IN PRAISE OF ‘GETTING BY’ – The Anxious Mouse versus the Heroic German Shepherd
“Speak English,” she says in exasperation. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” I had used only one word — “Schweyk.” The name of the hero (or anti-hero) in one of Bertolt Brecht’s plays. She wasn’t angry, not really. Maybe just tired of me trying to turn a simple drive into a seminar.
We were headed toward Tomales Bay, the northern inlet of Point Reyes. Her belated birthday weekend. Hills, cows, lots of sharp curves, ocean in the distance. And I can’t stop myself. “Can you give me a single story of the heroism of not resisting? Of not standing out? Of capitulating, even betraying your values — and still being right?” She looked at me like I was from another planet, “please stop – be in the here and now.”
JW COMMENTS
A story of heroic non-resistance?
We all have a duty to resist now, to stand up, to not capitulate. We have a duty of justice to each other, to our country, to find something that we can do for the good of the Republic. The duty is rebuttable in some circumstances, however, and heroism is something else.
Here is a natural definition of heroism.
Someone’s actions were heroic just in case:
i) She had no duty, strictly speaking, to act a she did—i.e., her actions were beyond what justice, and morality in general, strictly require of us;
ii) The hero knew that her actions were likely to lead to seriously bad consequences for her; and
iii) The hero acted as she did because she believed that her action would benefit someone else.
Between 1942 and 1943 at least, Oskar Schindler used his company, Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik (DEF), to produce enameled metal products—e.g., mess kits, pots, and pans—for the Wehrmacht. In 1942, he began using his factory to employ as many Jews as possible, in an effort to protect them from being sent to concentration camps. In 1944, Schindler moved his business to Brünnlitz (now Brněnec, Czech Republic), where he claimed to produce shell casing and munitions. In fact, the factory produced little of value to the German military but still allowed Schindler to employ, thereby protect Jewish workers, for most of the war.
There is a clear sense in which Schindler was heroic even though he: did not resist; did not resist openly, did not stand out—but did not capitulate and did not betray his values.
Because DEF directly contributed to the German economy early in the war, there is a plain sense in which Schindler collaborated with the German government for a time, rather than resisting it. Because this allowed him to save as many Jews as he did, he had a good reason—indeed, an exonerating reason—for not resisting the German government openly. Schindler also acted at some risk to himself: If he had been exposed as protecting Jewish lives, it is likely that the consequences for him would have been severe. So, there is plain sense in which Schindler acted heroically by supporting, rather than resisting, the German government and using his support to save as many lives as he did.
It is true that, by employing many Jews and protecting them from the concentration camps, Schindler inhibited the Nazi program of exterminating the Jewish population, and this was a kind of resistance. Still, it seem fair to say that Schindler collaborated or feigned collaboration with the Wehrmacht, and therefore with the German government, at least for a time; that he had a morally exonerating reason for acting as he did; and that he acted at some risk to himself for the good of others. So, it seems that he did, indeed, act heroically.
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The Boy Who Would Not Die
That morning I’d read a piece by Jack Hopson — one of those newsletters meant to keep us fighting for democracy. It told the story of Edgar Harrell, a seventeen-year-old Marine from Kentucky who survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and five nights in shark-infested water. He refused to give up; he believed rescue was coming; he lived.
The story rattled me, made me mad:
It’s the kind of story America loves: willpower, faith, grit. The boy who would not die becomes the proof that courage will be rewarded. Believe, and you will prevail. “you can get it if you really want, but you must try… try”
Except most of us aren’t Edgar Harrell. We aren’t made for sharks and miracles. The story inspires and shames us in the same breath. It sets the bar at the mountain top. We admire heroes best when they are far away or safely dead. In real life they are exhausting, impossible to live with.
Jack Hopson thinks he is encouraging us. He is not. It is discouraging because we know these are the rare exceptions. In his own story, hundreds of sailors perish. Did they not have enough courage, faith?
JW Comment
I do not read this story in the way that you do. I agree that Americans like stories of rugged individual courage followed by success. I do not agree that Americans believe that success inevitably follows effort. They simply believe that effort—sometimes, long, very difficult effort—is necessary for success.
If Harrell had given up, he would have died. As long as he kept treading water, he had a chance. His survival was no miracle; it was a case of practical reasoning—he knew that he had a chance but only if he keep treading water—coupled with enough hope and courage to keep treading. It was a case of rationality, fortitude, and luck. Some people get their hope and courage from religious faith, but most of us rely on rational assessments of our situation.
What I don’t like about Hopson’s story was that it was about someone who survives alone. That is rare. Americans tend to forget that their achievements almost never are the result of their efforts alone. Billionaire entrepreneurs like to say that “they earned” what they have. Which requires them to forget the unearned, undeserved advantages they inherited at birth. Even more, it requires them to forget that they achieved their success because they
were operating within a social arrangements, laws, and an economy that they did nothing to create.
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Frankl and Brecht: Two Other Languages of Courage
Viktor Frankl, in the camps, found another form of endurance. Not victory, not survival, but meaning. Even stripped of everything, one can still choose one’s attitude. A candle lit in the dark, invisible but defiant.
Bertolt Brecht took a harder look. His Schweyk in the Second World War gives us a fool who survives fascism by pretending to cooperate, mocking tyranny from within. No glory, only irony — and sometimes that’s enough. Brecht’s famous line from The Threepenny Opera still bites:
“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.” First comes food, then comes morality.
The anxious mouse understands that line better than the heroic dog. You can’t eat principles. Staying alive is not cowardice. Sometimes it’s strategy.
JW Comment
I basically agree with this.
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The Townsquare and the Fear of Speaking and the Virtue of Getting By
Just a few days ago, we got into a debate whether we were allowed to have a “Townsquare Democracy” stand at the Noe Valley Townsquare. The local administrators initially telling us that politics was not allowed in SF Parks. Politics? Defending our constitution not allowed? we were again debating what could and could not be done there — what kinds of messages were “allowed.” It sounds trivial, local, bureaucratic. But it felt larger than that.
People hesitate. They want to say something true but glance around first. They measure the mood before they speak. Leslie called it pre-emptive compliance — the habit of yielding before anyone demands it. Timothy Snyder calls it anticipatory obedience. The first step into tyranny, he warns, is self-censorship that masquerades as prudence.
We do it because we want to be safe, to get along. But every time we silence ourselves, we clear a little more space for the bully, the censor, the autocrat. And we tell ourselves it’s nothing — it’s only the Townsquare.
JW Comments
We all need to show courage; there is nothing much else to say. There is, however, courage in numbers.
The Virtue of Getting By
I still think about that drive with Gloria. Maybe she was right to tell me to “speak English.” What I wanted to say was messy: that not all resistance looks heroic; that there’s courage in waiting, in watching, in choosing your moment.
The hero rushes forward; the anxious mouse survives. Between those two is where most of us live. There’s no single rule — sometimes defiance, sometimes silence, sometimes delay. The art is to see clearly, to use time in our favor, to keep the small spaces open until truth can breathe again.
JW Comments
This is absolutely correct: “…not all resistance looks heroic; that there’s courage in waiting, in watching, in choosing your moment….“The hero rushes forward; the anxious mouse survives.”
I do not believe the general comment that the hero rushes forward. The definition that I give above does not imply rashness. And there are counterexamples. In WWII, Dick Winters did not “rush forward” on or after D-Day. Leadership was thrust upon him when the commander of E Company died parachuting from an airplane on D-Day. Winters was the second-ranking officer, so he inherited command. He gathered together whatever soldiers from E company he could find, got them organized, encouraged them, and displayed confidence. In his first experience as company commander, the mission was to destroy a battery of four German howitzers that were firing on troops landing on Omaha Beach. He designed an assault that is still taught at West Point today; he led from the front, not from the rear; kept his men as safe as they could be while completing the mission. He was sensitive about his soldiers—their strengths and weaknesses; how they were coping. There was nothing rushed, reckless, or self-aggrandizing about it. People who rush in needlessly are not heroes; they are people possessed by vanity.
RE ”So, this is my apology to her. All of this — Frankl’s candle, Brecht’s irony, the Townsquare hesitations — is what I wished I’d said then, driving toward Tomales Bay. A muddled defense of timidity, maybe. Or just a confession:
I believe in getting by. In staying human long enough that courage, when it finally comes, will still have someone left to inhabit.”
Rational fear is not timidity, not a vice. We have good reason to fear: Our nation is in the hands of people who will use violence when it serves them. We have seen this in the policy of “family separation,” for example, where the cruelty is the point. An old teacher of mine once told me that in general what we do matters more than how we feel about it. As regards
getting by: The loss of humanity in our people is how we got where we are now. Recovering humanity in ourselves and our nation by listening to our fellow citizens, whatever they say and hearing the fear in them is a fundamental element in how we become the people, the nation, that we should be.
by Jonathan.