Someone who stands for a long time, wrote the essayist Elias Canetti in the mid-twentieth century, shows that he is capable of perseverance and resistance. According to Canetti, this can be done by staying firmly in the same place “like a tree,” or by exposing yourself, “without fear or stealth.”
It made me think of the invariably unyielding portraits that the world has seen since the summer of Mahbouba Serai, the 73-year-old women’s rights activist from Kabul. The Taliban’s takeover was yet another setback in its struggle for the dignity and freedom of women in Afghanistan. Even now that the returned doctrinal rulers are once again brushing women away from public life, she remains visible. She stops. A bright spot in the world.
For Canetti, resilience was not a matter of morality, but of survival. His book Mass and power from 1960, from which I quoted, is a metaphorical anthropological reflection on the capacity of people to resist threats. They prefer to physically cling together, Canetti sees: mass. But the masses can also become deadly themselves and turn against enemies, besides themselves.
Ultimately, according to Canetti, such a threat is always related to power. “Whoever wants to rule over people tries first to humiliate them, then to cheat their rights and their ability to resist,” he wrote. And if they succeed, he observed, those people will be “powerless as animals” (animals impressed him less than trees).
Are unpleasant measures due to the power of the virus or mistakes of people?
In 2021 you could effortlessly look at political conflicts through Canetti’s eyes. The Capitol in Washington: short scene in January of an angry mass, who turned against the order of democracy and the rule of law.
Hong Kong: With the empty squares where the Chinese uprising of 1989 was commemorated, not only resistance seems broken, but also freedom. This year it was very busy at airports in London and Taiwan by fleeing Hong Kongers.
Myanmar: Since the coup in February, the world has barely noticed how ruthless the army is against young people who – en masse – do not acquiesce to the regime. Foreign reporters do not get further than the border in Thailand, where exiled Burmese people tell how they suffer from the distance from their fellow sufferers. By their flight they reduce the resistance to power, which feels like a condition of life.
When people are forced to operate as loners, their resilience decreases. This realization gives universal meaning to images of migrants in the no man’s land between Belarus and Poland or on the fences around Ceuta in Morocco. However you think about migration, you recognize people who get crushed in a showdown between the powerful. Governments in Minsk and Rabat luring migrants to put pressure on Europe, Europe they don’t want, building fences and pulling troops together.
The individual is vulnerable, but mass does not always mean power. A pandemic forces people to see each other as a risk, a factor of contagion. Who is friend or foe doesn’t count: tangles are always a danger. The chance of avoiding the virus grows with the distance from fellow human beings.
Canetti also writes about epidemics. He finds it “remarkable” how “the hope of survival makes the people here into individuals.” He sees a reversal: the masses are suddenly the victims. If nothing can be done about the epidemic, the masses are dead. The only difference Canetti sees between mass suicide and an epidemic is that the (same) result is “imposed by an unknown outside force.”
In 2021 you saw how difficult we find it, even after two years of corona, to get a mental grip on such an opponent, the ‘unknown power’ called corona. We can do more about it than in Canetti’s time. But that made some questions more difficult.
Were unpleasant measures such as a temporary curfew or a lockdown due to the power of the virus or the mistakes of people?
Vaccines also act as an engine for doubt. In a pandemic, it matters more than ever where you live, whether you are rich or poor, whether you can work from home, whether you are in close contact with loved ones or if you are lonely.
It also affects whether a country has access to sufficient vaccines. Without it you have to get through the virus and, if necessary, accept a higher mortality. In countries with many vaccines, this is more difficult to accept. Especially if you are used to a care system that provides a grip on life and death in normal times. Or the illusion of grip.
Willingness to be vaccinated seems less among people who are more distant from institutions – from which they probably already had less good to expect.
On the other hand: a society without resistance, that would be strange. It would feel like we were tumbling through space, like a typical Jeff Bezos.
René Moerland, chief editor
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