from forgotten bodies.
Saba held the sound of the drums as if it were breaths.
Chinelo kept the sun in a folded leaf under a mattress.
Roya kept the shadow of the Caspian Sea in the man who needed her.
Mykola dreamed a mystery turned cruel by another dream.
Maybe the past is the beginning and return is staying absent.
Meanwhile, when anyone says toughen up,
look at them until they fade.
Something sweet, for the road
And now, a very happy baby—’rushing in.’
Sourcing notes: via @nanammar (TikTok).
A question, til next time
Last week, I asked “What are you doing to avoid the even-sadder desk lunch?” Here's some of what I heard back:
Courtney says: "Today, I will spend my lunch hour driving to campus while listening to an audiobook. I also like to go for a walk, and either listen to a podcast or leave the headphones at home to give my attention a break.”
That reminded me: “I've been trying to leave my headphones at home, too. I find it helps just listening to the sounds around me as if it were important information I was following - it really brings me back into the world. Sometimes I even get a smile from a cute little kid!”
Meanwhile, Jay has been getting out on his balcony - but it’s reportedly “getting collllddd.”
I’m making a promo push this week. If you know someone who would benefit from reading, please forward it along!
That's all for this week.
Remember: Drink when you're thirsty, nap when you can.
Kind regards,
Chris Connolly
Manager, Personalized Care
(Acting Director, Standardized Care)
Humane Resources Division
The Dept. of Emotional Labour