A personal manifesto
Many people who are unsure of how their work can help put out the various (figurative) fires ravaging the country at the moment often quickly conclude that purpose is best found at the frontlines of this battle.
The common trap here is to conflate the most obvious path with the most right path, or either of them with the only path. It’s easier to protest, violently or non-violently, than to confront the apparent uselessness of whatever it is we had been doing until that moment. We passively discourage ourselves from doing something just because we liked doing it and aspire to doing something else because it accords a stronger sense of purpose, of being useful, in this moment. Putting the fires out becomes more important than everything else.
But the greatest trick the fascists ever pulled was in convincing us that everything we do that’s not immediately of service to the nation is useless.
What we do is worth protecting. How we enjoy the peace is what makes a people, society and culture worth protecting – not the other way around. The nationalist machine has slowly but surely turned this truism on its head, positing the protection itself, and the ethnically and religiously rooted cause legitimising it, as the end-all of our existence, and rendering the freedom of choice as constructed by various articles of the Constitution an indulgence of the selfish elite.
The fascists isolate us and make us think we’re alone. This loneliness stems from the sense either that we’re not one with the nationalists’ cause or that we’re not part of the resistance actively opposing the fascists. Resistance is necessary but the fascists score a point the moment you believe physical resistance is the sole form of valid resistance, and that the endgame is the only moment that matters. Resistive action in moments of crisis is by itself a necessary but insufficient condition that must be fulfilled to thwart our enemies.
If only we remember, for example, that we as a people are worth protecting for choosing to exercise our freedoms when the going gets tough and – to borrow Neil Gaiman’s suggestion – make good art, we are easily salvaged. We are salvaged if we have a fun evening with friends, go for an eclipse-watching picnic with the family, learn to sing or teach to dance, tip generously, water the fields, figure out a problem, walk the dog, go to school, make a good cup of tea, even watch the Sun rise.
There is a simple but persistent purpose in all of these things, little springboards from which to make giant leaps, and the politics of Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro would destroy just this foundation. Their politics represents the extremum of JFK’s exhortation to ‘ask what you can do for your country’, so it’s only natural to feel conflicted when one is seemingly forced to oppose it. But oppose it we must because the nation-state cannot make unlimited demands of the individual either.
The nationalists have further isolated us by carving science and society into distinct parts, robbing science of the moderating lessons of history and by robbing the transient present of the reassuring light of reason. They prize expertise to the point that it renders common sense dangerous, and they declare war on universities to ensure expertise is rare. They value data and facts above all else, empowering themselves to claim the virtuous pedestals of rationality and objectivity, when in fact they have weaponised the context and twisted definitions beyond recognition.
They isolate us by delegitimising our fictions, and the people and labour that produce them, substituting them in the public imagination with made-up histories that have none of fiction’s potential to enlighten and empower and all of scripture’s aspiration to subdue and stifle. In this moment, there is a valuable victory to be had in celebrating homegrown writers, musicians, filmmakers and illustrators.
While the greatest trick the fascists ever pulled was in convincing us that everything we do that’s not immediately of service to the nation is useless, they have also given away what it is we feel we have lost when we begin to feel helpless and insufficient in the face of their bigotry and triumphalism. Let’s reclaim the right to enjoy anything at all that we please (as long as they abide by constitutional principles). It may not seem like much but that’s also why we shouldn’t cede it: lose it and we have no legs to stand on.
