NOTE: I'm sorta in the middle of this post, but I have to go to work, so I'm posting it as is, a bit jumbled, but it's important to me to be thinking this stuff through--
that, is:
how should I, an ordinary person, think and act well in extraordinary times?
(Or, How to be good in bad times?)
History is always happening, every second is new––but there are times when social change is so, um, momentous, we know we are in History with a capital H.
I feel that now, especially living in the town where the police murdered George Floyd. But everywhere there's climate breakdown, Covid, and of course the everpresent ordinary moral and political challenges of being a human being.
Thinking About Thinking
Obviously, no one needs to read or comment on these posts--I am hashing this through for myself.
I am thinking and writing this stuff out because I am living in a city where the social fabric is... mmmm... how to put it?
. . . rearranging itself?
We will be voting in just a few weeks on whether to throw out the police force!
What?
Like, how am I supposed to know if that's a good idea?
Obviously THIS police force is rotten, but what will we replace it with?
Got Ideas?
A couple people recently have said to me that I am overthinking things.
(I asked Penny Cooper, the lead doll, about this and she was flummoxed. She had never heard of overthinking!)
Thinking in itself is no guarantee of action, or right action, that's true enough!
But for me, relying on old habits of thinking ,or relying on intuition based on input from the past, is not adequate in these changing times.
These BIG change times.
For me, thinking is part of/preparation for taking action.
I don't like to be motivated primarily by emotion or unexamined biases, because I've seen how unreliable they can be.
Call me Spock. (Ha, not really, but he was a big influence, with his insistence on rationality as a basis for action.)
I appreciate that Hannah Arendt "attempted in her work [writing/philosophy] to shine the light of intellect on the extreme darkness she lived through [Nazism]".
--New Yorker article, "Beware of Pity: Hannah Arendt and the Power of the Impersonal"
Her essay I wrote about yesterday (and here)––"Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship" (1964) PDF here (about 30 pages)–– wrestles with the way people in Germany went along with Nazi atrocities, even though they didn't believe in them.
“The more you realize that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become,” wrote a journalist about Bosnian atrocities.
[––same New Yorker article as above]
Ordinary People
And those "ordinary people" aren't necessarily OTHER people, they might be us (me).
Oh, (probably, hopefully) we're not war criminals who would come to trial in The Hague;
we're more likely to be the little people who look the other way, or not.
Guilty, if guilty, more likely, of inaction than action.
As an example of an ordinary person in extraordinary times, I want to use Big Boss, who is certainly a Good Person.
IN NO WAY here do I accuse him of anything bad in response to Our Times, not even of inaction to the point of badness.
[Heh. You know I have accused him of being a bad retail manager, but that's not a moral badness!!!]
No. Big Boss is good, and he does good things.
He is, in fact, already extra-ordinary:
he is such a good orator
[and a very tall and good looking Black man, too (people have a bias to grant tall men authority--almost all US presidents were unusually tall)]
he has been talking all over town to groups (school, church, journalist, political) about the need for social justice.
But... I see in him something I see in myself:
A gap between belief and action in extraordinary times and places.
In extraordinary times, we may be called on to do things that are waaay out of our comfort zone. His comfort zone is already bigger than most people's, but it has its limits, and that's where I find the example/mirror.
Yesterday, under the influence of Arendt's article, I asked Big Boss--a fervent Christian––if he had talked about God to any of the people who were living next to the thrift store--people he called "our neighbors."
I said to him, "You told me our neighbors on the street needed to know God has made them FOR A PURPOSE.
I think that kind of awareness--that 'I matter, my life has some bigger purpose that I don't even know'––can be a huge protector against despair, which a lot of people on the street are especially prey too.
You don't even need to believe in God to believe that.
Did you talk to any of them about that?"
And he said no, he hadn't, though he'd wanted to.
"I don't know why I didn't," he said. "I guess I didn't have the nerve."
"Me either," I said. "Not that I'd preach like you, but you know... I didn't do anything more than little things, like give them a chess set.
Not that that's worthless.
"I think the problem was," I said," there's been such a breakdown of social order that the problem is so big and complex, we feel overwhelmed."
"Yes," he said, "If people had done the little good things all along--shared water or chess sets, or even like you, call the city council––we wouldn't be in this situation."
But we are in "this situation".
And it's ongoing.
SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
Big Boss said someone had recommended that he read about George Whitefield, the preacher of the Great Awakening in the 1700s. (Wikipedia)
Uh, weird choice, but okay...
Along with examples of everyday (banal) evil we need examples of everyday (banal) goodness,
but ALSO of extraordinary goodness.
(I don't know if I'd call Whitefield good, but he certainly was extraordinarily ACTIVE among ordinary people.)
What's a good mirror?
I really don't like to use Nazi Germany as an example of anything, because it's become so Hollywoodized--that is, it feels so extreme, the evil is glamorized, and the heroism too––it doesn't seem to apply to us.
But while the end was extreme, the mechanisms in play are things I see around me and in my own self---including how hard it is to see one's own biases--and to think one's way into new information... new ways of thinking and acting.
Like seeing one's own elbow, you have to use a mirror.
Nazism is something of a fun house mirror, too distorted by Indiana Jones Nazis as Evil to reflect our times;
but the reality of it was built up of little, everyday actions, or inaction, not by Hollywood Halloween ghouls.
How do (did) people conduct little, everyday actions--there's a useful mirror.
I've always appreciated Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Nazi funcionaries,
because that's where I see most evil happening--in banal decisions, not Hollywood heroism.
Goodness, too, can be banal--obvious, boring, unoriginal... like I found my auntie boring when I was a teenager.
Often, moral choice is on the level of the question,
Do you change the toilet roll when it runs out, or do you leave it for the next person?
Little stuff, that builds up habits of thought and action.
Though is goodness ever "unoriginal"--one of the definitions of banal?
Um. Yes. Goodness can be automatic systems set up for the general good--like traffic laws. People have to think them through, so they are helpful and so other people will follow them, seeing their helpfulness.
And they have to be enforced, by people whom everyone (or most everyone) agrees are reasonable and acceptable agents of the law.
And what I'm seeing now (or, actually what I'm hearing) in my city is that the traffic laws are starting to fray.
I CAN HEAR THE FRAY
Here's what:
I'm house sitting in a busy area.
Sometime after the murder of George Floyd, people started to drag race in the main avenue, late at night.
This drag racing has continued, as the police force has dwindled. The police now prioritize 911 emergency calls, and often don't have enough staff to do banal policing.
Last night, Friday, roaring motor engines kept me awake until 2 a.m.
So it's unexpected fall outs like that--who knew the cops murdering George Floyd would lead to drag racing?
And people selling drugs & sex in the open outside my workplace.
And of course we have Covid and its effects---container ships backed up--the other day I noticed the grocery store shelves were a bit scant of supplies...
And climate change...
The breakdown of public order can let all sorts of cats out of all sorts of bags...
It is also a time of OPPORTUNITY.
When fabric frays, other patterns can emerge from behind--like ...what do you call a hidden image behind another image?
Anyway--a GOOD new order could emerge. But not automatically.
I am in no way up for creating a good new order!
Geez. Who is???
But at any rate, I am thinking about it.
____________________________________
Resist Early, Resist Often
Arendt wrote about people going along with the demands of a dictatorship giving the reason that doing so would avoid worse things happening, ". . . with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse––until a stage was reached [in Nazi dictatorship] where nothing worse could possibly have happened."
She wrote:
"We see here how unwilling the human mind is to face realities which in one way or another contradict totally its framework of reference.
Unfortunately, it seems to be much easier to condition human behavior and to make people conduct themselves in the most unexpected and outrageous behavior,
than it is to persuade anybody to learn from experience, as the saying goes;
that is, to start thinking and judging instead of applying categories and formulas which are deeply ingrained in our mind, but whose basis of experience has been long forgotten and whose plausibility resides in their intellectual consistency rather than in their adequacy to actual events."
