Late last century I figured out that I needed to work on a job dedicated to making the world a better place. I know not everyone can find such a job if they try. I appreciate all the other useful jobs that millions of people do -- if not the useless and destructive ones that millions of other people do. But I do want people to use some of their spare time to help out with the cratering world. In every moment of the past quarter century there have been people diligently creating catastrophes -- wars, ecosystemic destruction, mass incarceration, poverty, etc. -- and yet there have been moments in which people in my corner of the world have increasingly said things to me along the lines of "Wow it seems like maybe soon I'll need to ask you about that activism stuff."
A newly expanded book called The Evil of Banality by Elizabeth Minnich looks at how people come to do horrific things like genocides, but also how they allow horrible things to gradually develop. I'm thinking of the centuries-long but ever accelerating shifting of U.S. governmental power to Congress's executive, or the growth of the military industrial complex, or the normalization of animosity toward immigrants. Minnich's analysis is complex, but puts a lot of weight on the failure to think. Mass murder may often require a failure to think about the lives of the victims. Members of militaries are conditioned to kill without thinking, and often think about it with great suffering only afterwards. Sitting back and allowing a president to claim the power to imprison anyone may similarly require a failure to think about the lives of the first victims of that policy, as well as a failure to realize that one of the future lives may be your own -- as well as a failure to know one's potential and strategy for changing things. Supporting a genocide in Gaza with the argument that you are somehow thereby precisely opposing a genocide 80 years earlier in Europe may require a failure to think seriously about either genocide, or at least one of them.
Minnich looks into all variety of propaganda techniques, distractions, base motivations, careerism, obedience as a form of avoiding responsibility, obsession with a goal, etc., but puts a focus on denial, on refusal or failure to focus the mind. I think of Trump and gang speaking about the suffering of war victims in Ukraine while speaking and acting as if Palestinians were more a disease than a population. I think of authors cited in Minnich's book, like Samantha Power, pontificating about past genocides, while dutifully working for a government actively arming and supporting one. I think of all the editors and producers in U.S. media who 10 or 20 years ago scorned and mocked warnings of creeping fascism. I think of global broiling deniers. Minnich points to the strategy employed by Gandhi of nonviolently suffering abuse until those committing it were forced to think about it.
To the extent that this notion of failure to think seems helpful -- and I believe it is a great extent -- I would suggest two categories of it. The first is the one Minnich examines. She describes a prison guard who has abused prisoners who later regrets or objects to such abuse as "having returned to reflective thought." But said guard has returned to reflective thought within a culture that contains widespread understanding that what he has done is awful, understanding of which said guard had been aware all the time but had chosen to avoid or overrule. If, on the other hand, the same prison guard were to begin working for the abolition of incarceration entirely, or an organized popular refusal to consume fossil fuels, or the elimination of the livestock industry, or the dismantling of all nuclear weapons, he would probably be described more as engaging in creative thought than returning to reflective thought. If he were to propose the restoration of plantation slavery or theocracy, he would probably not be described only as failing to think about the suffering that would be created but also as proposing something so old that it's new. If -- to find a middle-ground that blurs the distinction I have in mind -- he were to suggest that his state in the United States at long last eliminate the 13th Amendment-like exception for slavery as criminal punishment that his state's constitution establishes or fails to ban, he would be either traveling to or returning to an idea that some are aware of and others not.
I'd like to live in a world in which someone might be said to have returned to reflective thinking when he or she ceased harming non-human creatures as well as human ones. Most of us don't live in that world right now. And yet it still requires a certain failure to think if you are to fail to work for the creation of that world. If engaging in slavery like others around you centuries ago was a failure to think, then phoning the cops today on someone suspiciously holding a peace sign whom you've just passed in your gas-guzzling SUV, cranking up the AC, and stuffing a hamburger in your mouth may also involve a failure to think.
Minnich writes about the attentistes in France under Nazi occupation, the people who wanted to wait and see what the Nazis might do before organizing any resistance to it. I imagine Senator Chuck Schumer dreaming of a team's captain jersey for the Attentistes, the new mascot for Columbia University. But those waiting and seeing whether we can survive nuclear weapons a bit longer or whether the collapsing environment collapses to a point of uninhabitability or whether shifting ever more government spending to war creates wars we don't survive -- all of these are also attentistes.
Minnich counsels pre-developing a culture of independence and resistance, conditioning oneself with good habits, but being prepared to think clearly in times of crisis. Whether we call them attentistes or unthinkers or the apathetic, the vast majority of people who do nothing in the way of civic participation beyond voting -- the people who say they are "not political" or "not an activist" -- always have the chance to get involved, by small or large steps. There is a first day for everything. And for anyone thinking, there is no time of non-crisis.
To people considering whether the moment has finally come to do something, I recommend a new book by Ralph Nader called Civic Self-Respect. Nader is in agreement with Minnich that how we behave -- as individuals and as organizations -- leading up to a crisis impacts how we behave in that crisis. Nader throws another term into the mix: idiots:
"Historians say 495 to 529 BCE, the time of the statesman Pericles, was the golden age of ancient Athenian democracy. The men (women were not allowed to vote, though they found ways to be influential) made an important distinction between Athenians who behaved as 'public citizens,' caring for and engaging in the city-state of some forty-five thousand voters, and those who cared only for themselves. The latter were called 'idiots,' or ignorant people, because they didn't improve society. Today, the word 'idiot' has taken on a different meaning, so we do not have a popular contemporary noun to describe the great majority of Americans who stay within their private lives and barely venture into the civic square except maybe to cast a vote."
Apart from one chapter on where rich people should put their money, this is not a book about what elites should do, but about what everyone should do. Nader provides numerous stellar examples of people who have become active in various areas, including the fields of working, shopping, tax paying, voting, parenting, and donating. He examines an array of barriers that overlap with Minnich's, including distraction, but also including learned helplessness. People don't just fail to try to change things because it hasn't occurred to them, but also because they've been taught that they are powerless, that things cannot be changed. So, they have to learn not only to care but also to be aware of what is possible and how to increase its likelihood.
We need education and organizing. We need radical vision and gentle nudging. We need to both support and challenge an opposition to a fascistic government that supports both human needs and endless war, that challenges elected officials but only if they are of a particular political party. All of this requires bravery and caring and thinking.
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