It Ain’t Me, Babe
Complicity and consequences, from sit coms to Gaza
How do we live in the world without being complicit in its evils? The answer is, of course, that we can’t. In the final two seasons of The Good Place, the gang of lost souls (plus one demon, and one not-a-robot) came to the realization that global capitalism had made living a traditional, moral life impossible. The mere act of buying a tomato at the supermarket ties one’s ethical thread into a skein of wrongdoing. Even if every single thing we bought or used was created in an ethical fashion— and we all know that almost none of the things we buy or use, including the tablet on which I write this, are— the mere act of getting them to us involves belching clouds of earth heating vapors into the sky. The Good Place’s solution to this problem is to shrug. The main characters revise the afterlife into a space in which no one is judged, and everyone gets to follow their bliss until they decide to be vaporized.
Those of us who aren’t already dead don’t have it so easy. We have to figure out how to live, how to balance the simple everyday calculations of right and wrong against larger principles of how the world should work. This is particularly challenging for Christians, if they take their faith seriously. I am not Christian—as a secular Jew, I’m not even religious— but there is something I find beautiful in the impossibility of Christianity. What I mean by is that, assuming you can make Jesus’s various pronouncements and instructions coherent after reading the four gospels, you’re left with a series of moral goals that are near-impossible to attain. Failure is built into the process of attempting to live up to Jesus’s example. Some faiths take advantage of this, turning the guarantee of failure into a mechanism of social control. But the Christians I know, the ones whose faith moves me, view the impossible example as the lodestar of a lifelong process of trying to become a better person, to lead a better life.
My child attends a Quaker school. We sent her there, despite not being Quakers, because we liked that it had explicit values of pacifism, respectful conflict resolution, kindness, and so on. In trying to learn more about Quaker ethics I recently read The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker. Lay, a Quaker, little person, sailor, autodidact, author, and glover, was a pioneer of abolitionist thought. He wrote one of the first books to explicitly call for the total abolition of slavery, because he took seriously the idea that all are created equal and that all have the light of God within us. He was one of the major figures who helped persuade the Quakers of Philadelphia to turn officially against slavery in 1758 (he died a year later). He did this not just through his writing, but through oratory, and through very odd acts of performance art. He disrupted meetings by spattering slave-owners in the congregation with fake blood, lay across the transom of meeting houses so that people would have to step over his body, smashed an expensive porcelain tea-set in a marketplace to protest the use of slaves in the tea and sugar trades, etc.
A little under 300 years ago, Lay already understood that that there was no ethical consumption under global capitalism. His eventual response to this was to evade complicity to a radical extent. He became a vegan a hundred years before the term was coined, only wore flaxen garments, and lived in a cave. His veganism forced him to leave his trained profession of glove making. He eventually became a bookseller, which we all know is the most ethical of jobs. He tried to grow his own food, and would not eat refined sugar or drink tea. Only one portrait of him exists, but he did not sit for it, as Quakers considered doing so idolatry. Lay’s life is a testament to the power of eccentricity— all dissenting movements need their weirdos!— but also to how difficult it already was, even before this nation was founded, to live an actually “good” life.
One response to this challenge that recurs frequently in literature (and, sadly, in the real world as well) is suicide. Faced with insurmountable evil— and the widespread denial of that evil’s existence—suicide becomes a solution of sorts. This is what happens to Antigone, both in Sophocles’s original and more pointedly in Jean Anouillh’s adaptation first staged in occupied Paris. In the Sophocles play, a civil war between Antigone’s brothers Eteocles and Polynices has resulted in the death of both men and the ascension of Creon to the throne of Thebes. Creon declares that Polynices cannot be buried or mourned, and that anyone attempting to do so will be stoned. Antigone defies him, insists on the primacy of divine law— in this case the proper obeisance shown to the dead— and is buried alive in a tomb. Creon changes his mind and orders her freed, but before he can, she has hanged herself; she has insisted on the State taking her life in order to expose its ruler.
Anouilh’s version has Creon admitting to Antigone that both brothers were equally scoundrels, and that their remains became mixed up after the battle so that it is not even clear whose burial he is forbidding. He tells Antigone that she would thus be throwing away her life for nothing:
Life’s a book you enjoy, a child playing round your feet, a tool that fits your hand, a bench outside your house to rest on in the evening. You’ll despise me more than ever for saying this, but finding it out, as you’ll see, is some sort of consolation for growing old: life is probably nothing other than happiness.
To Creon, age brings the realization that a morally upright life cannot actually be lived; all is compromise. What can we do, then, but be happy? Antigone responds:
And what will my happiness be like? What kind of a happy woman will Antigone grow into? What base things will she have to do, day after day, in order to snatch her own little scrap of happiness? Tell me— who will she have to lie to? Smile at? Sell herself to? Who will she have to avert her eyes from— and leave to die?
I thought of this scene when reading about the recent death by suicide of Aaron Bushnell, the 25 year old serviceman in the Air Force, who lit himself on fire to protest the ongoing destruction of Gaza. I’ll admit to being shaken to my core, not just by the act, but by his reasoning for doing so. “Many of us like to ask ourselves, `What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid?’” He asked on facebook. “The answer is, you’re doing it. RIght now.”
Many of us have asked these kinds of questions, but few of us came up with the answer that Bushnell or Antigone did. And, having lost many friends to suicide, I’m grateful that few people take that route. Death does release us from complicity with the evils of living, I suppose, but it’s hard to argue that it does much to solve the problems that motivated it in the first place. Creon remains King of Thebes (although he loses his son, Haemon, who dies by suicide not long after Antigone). Bombs are still dropping on Gaza.
What do we do with our complicity? This is the shadow question asked by a recent piece published—and then unpublished— by Guernica titled From the Edges of a Broken World. It is no longer officially online, but thanks to the Wayback Machine, you can read it here. In it, an Israeli woman named Joanna Chen writes of her own experiences trying to maintain some form of empathy during the recent crisis. A member of the Israeli left in good standing—among other things, she volunteers driving Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals so they can receive medical care—she struggles in the aftermath of the attacks of October 7th because friends of hers are among the murdered. She stops volunteering for a few weeks and then, eventually, resumes.
I don’t particularly like this essay— I find it morally blinkered, and I feel it frequently substitutes sentiment and pretty, literary writing where deeper thought is needed— but I recommend you read it anyway. It is from a specific point of view within Israel we rarely get to read here in the United States, and is a reminder that populations are made up of particular individuals, each with their own consciousness, or what the Quakers call “light.” But it’s also worth reading because of how unintentionally revealing it is, specifically of how the psychic miasma of occupation infests even dissenters like Joanna Chen. Like many with privilege who do charity work, she is unwilling to question or investigate the reasons her charity is necessary. And when writing about the violence of the past few months, refuses to specifically name the Israeli state as an aggressor, writing instead: “I watched videos of atrocities committed by Hamas…. And reports about the rising number of innocent civilians killed in a devastated Gaza.” Her fellow Israelis exist as individuals, ones she watches in “distressing footage taken by Hamas terrorists, by surveillance cameras, and by people running for their lives,” while Palestinians are simply numbers; they are the constituent parts of depersonalized “reports.” In the piece’s most interesting passage— one that should have been the basis of a much better piece of writing, she writes about the poets she’s translated who live in Gaza. She wants to know how they are doing, but does not reach out to them, both afraid that the mere act of communicating with them will get them in trouble with either Hamas or the IDF, and that they may not want to hear from her.
Chen’s main way of grappling with her complicity prior to 10/7 was by doing charity work, and by translating Palestinian poetry into English. She has done more for individual Palestinians than most of us have. She’s certainly doing more than I am. I am donating money, and helping organize pro-ceasefire events. She is saving the lives of children. Yet her very existence, her citizenship, her geographical location, her tax dollars, these all make her more complicit than I am.
Because of this, Chen’s essay has spawned a reaction that strikes me as predictable and bizarre in equal measure. After an online outcry accusing the piece (and the magazine) of complicity with genocide, and the resignation of several members of Guernica’s staff, the piece has been pulled. This is how some American leftists have decided to deal with their feelings of complicity, and the persistent futility of watching the U.S. contribute arms and money to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land despite a clear majority of American opposing our doing so. Some action is necessary. That action, sadly, has been the exercising of the heckler’s veto premised on the bizarre and unsupportable assertion that the essay in question supports genocide. The essay does nothing of the kind; among other things, Chen is a translator of Palestinian literature and genocide specifically includes cultural erasure, a thing she is dedicating part of her adult life to resisting. The essay instead expresses a simple truth: that having people murder your friends in the name of a cause you support makes it harder to support that cause. It also accidentally expresses a more complicated one: that even the most well meaning of us have blind spots, and that we may do good works in this world by morning and reinforce the evils that make those works necessary by night. From the Edges of a Broken World then documents how the author attempts to find her way through this pain to some new equilibrium. Yes Chen does not see, cannot allow herself to see, all the ways in which the life she leads, including the charity she performs, undercut the values she says she espouses. But then again, isn’t that true of most of us?
And now, a short bit of self-promotion: I have co-curated a new collection for The Criterion Channel, on the immersive, extreme style of acting ushered in by Robert DeNiro et al. You can view it here. They shot a short video of me explaining the changes in screen acting during this period, so if you ever want to see me talk about acting, here’s your chance.
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