Readings from Our Library Launch

From “Two Cheers for Anarchism” by James C. Scott
Chapter Six: Particularity and Flux

Read by Charlie Waterhouse

“History is written by learned men, and so it is natural and agreeable for them to think that the activity of their class supplies the basis of the movement of all humanity” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

FRAGMENT 27
Retail Goodness and Sympathy

The heroism of the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the Haute-Loire, which managed to shelter, feed, and speed to safety more than five thousand refugees in Vichy France, many of them Jewish children, is by now enshrined in the annals of resistance to Nazism. Books and films have celebrated the many acts of quiet bravery that made this uncommon rescue possible.

Here I want to emphasize the particularity of these acts in a way that, though it may diminish the grand narrative of religious resistance to anti-Semitism, at the same time enlarges our understanding of the specificity of humanitarian gestures.

Many Le Chambon villagers were Huguenot, and their two pastors were perhaps the most influential and respected voices in the community. As Huguenots, they had their own collective memory, from at least the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre forward, of religious persecution and flight. Well before the Occupation, they had manifested their sympathy for the victims of fascism by sheltering refugees from Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy. That is, they were well disposed both by conviction and experience to sympathize with the plight of refugees from authoritarian states, and with Jews in particular as a biblical people. Translating that sympathy into practical and, under Vichy, far more dangerous acts of assistance, however, was not so simple. 

Anticipating the arrival of Jews, the Huguenot pastors began trying to mobilize the clandestine shelter and food they knew would be required of their parishioners. With the abolition of the Free Zone in southern France, both were arrested and taken off to concentration camps. In this menacing setting, the wives of the two pastors took husbands’ work and set about lining up food and shelter for Jews within their community. They asked their neighbors, both farmers and villagers, if they would be willing to help when the time came. The answers often were not encouraging. Typically, those they asked expressed sympathy for the refugees but were unwilling to run the risk of taking them in and feeding them. They pointed out that they also had a duty to protect their own immediate family and were fearful that if they sheltered Jews, they would be denounced to the local Gestapo, who would put them and their entire family at grave risk. Weighing their obligations to their immediate family and their more abstract sympathy for helping Jewish victims, family ties prevailed, and the pastor’s wives despaired of organizing a network of refuge.

Whether they were ready or not, however, the Jews began to arrive, and to seek help. What happened next is important, and diagnostic for understanding the particularity of social (in this case, humanitarian) action. The pastors’ wives found themselves with real, existing Jews on their hands, and they tried again. They would, for example, take an elderly Jew, thin and shivering in the cold, to the door of a farmer who had declined to commit himself earlier, and ask, “Would you give our friend here a meal and a warm coat, and show him the way to the next village?” The farmer now had a living, breathing victim in front of him, looking him in the eye, perhaps imploringly, and would have to turn him away. Or the women would arrive at the farmhouse door with a small family and ask, “Would you give this family a blanket and a bowl of soup and let them sleep in your barn for a day or two before they head for the Swiss border?” Face-to-face with real victims, whose fate depended palpably on their assistance, few were willing to refuse them help, though the risks had not changed.

Once the individual villagers had made such a gesture, they typically became committed to helping the refugees for the duration. They were, in other words, able to draw the conclusions of their own practical gesture of solidarity – their actual line of conduct – and see it as the ethical thing to do. They did not enunciate a principle and then act on it. Rather, they acted, and then drew out the logic of that act. Abstract principle was the child of practical action, not its parent.

François Rochat, contrasting this pattern with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” calls it “the banality of goodness.” We might at least as accurately call it the “particularity of goodness,” or, to appropriate the Torah, an example of the heart following the hand.

Iain McGilchrist & Analogues

Darius Cuplinskas summarised McGilchrist’s core ideas and their echoes across cultures, accompanied by the following handout.
(View as a PDF)

From “The Matter with Things” by Iain McGilchrist
Volume 2 Chapter 26: Value

Read by Ben Smith

What life brings, I would maintain, is not consciousness, then – which, as I have argued, is present from the beginning – but the coming into being of the capacity for value: thus, a mountain cannot value, though it can have value for creatures, like ourselves, who value. And it is not just we, but all living creatures, that for the first time are able to recognise value. Life vastly enhances the degree of responsiveness of, to and within the world. 

The customary way to think of values is to see them as piggy-backing on and arising out of our consciousness: a human invention. An alternative view is that values are not invented but discovered and disclosed, and it takes life to discover and disclose them: that they declare themselves in and through the responses of living beings to the world and the world’s response to them. ‘Value’, writes Thomas Nagel, ‘is not just an accidental side-effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value.’4 Valuing depends on a relationship; only in its appreciation is value fulfilled. But it is not we who originate the possibility of truth, or goodness, or the beauty of the cosmos. We help fulfil them (or not). I see value as intrinsic to the universe; and the possibility of appreciating and responding to value – therefore fulfilling its potential – as one reason for the cosmos having evolved life.5 Indeed, life could be seen as the very process of the cosmic consciousness continually both discovering and furthering its beauty, truth, and goodness; both contemplating and (not separately but in the same indivisible act) bringing them further into being: a process.

(Full reference: McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (pp. 1721-1722). Perspectiva Press. Kindle Edition.)

From “Restoring the Earth” by John D Liu

Read by Anne Enith Cooper 

We are living in a very important time for humanity. For thousands of years human beings have valued the things we make more highly than the natural systems that continuously renew the atmosphere, the water, the soil and the amazing biodiversity on the Earth. The consequences of this human choice have manifested as biodiversity loss, deforestation, desertification, toxic pollution and climate change.

We are experiencing the inevitable end of this cycle of ignorance and greed. The responsibility to understand and to restore ecological function on the Earth is arguably the most important task humanity has at this time.

Words can barely begin to convey the profound importance of what we are required to do. In fact, words, while necessary to communicate and educate, are not the solution. The solution is to physically engage everyone on Earth in the urgent task of restoring carbon in living soils, restoring vegetation cover to all areas where the soils are exposed and protecting and encouraging biodiversity in nature. Each individual’s actions matter. Together our actions represent the collective human response to our historical failure. We are all in this together. Every person, and in fact, all living things are affected by what has happened and by what we decide and do now. We can only change the situation if we all do this together. The Ecosystem Restoration Camps Movement represents a highly effective, low cost method to educate and engage everyone in the task of restoring the Earth. It also represents a way in which people are sovereign over their own future. The Movement is not only about restoring natural ecosystems it is also about restoring human rights and the rights of all life. It is about Freedom.

(‘Restoring the Earth’ by John D Liu in ‘The Tao of Revolution: A field guide to Global Transformation or How to survive the collapse of civilisation as we know it,’ Complied and Curated by Chris Taylor, Stairwell Books, York, 2019 (p103))

From “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde
Section V

Read by Martin Fisher

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother’s life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.
This too I know—and wise it were
If each could know the same—
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.
With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and gray,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.
The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with a loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed, and cries to Time.
But though lean Hunger and green Thirst
Like asp with adder fight,
We have little care of prison fare,
For what chills and kills outright
Is that every stone one lifts by day
Becomes one’s heart by night.
With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell,
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.
And never a human voice comes near
To speak a gentle word:
And the eye that watches through the door
Is pitiless and hard:
And by all forgot, we rot and rot,
With soul and body marred.
And thus we rust Life’s iron chain
Degraded and alone:
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God’s eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone.
And every human heart that breaks,
In prison-cell or yard,
Is as that broken box that gave
Its treasure to the Lord,
And filled the unclean leper’s house
With the scent of costliest nard.
Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?
And he of the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes,
Waits for the holy hands that took
The Thief to Paradise;
And a broken and a contrite heart
The Lord will not despise.
The man in red who reads the Law
Gave him three weeks of life,
Three little weeks in which to heal
His soul of his soul’s strife,
And cleanse from every blot of blood
The hand that held the knife.
And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal:
And the crimson stain that was of Cain
Became Christ’s snow-white seal.

Other readings

Janos Abel read a quote from Howard Zinn
Kyrena Karmiloff read from The Treeline by Ben Rawlence
Monique Roffey read from Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World by Glenn A Albrecht
Robert Butler read from How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm