Reading IS Resistance: Lessons From Timothy Snyder’s ‘On Tyranny’
A collection of notes written upon this still-timely book's 2017 release
by T. Bloom [A version of this article was originally published by Penguin Random House]
“Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.”
At first glance, there’s nothing revolutionary about this advice — it’s a sentiment nearly as old as the web itself. But even moreso now, the act of being online has become entangled with a sense of civic responsibility, one that requires us to pay a certain amount of attention to the voices clamoring on news sites, on Twitter, on the various blogs that represent cross-sections of culture and public opinion we might never have stumbled across otherwise, allowing the public to share information (and misinformation) simultaneously with events as they occur.
In the months leading up to the 2016 election, however, this responsibility tilted toward a downright unhealthy compulsion, and in the intervening months it’s only gotten worse. With a President who tweets angry screeds at odd hours, a Senate that stealthily schedules important votes for 6:30 AM, and I.C.E. raids occurring across the nation under cover of darkness, we’re officially afraid to look away from the screen. Gradually other pastimes fall by the wayside, with some even reporting a loss in sex drive. We’re scanning “Trending” toolbars and researching false claims when we should be asleep, as if we can get democracy back on track by sheer force of will, shooting down every damning new headline with Carrie-esque blasts of telekinesis.
When historian Timothy Snyder declares that stepping back from the screen in favor of books is a form of resistance, he’s not just recommending his own new book — although it would be a great start. In under 130 pages, On Tyranny sketches out the lessons we ought to have learned from various instances when 20th- and 21st-century governments declined into states of textbook tyranny, “in which a leader or a party claimed to directly represent the will of the people.”
The most notorious of these instances produced some of the most ghastly atrocities ever recorded. Others, less dramatic, merely set important precedents for future would-be tyrants to study and perhaps improve upon. Don’t think it can’t happen here — history shows that no nation, “free” or otherwise, is immune.
“Societies can break,” Snyder reminds us in the prologue, “Democracies can collapse, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”
To those of us constantly pawing at the Refresh button, it might seem this is exactly what we’re already doing: applying our own knowledge of historical events to the ever-unfolding present, desperate for a glimpse of what’s just over the horizon. However, amidst Snyder’s brutally succinct lessons on the importance of defending society’s institutions and resisting the decline into a one-party state, he includes a chapter that requires a vast amount of additional homework. Entitled “Be Kind To Our Language,” this chapter issues a stern reminder of what we’re unwittingly leaving behind as we lurch forward to meet a future of electronic alerts and constant updates:
“Staring at screens is unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading… The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this — but we still can.“
Snyder’s thinking seems to be in step with Lithub’s instructions for protecting your inner life in times of turmoil, or the Boston Globe’s recent article about the necessity of discussing current events with your therapist, addressing anxiety that may be Trump-related. It’s also supported by these studies reported in The New Yorker, which explain why facts and logical reasoning alone won’t be enough to change most people’s minds: our sense of unearned confidence in our own understanding of complex systems seems to be deeply ingrained in how we perceive everything around us. “It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert.
Based on the research she cites, the larger problem affecting society is not one we can counter by absorbing up-to-the-minute information, hunting for narratives or statistics that support our arguments — especially when even the most credible evidence can be waved aside as “Fake News” by those whose minds are already made up. The only defenses we can really penetrate are our own, Kolbert says: “If we — or our friends or the pundits on CNN — spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views.”
All this research speaks to the urgent need for every person to take responsibility for cultivating their own well-organized interior reality. As one of our oldest technologies, the written word remains one of the most accessible and influential tools we can use to accomplish this — one which reaches the hidden depths at the core of individual identity, but keeps us permeable to new perspectives and attentive to the needs of other humans.
Did we not just recently discover new links between reading literary fiction and the development of human empathy? Have we not found that literary characters make “experiential crossings” into our real world, speaking to us (and through us), guiding our behavior long after we’ve turned the last page? How quickly we forget the delight of experiencing these phenomena firsthand, which Malcolm X described so accurately in his autobiography: “The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
But what to read? On Tyranny anticipates this exact question, and then answers it — first with a reading list for would-be revolutionaries that includes literary giants like C.S. Lewis and Fyodor Dosteovsky, followed by a long list of political and historical texts that support his thesis about the importance of reading itself (many of which, such as The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, have been gaining belated traction on Amazon’s bestseller list following the election of Donald Trump).
The idea is to give yourself room to wander through a galaxy of moral and conceptual ambiguities, so that your own field of perception won’t diminish in scope, no matter how tightly that framework of political ideology may constrict around you.
Even the Bible makes for enlivening reading during such times, Snyder insists. Consider the gulf between the way Americans think and talk about Christianity, and the way it’s actually meant to be practiced. These foundational texts are always more complex than they’re popularly understood to be, and contain treasures for the minds of the faithless and faithful alike. On Tyranny quotes the Gospel of John: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
If books like these can serve as a preventative measure against indifference and hatred in those of us who wish to overcome the effects of tyranny on our own brains, can they also be offered as an antidote to those who have already swallowed the poison?
A judge in Virginia turned the courtroom into a classroom last month: several teenagers who’d spray-painted a local school with hateful slurs and symbols were sentenced to read books such as The Bluest Eye and The Handmaid’s Tale. Judge Alex Rueda (whom the article credits as having librarians in her family) seems to believe these are crimes of pure ignorance and underexposure. What’s more likely to keep someone from painting another swastika: hours spent picking up trash on the roadside, or hours spent getting to know another person’s world intimately? The effectiveness of sentences like these remains to be seen, but they remind us of the societal need to be proactive about education, wielding the power of literature as more than just a defensive tool.
It’s irrelevant whether Donald Trump will remain in office for four years or four months: whatever comes afterward will likely be just as chaotic as everything that came before, and no convenient opportunity to jump off the media merry-go-round will be forthcoming. Your desire to stay informed will continue overwhelming the better angels of your nature; the time to start safeguarding your ability to think more broadly and deeply is now.
There’s an optimism in texts like On Tyranny that you might miss on the first pass, glimmering in the spaces between all those anecdotes about the evil and sheer stupidity humans are capable of. We might be late to the party — some of us later than others, with worse excuses — but one of mankind’s most unifying qualities is that we come into the world knowing nothing. We have resigned ourselves to being taught, and in everything from taking our first steps to reading our first sentences, we won’t get anything right on the first try, or even the eleventh. Nations, being made of people, will likewise get it wrong over and over, before (hopefully) getting it right.
But here’s the life-cycle of any new concept: first we rely on a teacher, then we start teaching ourselves, and finally we begin teaching each other. Most of us have already been exposed to the historical impact of tyranny, and how people around the world have risen to the challenge of fighting it — this was taught to us in school, and by historians like Timothy Snyder. In the times ahead, will we step up to the challenge of teaching ourselves, adapting this wealth of knowledge to the unique perils of the present? Will we afford ourselves enough patience and wisdom to go on and teach each other?
This too remains to be seen, but in the meantime, facts have conspired to suggest that every book you read represents another small investment in the future, and an opportunity to remind yourself: I am here to learn.
If enough of us can keep that up, then perhaps one of these days, we’ll get it right.
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