Butler and the Nature of Resistance
I’ve often wondered who decides what news makes it onto the digital ticker that runs along the bottom of the screens on subway platforms—it's such an odd mix of international politics, natural disasters, sports, crime bulletins, entertainment, and the occasional local news tidbit, all tossed together in an order that seems to reject any logical flow.
Protests in Caracas as Venezuelan crisis continues. Raptors win 111-109. Meghan Markle’s “wild” hat causes palace stir. President Trump denies ongoing family separation at the Mexican border. Extreme winter weather predicted this weekend along the Eastern Seaboard. Bruce MacArthur pleads guilty to the murder of eight men associated with Toronto’s gay village. Ariana Grande hints new song could be about Pete Davidson. Ford government to disband Local Integrated Health Networks.
In the age of social media, such jumbled collections of information-segments are of course not confined to subway platform screens. Lists of trending stories on Twitter or Facebook are curated by automated systems that trawl the relevant platform for the most written-about topics, aggregating them by hashtag. But this robotic logic does little to help one process these rapidly moving snippets of information—especially in their often uncomfortable or uncanny association with one another.
Perhaps, then, the strangeness of these lists is less about the logic of their selection and more about the inherent relationship that one news snippet has to those that come before and after. There is something disconcerting about seeing a memo about someone’s silly hat alongside a casual update about the inhumane detainment of children by the highest levels of power—something deeply uneasy about the false equivalency that is implied by their identical formatting and equal visibility.
The work of mid-century Irish thinker Hubert Butler investigates how horrors of religious and racial dehumanization and persecution happen—not in the broad, philosophical sense, but in the drab, everyday sense. At the end of the Second World War, Butler visited several smaller European nations and communities to comb through their archives—memos to sub-prefects, letters from minor church officials, and the pages of local newspapers: documents to which no one else was paying attention. But for Butler, such records of minor everyday dealings under an occupying force are the only hope of understanding how communities—“small peoples,” as he refers to them—might effectively resist tyranny.
In his 1950 essay “The Invader Wore Slippers”, Butler explores the implications for his home country of Ireland of one piece of his archival research: the daily newspapers of the Channel Islands from 1940-45. During that time, the islands were occupied by the Nazis; they were the only parts of Britain to fall under occupation. Less than a decade earlier, Nazi invasion and occupation of Ireland had seemed likely, and Butler makes use of his Channel Island research to contemplate the extent to which the people of his homeland might have submitted with complicity, had they too been subject to fascist control.
Butler’s work presents a thought experiment we can make use of today, especially with respect to one of the more chilling excerpts from the Channel Island archives—a “printed summary of events” from a 1940 Guernsey newspaper:
Dog-biscuits made locally. Table-tennis League of Six Teams formed. German orders relating to measures against Jews published. Silver Wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. W.J. Bird.
The effect of this sort of list, Butler writes, is that “the news of the deportation and torture of the local shopkeepers is made more palatable by being sandwiched between sport and domestic pets and society gossip .... Lubricated by familiar trivialities, the mind glided over what was barbarous and terrible.”
That list of familiar trivialities from 1940 may seem remote in the details, but otherwise it is strikingly like the lists of trending stories on our social media platforms and the news tickers on our subway station screens. Reading that snippet of events from Nazi-occupied Guernsey, it takes only the tiniest of mental shifts to see a 2019 list of trending stories instead—like a palimpsestic text moving backward in time.
Protests in Caracas as Venezuelan crisis continues. Raptors win 111-109. Meghan Markle’s “wild” hat causes palace stir. President Trump denies ongoing family separation at the Mexican border. Extreme winter weather predicted this weekend along the Eastern Seaboard.
The effect is similar to the 1940 list, which casually drops mention of emerging genocide in-between bulletins about table-tennis, a local wedding anniversary, and treats for pet dogs. I hope that few of us see the ongoing separation of Mexican migrant children from their parents and their indefinite detainment at the American border as anything but a horrifying breach of human rights, but when we see casual mention of one political-bureaucratic aspect of it dropped into a list of familiar trivialities, does our mind not begin to glide over it? Does it not start to seem as regular and familiar—as part of everyday life—as news about sports and celebrities and distant Royals? Does it not start, in some subtle way, to become dangerously, almost effortlessly, fathomable?
Butler argues that this normalization, this gliding over, is a human tendency that can be weaponized by clever fascist forces in a variety of ways, including smoothing over barbaric and inhumane actions by slipping them in alongside everyday news snippets. If this was an effective tactic in 1940, when the news was strictly subject to the limitations of the printing press and could therefore be consumed slowly and with greater moderation—what might be the effect of similar lists in the era of digital media?
There are also complicating factors to consider in our modern iterations of the summary of events. In addition to robotic curation of our lists, we also curate, cull, and limit our own news—the bubble effect of our agentic social media choices, combined with algorithms designed to adapt to the perceived implications of those choices, showing us more of what we seem to want to see. Many of us consume news primarily through our social media networks, which provide us with a type of society news segment that is much more personal and immediate than an announcement of the silver wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. W.J. Bird. You see news of your former dorm-mate taking up skydiving; your ex accepting an award; your childhood friend holding his newborn baby. And sandwiched between—in the same visual and often linguistic format—is an article about the poor conditions in the migrant detainment camps on the southern American border and a chummy little advertisement for donuts.
Take this sample of consecutive posts on my Facebook newsfeed from a morning in early February: a Guardian article about the wealth-gap effects of class privilege; photos of my brother on vacation in Cuba with his girlfriend; an acquaintance asking about mental health resources at their university; a Starbucks ad for a seasonal specialty drink (“love is simple ... say it with a latte”); a local article about the medical plight of Indigenous children in Cat Lake, Ontario; a co-op housing organization sharing an infographic about the importance of not poisoning rodents for the sake of owls; and an ad for a bra company that is doing it right, not like that mainstream lingerie company.
These social media lists of events are arranged not horizontally but vertically, which is not insignificant. There is a hypnotic element to the reel of stories moving from the top of the screen to the bottom in a near-infinite series—a scrolling effect that can numb the mind against any meaningful intake of information.
It is easy to lose sight of what is truly worthy of our attention when it is distorted by a smooth alignment with hockey scores and celebrity marriages.
As we scroll through such a disconnected series of information-snippets, what do we actually retain—and are we even interested in retention? We seem to tacitly accept that the purpose of scrolling through these lists is not truly to absorb news or information—although that can happen—but in fact to coat our minds against the need to delve more deeply. The sheer volume of disconnected segments can seem like reason enough to glide past the elements that are barbarous and terrible—even while we glancingly acknowledge the fact of their barbarity.
The development of the word “content” itself points to this tendency. Content now commonly refers to anything that captures attention and has some kind of narrative, even if it’s disjointed. This usage encourages the smooth connection of fundamentally dissonant items of news—precisely what Butler warned against. By valorizing content creation rather than scrutinizing the nature of that content or even the relationship or consistency between content that sits side-by-side, we encourage and accept a continually shifting focus. This consumerist logic of quantity over quality, when applied to the way we get information about the world around us, can have deeply troubling consequences. The headlines about Trump's detainment of children at the Mexican-American border are, to many, unambiguously awful, yet even they can become something we glide past with a shake of the head. And what of the other large-scale inhumane state actions close to home that have less striking headlines or images?
The horrific realities that we associate with war and fascism are not captured by a glancing sentence about current events that we consume amidst a slew of tidbits about ordinary life. There are no memos about impending cattle-cars or headlines about the construction of gas chambers—not in the way we might expect from a media diet rich in “technicolour picture(s) of barbarity and heroism.” Any memos we receive about such horrors are deceptively normal and often boring; they are smoothly blended in with sports notices and weather updates. It is easy to lose sight of what is truly worthy of our attention when it is distorted by a smooth alignment with hockey scores and celebrity marriages. The daily signs of inhumane actions taken by powerful institutions are subtle; there are no announcements of when an institution or powerful group in our midst is crossing the shifting line into what we might later recognize as unconscionable evil.
Perhaps the fact of persistence of list-format news from Butler’s time to the present can help guide us here. The general human aversion to focused, difficult thought in favour of emotionally easy explanations and psychologically comfortable evasions is amplified in the age of social-media scrolling, but the aversion itself is no different—merely more pervasive—than the tendencies identified by Butler in 1950; or, for that matter, by T.S. Eliot in 1936:
Distracted from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration
Eliot’s lines, describing what he referred to as “this twittering world,” are an eerily prescient reflection of our contemporary world of tweet-based news, wherein it is all too easy to be distracted from distraction by distraction. Yet the penning of such apropos lines in 1936—before television, let alone live-stream video that auto-plays as you scroll—implies that, as overwhelmed as we may feel in our “twittering world,” this problem of willing distraction is not new.
... next, they must recognize that such an oppressor is likely to come cloaked not only in everyday distractions, but also in the comforting garb of soothing social niceties.
Butler identifies this problem as a vital hurdle to overcome in order to resist fascism. He argues that communities must first recognize that a savvy oppressor will leverage the human inclination toward distraction as a tool to insinuate themselves into that community; next, they must recognize that such an oppressor is likely to come cloaked not only in everyday distractions, but also in the comforting garb of soothing social niceties. This is the meaning of his essay’s title: by calling it “The Invader Wore Slippers”, Butler subverts the dominant depiction of totalitarian oppression, which in the 1940s was symbolized by the jackboot. A large, distinctive, military-issue affair, the jackboot presents an image of tyranny that is heavy, stark, and obvious. But, as Butler points out, the daily reality of living under an occupying fascist force is something much more subtle, elusive, and entirely undramatic:
During the war, we in Ireland heard much of the jackboot and how we should be trampled beneath it. ... our imagination, fed on the daily press, showed us a Technicolor picture of barbarity and heroism. It never occurred to us that for 90 percent of the population the moral problems of an occupation would be small and squalid. Acting under pressure, we should often have to choose between two courses of action, both inglorious. And if there was moral integrity about our choice, it certainly would not get into the headlines.
Butler’s key point here is perhaps even more relevant to our time than it was in his own: that our efforts to remain vigilant in times of political crisis can easily be foiled by false notions of resistance as both obvious and glorious—and by a corresponding image of the oppressor as unambiguously morally wrong. Resistance against encroaching tyranny is rarely heroic, he reminds us; it is usually merely dull and inconvenient. Rarely is it praised, and rarely are choices to support the oppressed clear of petty moral uncertainties or awkward social discomforts.
The central question of “The Invader Wore Slippers” thus challenges us to ask ourselves how we might—realistically—behave if the place where we work or live comes under the power of a fascist force. “Supposing,” Butler asks, “the invader wears not jackboots but carpet slippers or patent-leather pumps, how will I behave?”
In this way, the troubling applicability of Butler’s list of familiar trivialities warns us not only to look out for our contemporary invader in slippers, but also to be on guard against the seductive benefits of a civilized sort of collaboration that such a slippered invader might offer—to prepare ourselves for the fact that the types of decisions we would have to make to be in noncooperation with tyranny would likely be morally muddy, as well as socially and economically unpleasant. We will be tempted not by glittering new treats but by keeping our boring everyday realities, and our decisions will be complicated by being offered such things by individuals who are inoffensive and amiable in themselves.
To value civility as a principle in the face of systemic atrocities, she argues, is a privilege born of a comfortable distance from those who are suffering.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that questions of civility have risen to the fore of the cultural conversation in recent times. In her essay “The Privilege Of ‘Civilized’ Political Discourse”, written as alarm bells began to sound in response to Trump's rise through the 2016 Republican primary process, Ijeoma Oluo draws a link between civility and complacency in the midst of state barbarism. To value civility as a principle in the face of systemic atrocities, she argues, is a privilege born of a comfortable distance from those who are suffering. “When you have nothing to fear,” she writes, “the most important decisions in our government all turn into thought experiments where everything — even the lives of human beings — is up for compromise.”
In this context, Oluo argues, “the call for civilized debate is barbaric.” A commitment to civility can thus dilute—dangerously—our focus on real and pressing injustices. Butler warns us about that too—about how easily we can be seduced by correctness—by civility—into ignoring burgeoning atrocities—about the pivotal role played by politeness in eroding the will of civilian Channel Island residents to resist the Nazi occupying force:
‘I must record,’ wrote Mr. Maugham, of the German soldiers in his garage, ‘they did their best to give us as little trouble as possible, were perfectly polite and grateful for any slight help which they received from us,’ and the Procurator of Guernsey officially declared: ‘The Germans behaved as good soldiers, sans peur et sans reproche.’ Such behaviour is plainly more formidable than the jackboot; we are hypnotized by the correctness of the invader into accepting invasion itself as correct. The solidarity of our resistance is undermined by carefully graded civilities; our social and racial hierarchies are respected.
A deep personal or cultural discomfort with being impolite can thus be downright dangerous in times of encroaching populist threats to liberty. A preoccupation with civility enables us to diminish the reality of inhumane actions, just as our rapid consumption of list-format news carries us swiftly past daily horrors. Centring civility dismisses the less comfortable and more radical conversations that challenge our complacency, and accepting it as a core principle risks complicity in what we might claim to find intolerable.
In an example of her own point that is perhaps too poignant, on the day the news broke that the United States Supreme Court had upheld Trump’s travel ban on Muslim-majority countries, Oluo tweeted: “[a]re y'all ready to stop fucking talking about civility yet? Do we have to wait until all our rights are gone?”
There is also a heavy exhaustion that can overwhelm us along with the flood of bad news—a depressed weariness arising from the combination of shock and sense of helplessness. It is too easy to get caught up in the stream of news, and very hard to clamber up onto the bank and take a moment to see where the current has brought us. But clamber we must. Crucial to the project of staying vigilant is not vowing to never get distracted or overwhelmed, but recognizing that we inevitably will, and preparing ourselves for the weary work of bringing our focus back to the bigger picture.
One way to do this is to make thoughtful use of a contemporary news-list feature not available in Butler’s time. The hypertext of our hand-held digital feeds provides an opportunity to read further when we recognize something noteworthy. Hypertext presents us with the choice to click on our equivalent of “German orders relating to measures against Jews published” instead of “Dog-biscuits made locally”. And with this modern resource at our fingertips comes an obligation to think critically about what draws us in. On which headlines can we best spend our inevitably limited mental and emotional energy? What link merits thoughtful engagement in a lunch break that accommodates so few clicks?
Instead of getting trapped on the futile scroll-treadmill of trying to be fully informed, we might be better served by discerning what type of information is most valuable to know, as well as by drawing connections and contrasts between ideas and points in time, rather than focusing on singular ideas or the points of time themselves. Our task when we are faced with a given summary of events is then to pause long enough to think about what on that list truly matters. But our larger project is to consider if we are truly prepared to consume less information in order to consume more meaningfully—to train ourselves to focus on reading, thinking, and acting on what we have determined matters most.
