Better Strangers

In 2014, just before I got engaged to my wife, we watched the first season of the show True Detective, and I was completely taken by Matthew McConaughey’s character Rustin Cohle.

Cohle is a pessimist — not a half-assed Eeyore pessimist who just looks at the glass half empty, but a philosophical pessimist, someone who thinks the existence of humanity is a mistake. He gives a particularly miserable speech at one point in the show, while talking with his detective partner Marty Hart.

RUST: I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.

MARTY: Hm. That sounds god fuckin’ awful, Rust.

RUST: We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody.

MARTY: I wouldn’t go around spouting that shit if I was you. People around here don’t think that way. I don’t think that way.

RUST: I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

MARTY: Man, I picked today to get to know you. Three months and I don’t get a word out of you —

RUST: You asked.

MARTY: Yeah, and now I’m begging you to shut the fuck up.

Spoiler alert, if you haven’t seen that particular season:

At the end of the season Cohle gets stabbed and has a near death experience that gives him a change of heart. He doesn’t become an optimist, per se, so much as he has hope that there are things worth fighting for, that life is worth living.

I had to leave our apartment and take a walk after we finished the final episode. The truth was that I was feeling more philosophically in line with the Rust of the earlier episodes, and as much as I loved the show, I suspected it had opted for a happy(ish) ending rather than a perfectly satisfying one.

But, I thought as I walked, if I believed this: what was I doing? The engagement ring was already in my apartment, I just hadn’t gotten down on one knee yet — was that the right move if I didn’t actually think life was worth living? Worse, Steph and I had decided to have kids. Was that even moral given what appeared to be the planet’s catastrophic trajectory?

Anti-natalism and the philosophy of despair

After I finished True Detective, I got a copy of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. The book was cited by True Detective’s showrunner Nic Pizzollato as one of the core inspirations for Cohle’s character. It’s a philosophical tract by a reclusive horror writer arguing that humanity is a mistake, that existence is (he always puts it in all caps) MALIGNANTLY USELESS, and that to have a child is to commit an act of violence.

Unfortunately, I found his arguments convincing. I read this book just as we moved from Washington, DC, to New Jersey, and it was one of the reasons I entered a long period of depression that I have yet to completely pull out of, nearly 9 years later.

Advocates of the anti-natalist movement argue that life is mostly suffering and pain, and that as such, creating life is to effectively add more suffering to the world, and is immoral. They argue that we can’t take care of the people that we have on earth, that the planet is getting overpopulated, that humans are actively destroying the planet and other life, that human consciousness is a horrifying mistake, and that if we wanted to contribute the greatest good, we would all commit to voluntary extinction.

On the tail of this, I read Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, the 1960’s environmental tract arguing that humans need to do an enormous amount to curb population growth if we want to have a sustainable future. Ehrlich argued for mass sterilization programs in the Global South, where more population growth was happening, which he believed should be incentivized by rich western governments as a condition of humanitarian aid. It was a tough choice, he believed, but it was our only chance of survival as a species.

Then 2016 happened, the night of our one year wedding anniversary. Donald Trump was elected, and on that night, I said to my wife, “We can’t have kids. We can’t bring them into this. We’re fucked.”

In early 2018, my daughter was born.

Light vs. Dark

What changed my mind, ultimately, was also True Detective. In the final lines of the show, Rust and Marty discuss the battle of light vs. dark. Marty looks up at the sky, and says, “Seems to me the dark’s got a lot more territory.”

Rust tells him he’s looking at it wrong: “Once, there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.”

In the context of the show, I didn’t know if this was a satisfying conclusion — I wasn’t sure they’d done the work to get Rust to that point. But in reading about the line, I learned that it had been almost lifted word for word from a comic called Top 10, by my favorite writer, Alan Moore. I’d loved his books V for Vendetta and From Hell, but on the heels of True Detective, I checked Top 10 out from the library and then proceeded to read everything the man had written that I could get my hands on.

Once I’d read all of Moore, I got a hold of any book which he’d recommended in an interview, and read those, and out of them, I was able to cobble together a philosophy in which I didn’t have to abandon my atheism, but in which I also didn’t have to succumb to the nihilism of the anti-natalists.

With a broader reading of Alan Moore, these are two lessons one absorbs:

* Good vs. Evil is a distraction — it is something we spend our entire lives wringing our hands about, whether good will win out in the end. In reality, good and evil require one another. You can’t have a hero without the villain. So the day evil is defeated, good will cease to exist. As Moore puts it in his fantastic Saga of the Swamp Thing, evil is the decaying mulch that good grows out of. And if one must exist for the other — can anything truly be said to be right or wrong?

* What matters is the current moment. We can spend all of our lives worrying about outcomes, but in Moore’s cosmology, time is eternal: all moments past and present exist simultaneously. Our experience of consciousness is much like reading a book: we’re currently focused on a specific word or sentence, but that doesn’t mean the pages we’ve already read have stopped existing, nor does it mean the future moments also don’t exist. There is actually some good science backing this view, but it’s effectively just a mind-bendy and psychedelic way of saying what everyone from the Buddha to Garth from Wayne’s World has been saying for eons: Live in the now.

Peeing as an act of hope

What changed my mind on having kids was this: Even if the anti-natalists arguments are internally consistent about how terrible life is, about the meat-grinder that is the world, they aren’t able to tell my that my personal experiences are all pain and misery, because they aren’t: I actually enjoy most moments of my life.

I am not in a state of constant pain. I go for walks and I see birds and that feels nice. I wrestle with my kids and they give me big hugs and their hair smells vaguely of hay and little kid sweat. I do stretches in the morning and it feels incredible. I eat delicious foods and sip delicious drinks. I smell coffee before I drink it, watch the cream swirl in beautiful chaotic clouds, and then get to sip at it. At night, I crawl under my cool covers in my cold room and I just squirm for a few minutes because it feels so good. And — NO ONE EVER TALKS ABOUT THIS — I get to go to the bathroom and get to pee! Peeing feels fantastic! It’s just a moment of intense relief I get to feel like, 6 times a day! And pooping?! Stop! It’s just an embarrassment of riches!

In my depression, I had stopped paying attention to these sensations, but once I began to do so again (thanks, edibles!), I realized just how constantly the world was serving me wonderful stimuli.

Beyond physical sensations, the evidence of most of my interactions seem to directly contradict the nihilists’ “people are trash” arguments. Grocery store check-out clerks are usually kind to me. Strangers on the street smile at me more often than they frown or yell at me. My friends are kind and funny and fun to be around. Occasionally, I come across a jerk (or, more accurately, a person who is having a bad moment) but with just a little bit of knowledge about humans’ inherent negativity bias, I began to understand that these encounters actually just absorbed more of my attention than the pleasant ones, which were in reality far more frequent.

The question — is it fair to bring a child into this world? — forces you to ask yourself: are you happy to be in this world? I was born in 1986, during one of the scariest parts of the Cold War. My parents could easily have decided the very real possibility of nuclear armageddon was reason enough to not bring another child into this world.

I would not say history has gone particularly well since then, but I’ve also managed to have a mostly enjoyable, fulfilling life in that time. Ultimately, it is up to every individual person to decide if their life is worth living. But the evidence seems conclusive: each day, most people don’t commit suicide. Most people find life worth living. The anti-natalists argue that this is because of a glitch in human consciousness, but who cares if the happiness you feel while scratching a dog’s tummy is a glitch? It still feels nice. We could use more glitches like that.

More than that — most of the people who espouse this sort of view suffer from severe depression and anxiety. The question I’ve learned to ask during my fight with depression is: what came first? The depressing thought or the depression? Is the planet a meat grinder of despair, or do I just need to go for a walk?

I do not always have an answer for this, but it certainly seems to me that my children’s natural state is to be happy. Darkness always creeps in to human life, but so do beauty and joy, and it will be up to my kids to decide what they pay attention to.

None of this means that people should or shouldn’t have kids. That choice is up to the individual, and if we’re being honest, there needs to be more space and acceptance of people who choose not to have kids — those of us with kids depend on them pretty heavily for both support and fun. But it does mean that maybe the fact that we’re scared about the future isn’t an adequate justification for instituting global eugenics programs that sterilize the poor. We could always, instead, change our political and economic system to one that isn’t consuming the planet, and try to live in balance with our world rather than wring every resource dry so the worst humans can have even more wealth. All we need to do to keep population in check is just average two kids per woman. There are plenty of ways to do that voluntarily instead of the eco-fascist “kill the poor” strategies of Ehrlich and his cadre.

Even if we are coming to the end of human history (I don’t believe that we are) I suspect that the odds are in my favor in betting that the final human’s final thought will be a nice one.

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If you, like me, come from a certain demographic group (white, male, etc.) you were likely raised to feel misty warm feelings at the sight of the American flag or the sound of the national anthem.

There are still enormous swaths of the American public that act like this: they cover the back of their truck beds with enormous American flags, “Don’t Tread On Me” flags, or the Thin Blue Line flags that imply they are happy with indiscriminate police violence.

But many of us over the past few years have been forced to wake up to the reality of what American society is: it’s a meatgrinder. It’s designed to wring every penny of value it can from every human life, and it will only give us rights that we fight for, so long as we promise to never stop fighting for them.

So hey! Here are some books to annihilate whatever patriotism remains in those rickety old bones of yours.

Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse

Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves is a chilling look at how seemingly reasonable decisions made at the top of the chain in the American military machine can result in countless civilian deaths.

The book is focused on the war in Vietnam, and specifically, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s insistence that there be quantifiable metrics for success in the Vietnam War. His metric of choice? Vietnamese enemy combatants that were killed in combat, AKA the “body count.”

Anyone who has watched The Wire knows what happened next: the generals and officers in the field began “juking the stats.” Because enemy combatants in the guerrilla war were often not in uniform, anyone dead could be after the fact declared an “enemy combatant.” It created a system that rewarded less scrupulous officers who would murder civilians and claim them as enemies, and punished officers who took care not to kill the innocent.

As a result, well-known crimes against humanity like the My Lai massacre became special only in that the press got wind of them — now, decades later, we know that My Lai-like massacres were happening on an almost constant basis, and that one operation after the Tet Offensive, known as Operation Speedy Express, likely killed at least 7000 Vietnamese civilians.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

Since the 1950s, the CIA has existed, nominally at least, to keep Americans safe. It appears to have never adequately done that. In the Cold War, rather than pursuing American public interests (which would obviously have been a lowering of tensions in order to avoid a potential nuclear war) the CIA fought for the interests of American businessmen.

They did this by overthrowing democracies, by funneling money to oppressive dictators, and by utterly failing to get reliable sources on the ground to fight our main geopolitical opponent, the USSR and the PRC. Later, when the Cold War ended (no thanks to them) they completely failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks on the United States, which they full well knew were coming.

The CIA has since been in large part supplanted as the go-to intelligence collecting resource by the even more invasive and secretive NSA, but it remains a perfect symbol of the reality of American democracy — power, as it does everywhere, protects power. Not the people it claims to have power over.

Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America is to Latin America what A People’s History of the United States is to the US. It is a catalogue of hundreds of years of colonialism and brutality carried out by the European (and North American) powers against the New World.

The project of European society in these continents has not been a civilizing one, Galeano shows, but an extractive one. It has been to bleed these countries dry of their natural resources at the expense of those that were here first in order to enrich the Europeans. The means by which they did this were brutal — genocide, enslavement, mass murder, torture, and ecological annihilation.

Given the modern surge of leftism in Latin America (and the concurrent surge of cryptofascist movements) this is a good book to read for an understanding of the history. If we only see land as a thing to be exploited, and not something which we are a part of and therefore must care for, we should expect this sort of brutality and destruction to continue.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Malcolm X is a hard read if you’re a white guy. I was brought up in the predominantly centrist-liberal strand of “the civil rights movement was good, but because of Martin Luther King, Jr., not any of his more violent counterparts.”

Malcolm X was decidedly more radical and unforgiving about the nature of American white supremacy than MLK was. And if I’m being honest — I think Malcolm X’s rhetoric worked better on my white brain than MLK’s did? The reason is that with MLK’s rhetoric, you could always put the racism out there — it was the Southern hillbillies that were the racists, it was the sheriffs and klansmen of the Deep South, it was the policemen and rich white powerbrokers up north. Reading Malcolm X, you have to confront what’s inside you, which is a much harder thing to do. Because reading his life story, it is pretty hard to argue that you, in the same position, would have a less radical attitude towards white America than he did.

The conciliatory attitude of the more peaceful section of this movement undoubtedly lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of white activists, which was certainly a major factor in the movement’s success. But we’re still fighting the same battles decades later — we may have to accept that Malcolm X was right. It wasn’t parts of white America. It is all of white America. The problem lies at the root of this country’s power, and to meaningfully confront it would mean to irrevocably change what this country is.

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

This book is a smack-on-the-head “duh” choice if you’ve ever traveled even gently in leftist circles, but I include it because Zinn — who died in 2010 — left behind a massive legacy that has resulted in countless spin-offs of his epochal alternative history of the U.S. Because of this book, we now have books like the comic A People’s History of American Empire, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, A People’s History of the World, A People’s History of Christianity, and more.

Zinn’s premise is simple — he rejects the “Great Man” theory of history, which says that major events are caused by the actions of great and powerful people. Instead, he says, history is made by the masses of people. But most history books spend little to no time focusing on the poor, the working classes, or the marginalized groups in society. Zinn’s book changes that, and gave us a scaffolding to look at all of human history through the lens of the powerless rather than the powerful.

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Having a hard time with the winter? Read an obnoxiously long book! This has been my strategy for getting through Seasonal Affective Disorder for a few years now, and it’s been one of the main things I’ve begun to look forward to in the winter time.

Here are the first two books I mentioned:

And these are the hard books:

As always, all books are affiliate linked to Bookshop — if you buy through here, I get a small kickback, but that does not influence what I choose!

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

This article was originally published on my personal website in 2021.

No one “got” the late 20th century like Kurt Vonnegut, the science fiction writer and humorist best known for his 1969 World War II book, Slaughterhouse-Five. He saw the dangers of late capitalism, of religious fanaticism, of climate change, and of technological change with such clear eyes that it would be too difficult to read him if it weren’t for the fact that he was also very humane and very funny.

All told, he published 14 novels, 98 short stories, a children’s book, and god knows how many essays over the course of his 84 years. That can be a little daunting if you’re trying to pick a place to start (and didn’t, as so many of us did, have to read his work in high school English class).

So what follows is a breakdown of what to start with if you’re interested in Vonnegut. It’s a subjective list, obviously, but I claim three tiny bits of authority on the topic:

* I’ve read all of his novels, as well as most of his short stories and essays.

* My original blog was named “A Man Without a Country,” which was ripped off from one of his books. This was a terrible career move, as Vonnegut was always gonna beat me on SEO.

* My wife and I popped his saying, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” into our wedding vows.

So without further ado:

The Best Novels to Start With

Vonnegut did something no other author did, to my knowledge, which is that he published a self-graded list of the books he had published so far in 1982. This means some of his later books are left off of the list, but it’s actually a pretty good ranking, with a couple of tweaks. So if you want the opinion of the author himself, here they are:

* Player Piano — B

* The Sirens of Titan — A

* Mother Night — A

* Cat's Cradle — A+

* God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater — A

* Slaughterhouse-Five — A+

* Welcome to the Monkey House — B-

* Happy Birthday, Wanda June — D

* Breakfast of Champions — C

* Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons — C

* Slapstick — D

* Jailbird — A

* Palm Sunday — C

At least two of these he’s far too harsh on (Breakfast of Champions is one of his best, and Slapstick is much better than a D), and maybe one he’s a bit too kind to (Cat’s Cradle is more of a B, to be honest), but it’s otherwise pretty accurate.

Here’s a breakdown of where to start:

Best Overall: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Slaughterhouse-Five is quintessential Vonnegut. Everything that came before doesn’t quite feel like Vonnegut, and everything that comes after echoes it. It has the black humor, the repeated phrases, the sudden appearances by the author, and the sci-fi weirdness that he did best.

The story is based on Vonnegut’s own experiences as a prisoner-of-war in World War II, when he survived the firebombing of Dresden. The main character in the book is a man named Billy Pilgrim who, depending on how you read it, either has a mental breakdown during the war, or he becomes “unstuck in time,” which means that he zips around to different moments in his life with no apparent control of where he’s going next. The book zips with him to those moments, including the moment on his wedding night where he is abducted by aliens called Trafalmadorians and is placed in an alien zoo with a pornstar as his “mate.”

While living with the aliens, he learns that they see time “as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.” In other words, when they look at you, they see you now, they see you at the moment of your birth, and at the moment of your death, which makes every human look like a centipede. This gives them a fatalistic attitude towards death — they (and the book) say “So it goes” whenever someone dies. “So it goes” appears 106 times in the book.

It sounds, reading most synopses, like a very cynical book, but the magic of Vonnegut is just how humane it is. He’s upset about the loss of life he saw in the war, he can’t comprehend the suffering we put each other through, and the only way he manages to cope with it is through jokes. But the humor doesn’t harden you, it softens you. You can’t call it an easy read, but you can call it a beautiful read.

With all of that said, Vonnegut can be jarring to read (I’ve heard more than one person say he made them sick to their stomach), so if you’re looking for something that feels a bit more like a traditional novel, go with one of his earlier books.

Best for people who don’t “get” Vonnegut: The Sirens of Titan (1959)

Before he was famous, Vonnegut was a bit of a hack — in a good way. He wrote short stories and his first couple of novels as a way of feeding his family, and he occasionally had to work other jobs — PR for a major corporation, running a Saab dealership — in order to make ends meet.

The Sirens of Titan was his second book, and it is the most classically pulpy sci-fi of any of Vonnegut’s books. It’s about a space-traveler and his dog who, by accident, gains the ability to materialize on other planets, and also to see the past in future. Using this ability and knowledge, he founds a church (“Of God the Utterly Indifferent”), and squabbles with an alien robot trapped on Titan, a moon of Saturn.

For people who don’t like Vonnegut, this is probably as close as you can get to the good parts of his work before he really developed his style, which is an acquired taste. It’s also one of his best books period, and thus possibly the best Vonnegut book for beginners.

Best for people who don’t “get” Vonnegut OR science-fiction: Mother Night (1962)

If sci-fi is not your bag, your best choice is probably Mother Night. The book is about Howard Campbell, Jr., an American who was recruited by the OSS (precursor of the CIA) to spy on the Nazis from within the party. In his role, Campbell becomes an English-speaking propaganda broadcaster for the Nazis, sending out messages to the Allied troops telling them to give up and surrender (kind of a German Tokyo Rose). He does his job so well that after the war, he ends up on trial in Israel for crimes against humanity, all while scrambling to prove that he was actually a spy.

Vonnegut gives a moral to the story: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.” It’s one of his more straightforward books, and its one of his more affecting — many people do terrible things during the war, for all sorts of “justified” reasons. Vonnegut, for his part, wants to weigh the justification against the deed.

He never did a spy novel again, though he did one more set in jail (1979’s Jailbird, about a Watergate conspirator). It remains one of his most moving. And it’s not too Vonnegut for people who aren’t into him just yet.

Next Steps

If you liked one of those books and are looking for something that does have the Vonnegut style, the best of his remaining novels are:

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Breakfast of Champions is the first book Vonnegut wrote after he became mega-successful with Slaughterhouse-Five, so he just kind of lets all of his weird impulses off the chain. The resulting book is probably his funniest, and also probably the Vonneguttiest book he ever wrote. It is also not for people who aren’t into Vonnegut. It’s about a syphilitic Pontiac dealer who is slowly losing his mind and a failing sci-fi writer, but honestly, who cares about the plot? This book is bonkers and hilarious.

Cat’s Cradle (1963)

Vonnegut’s A+ for this may be overstated, but it’s probably his highest regarded book after Slaughterhouse-Five. It involves an inventor who develops something called “Ice-Nine,” a new type of ice that freezes at a higher temperature, and thus has the ability to freeze all of the oceans on earth. It has all the classic Vonnegut features: a made-up religion that’s mostly just goofy quips, horrifying sci-fi catastrophes, and short verbal tics that are repeated throughout the book.

Slapstick (1976)

Slapstick deserves far better than the D he gave it, but it’s possible that Vonnegut’s judgment was clouded by how the critics had panned this book (something which had never happened to him before). In reality, it’s delightful. Inspired by his relationship with his sister (she died of cancer two days after her husband was killed in a trainwreck, and Vonnegut adopted two of her kids), it’s the story of a brother and sister who ascend to the Presidency in a post-apocalyptic America by campaigning on the promise of ending loneliness.

Among his other novels, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is probably the least bizarre — it’s the story of a rich do-gooder son and the plot against his inheritance — and also maybe the best regarded. Broadly speaking, his best novels were the ones written between 1959 and 1976. His first book — Player Piano — is good, but is the work of a green novelist, while the later ones — Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Galapagos, Bluebeard, and Hocus Pocus don’t do much that his earlier novels didn’t do. His final “novel,” Timequake, is one of the most interesting, as he basically gave up on writing it and made it half of a novel and half an autobiographical work.

His Other Work

On a personal level, I’ve always loved Vonnegut’s nonfiction writing, in particular his speeches. His novels can often be jarring and depressing, but his essays always manage to balance funny and furious in a way few others can. Because of his popularity, books of his nonfiction have continued to be published posthumously for the past 14 years. I will say as a parent that his children’s book Sun Moon Star is not all that great, judged by the metric that it has never managed to capture my kid’s attention. It is an extremely simple telling of the Nativity from the perspective of the baby Jesus and what he saw — the illustrations are all very simple shapes, so perhaps some younger babies would be engaged with it, but it fails to interest my toddler.

Fates Worse Than Death (1991)

Vonnegut’s books Palm Sunday (1981) and Fates Worse Than Death are must-reads if you want a look into Vonnegut’s brain particularly in regards to his writing and his personal history. In these books, he discusses his early life, his mental health, his experiences during the war, and the writers who inspired him. These are good books for people who have been intrigued by the novels and want to get a better sense of the man.

A Man Without A Country (2005)

Vonnegut considered himself a humanist for all of his life (and politically, usually aligned himself with socialism). Towards the end of his time on earth, these alliances made him feel less and less comfortable with the country of his birth, which he saw as increasingly corrupt and violent. A Man Without a Country is, for my money, Vonnegut’s best non-fiction book, and is required reading for anyone who looks back on the Bush years with a sense of deluded nostalgia.

If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? (2013)

After Slaughterhouse-Five was released, Vonnegut became an in-demand commencement address speaker. This book collects nine of those speeches. It includes the advice his uncle passed down to him: during the good moments in life, take a moment to acknowledge it by saying, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

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Short Stories

Vonnegut’s bread and butter in the early part of his career were short stories. Some of them are great, and some of them are forgettable. There were three books of his short stories released in his lifetime, more seem to keep leaking out after his 2007 death. Your best bet is the Complete Short Stories, a compendium that was released in 2017. Three to check out to start:

“EPICAC”

“EPICAC” is about a computer technician who falls in love with a mathematician. The mathematician tells him that she could never love a man who isn’t “poetic,” so the technician asks his computer, EPICAC, to write her a love poem. As he asks EPICAC for more help, he realizes that the computer has fallen in love with the mathematician. It’s actually a fairly heartbreaking story, and it’s one of his best.

“Harrison Bergeron”

This is the one you may have read in high school English — it’s about a world in which all people are forced to be equal. If you have really great eyesight, you have to wear thick glasses. If you’re athletic, you have to wear weights around your neck. One man, the most exceptional of all, Harrison Bergeron, decides to stage a revolution. No more should be said, read it, it’s beautiful.

“2 B R 0 2 B”

“2 B R 0 2 B” imagines a world in which aging has been cured, but the world can’t sustainably hold onto an eternally increasing population. So a rule is set up: You can have kids, as long as one person agrees die for each person that’s born. If you can’t find someone, you child is killed at birth. The story focuses on a man in a hospital waiting room while his wife is giving birth to triplets. He does not have three deaths lined up. For a story that was written in 1962, it is bananas how ahead of its time this one is.

Similar Authors

During his life, Vonnegut was mostly neglected by academics and critics, but he was enormously influential on other authors. His style is his own, and it can’t be replicated, but if you like Vonnegut, you may like the following authors. The first, Celine, was a direct inspiration for Vonnegut, the second, Heller, was a friend and contemporary who wrote perhaps the only WWII book better than Slaughterhouse-Five, and the latter two, Palahniuk and Kobek, are satirists with as sharp an eye and as distinct a voice as Vonnegut.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Vonnegut acknowledged that his writing owed a lot to the French writer: he read Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night while writing Slaughterhouse-Five, and the influence shows. That book’s influence on 20th century writing is huge, you can pick up traces of it in Vonnegut and in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. It is, in short, about a man who finds himself in the horrors of World War I, then as a colonist in Africa, then as a galley slave, then as a doctor in Detroit. It is, without a doubt, one of the bleakest, most cynical books you will ever read. Fortunately, Vonnegut never became that cynic: he always had humanity left in him. Not so for Celine — after his experiences in the first World War and his success as a nihilistic writer, he became an enthusiastic antisemite and Nazi collaborator.

Joseph Heller

The only literary equal to Slaughterhouse-Five is Catch-22. They are totally different styles, but they are both chaotic, hilarious books about the stupidities of World War II. Heller’s protagonist, Yossarian, is a bombardier in the Mediterranean during the siege of Italy, who increasingly starts to wonder, “Is any of this worth me dying?” When he answers no, he realizes he has to work incredibly hard to hold to his convictions to be a coward and stay alive. Heller is amazing — when an interviewer told him he never wrote a book as good as Catch-22 afterwards, he said, “To be fair, neither has anyone else.”

Chuck Palahniuk

There are two writers who can make me sick to the stomach: Vonnegut and Palahniuk. Chuck Palahniuk is best known for his excellent book Fight Club, which remains one of the most misunderstood books of all time (it has been adopted by Men’s Rights Activists and alt-right types who do not realize that the book is mocking them), but he’s written a handful of other amazing satires as well, like Invisible Monsters, Lullaby, and Choke.

Jarett Kobek

Jarett Kobek hates being compared to Vonnegut. He prefers to be compared to Celine (which is weird, because Kobek is left-wing, not a Nazi). Regardless, there are similarities: Kobek relies on repeated phrases, short paragraphs, constant black humor, and he repeatedly writes himself into his stories. If you like Vonnegut but want his material updated for the 21st century, you could do worse than Kobek’s I Hate the Internet or Only Americans Burn in Hell.

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Note: As always, these books are affiliate linked to Bookshop.org, which means that if you buy through the link, I get a small kickback. This does not have any effect on the books I choose. I never affiliate link to Amazon.

In my previous job as a librarian, I had the job of buying new comics for the local library. It was maybe my favorite part of the job — in the past, not much had been set aside for the section, and over my tenure, I got to expand it by the thousands.

Comics were among the highest circulating books in our collection, but they were mostly checked out by a group of loyal regulars who tended to be at the oldest, about my age (mid-30s), and usually in their teens or 20s.

The older generations usually still view comics as pulp, or as a lesser medium. I’ve argued that this is a mistaken viewpoint elsewhere, but I needn’t bother — this opinion will die out with the older generations.

I’d like more of my generation to engage with comics, though, mostly because I like talking about them and we still have a hangover of the olden days when comics were in the “nerd” domain, back before being nerdy was trendy.

So: for my non-comics friends, I have five recommendations for comics that are not pulpy, and are, in fact, beautiful and transcendent, like the best that literature has to offer.

Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s Daytripper spends each issue following the life of Bras, a man living an ordinary life in Brazil, and each issue ends with his death. Then, in the next issue, he is resurrected — he dodged the bus, he was saved from the drowning, etc. — and his life moves on.

It’s a staggeringly good book, covering childhood, first romances, professional successes and disappointments, difficult parents, and finally old age. The conceit is similar to Kate Atkinson’s novel Life After Life, though the execution is extremely different (there are, for example, no wars, no counterfactual attempts on Hitler’s life, etc.).

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki

Miyazaki is now best known for his Studio Ghibli movies like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and My Neighbor Totoro. One of his earlier films was an adaptation of his acclaimed manga series Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which remains, for my money, one of his best two or three works.

Nausicaa is set in a dystopian future, long after giant, nuclear-powered “warriors” destroyed human civilization and left the planet in ecological ruin. The effects are still being felt a thousand years later as an enormous toxic jungle continues to consume civilization, and enormous insects rampage and kill anyone who dares to get too close. Nausicaa is a princess in an uncontaminated zone called the Valley of the Wind, and she has an affinity for animals and the deadly insects that threaten what remains of civilization.

Miyazaki has been creating emotionally immense works of ecological fiction his entire life (my favorite of his movies, Princess Mononoke, has similar themes), but it started with this manga. If you’re new to that medium (which differs from mainstream comics mostly in that it’s read in the opposite direction, as Japanese books are read in what we would consider to be back to front), this is among the best places to start: it’s significantly more in-depth than the movie, but having the framework of that film to help guide you through will be helpful.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

There are zero words in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. Instead, he seeks to convey the experience of immigration from one country to another solely in images. The way he does this is ingenious — the old country, which our immigrant greatly misses, is no longer safe, as enormous dragon tails can be seen prowling around the corners of the streets.

But our immigrant must exchange the dangerous for the impossibly strange — the animals in the new country are portrayed as aliens, the language as impenetrable hieroglyphs.

For those who see comics as just picture books for people who don’t have the patience to read, this book is the antidote — it does with images alone what words could never do, and is perhaps the best depiction I’ve ever seen of the alienating strangeness that is moving to a new and unfamiliar country.

Here by Richard McGuire

Richard McGuire’s Here is renowned among comics fans for its concept, and is another book that most likely couldn’t be done in solely written form. It is the story of a corner of a room, taking place from prehistory to the distant future.

It sounds like a gimmick, but the execution is flawless: by fixating on this one corner, you can see when it was once a forest, you can see when a couple conceived a child there, when the child plays, when the couple throws a party, when they fight. You can see previous owners — occasionally even historical figures! — as they live their lives, you can see as new technologies come and grow old.

It’s a beautiful perspective of the places we live and how they play a very real role in our lives, even if we only ever give them credit as the backdrops to our adventures.

In. by Will McPhail

This is easily the goofiest book on my list (it has one particularly absurd page in which a new couple hooking up for the first time is portrayed as a fully-nude dance routine), but it’s been my favorite of recent years.

It tells the story of Nick, an awkward millennial who discovers that much of what has been missing from his life has been other people — when he stops focusing on himself and is let into the lives of others, the pages flip from black and white classic comics to gorgeous, lush paintings of his acquaintances complex interior worlds. It’s a perfect antidote to those of us who have hidden our true selves behind several layers of irony.

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This week’s podcast is about how the internet — not the state of the world — is what’s bumming you out. As someone who has worked in the attention economy, I have some insider tips for understanding why this is happening, and books to recommend if you want to go deeper.

Here are the books (and the song) mentioned in the episode (with affiliate links, of course):

A quick correction — in the episode, I mention the myth that carrots help you see in the dark. The British propaganda campaign was not as I mention, because they developed better bombsights, but because they developed radar and were using it to intercept Luftwaffe planes.

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When my son was born in February of 2020, we knew we would need to move to a new house soon, but we loved our apartment — it was a cozy second floor two-bedroom, it was where we’d spent the first two years of my daughter Sophie’s life, and we knew that in my wife's late pregnancy the stress wasn't worth the move. Instead, we nested, and focused on enjoying the last few months with Sophie where there was just three of us. We planned on getting a place with three bedrooms after the rough first months following my son’s birth. Until then, he'd sleep in a bassinet next to our couch, or, more likely, swaddled in the warm cloth carrier we draped around our torsos.

But a month into his life, COVID hit, and suddenly, we were without daycare. New Jersey was one of the earliest and hardest hit, so the closures were sweeping and widespread, and included the public parks. They still weren't sure, they explained, if the germs could linger on surfaces, and this made playground equipment dangerous. 

When I mentioned on a local Facebook page that this made it hard for families with young kids and no yards, a neighbor told me to just take Sophie to a nearby road and sit her on a bench, so she could watch cars go by. I gently suggested that I was not positive she had ever physically sat down, and that attempting the experiment in busy traffic was not my idea of “blowing off steam.”

Instead of a yard, we had an empty lot next door, so the entirety of our time outside the apartment became the hour or so a day, rain or shine, when I would take my daughter into the empty lot, to give my napping wife and son a few moments of peace and quiet. Sophie would run around and splash in puddles while I picked rusty cans and nails out of the property and tossed them into the trash.

Once the lot was more or less cleared of debris, I began to get bored just standing in it, and I needed something to do. So I downloaded nature apps — iNaturalist, Merlin Bird ID, and Seek, which allowed me to use my phone’s camera to identify every plant and bird in the yard. The first plant I pointed it at happened to be poison ivy, which made it instantly useful. After moving Soph away from the plant, we went on scavenger hunts for weird bugs and mushrooms, and we began listening to bird calls to try and identify them. In doing so, we could hear the thrice-repeated patterns of mockingbird calls, and look up and catch them flying in their characteristic wavelike parabolic swoops.

The hobby grew to the point that I bought a window feeder, which I installed on our second story window, right in view of the couch so I could watch starlings and house sparrows fight over the seeds while my infant son napped on my chest. On days when we never left the apartment, it felt like my only connection to the wider natural world, like I was the Birdman of Alcatraz.

As I grew more proficient, I could tell which birds were outside the apartment without looking — if I was woken up at 3 AM by a truly thunderous cheerily! cheerily! cheer up! I could tell that it was a robin, and if I heard an ugly, throaty screech, I could tell if it were a crow, a fish crow, or a blue jay.

After our initial, hellish, 14-day quarantine, we would spend our weekends in Point Pleasant with Steph's parents, who had a whole different set of birds living in the swamp along Beaver Dam Creek. One early morning, when Sophie woke up early, I sat on their deck chairs outside sipping coffee when the two-year-old said, "Papa, that's a mourning dove."

I reflexively began to correct her and then paused and heard the unmistakable, sad, coo-WOO-woo-woo-woo. It was a mourning dove.

I’d heard it lamented that today’s kids can recognize 100 corporate brands by the age of 3 but couldn’t name any local plants or birds. My kid, at least, knew dandelions and mourning doves.

Small ideas

I recently read Helen Macdonald’s wonderful H is for Hawk. The book, if you haven’t read it, is about how, in the wake of her father’s sudden death, the author adopts and trains a wild goshawk named Mabel. There’s a bit in it where a misogynist acquaintance suggests that the reason she gets along so well with her hawk is that they are both women. She recognizes it as an astoundingly stupid comment, but in her research finds that this was a common theme among Victorian male falconers — rather than a hawk being difficult to train because it’s a wild animal, it must be difficult because it’s a hormonal woman.

While pondering this, she notices something — her goshawk, Mabel, is trying to play with her.

Her eyes are narrowed in bird-laughter. I am laughing too. I roll a magazine into a tube and peer at her through it as if it were a telescope. She ducks her head to look at me through the hole. She pushes her beak into it as far as it will go, biting the empty air inside. Putting my mouth to my side of my paper telescope I boom into it: ‘Hello, Mabel.’ She pulls her beak free. All the feathers on her forehead are raised. She shakes her tail rapidly from side to side and shivers with happiness.

An obscure shame grips me. I had a fixed idea of what a goshawk was, just as those Victorian falconers had, and it was not big enough to hold what goshawks are. No one had ever told me goshawks played. It was not in the books. I had not imagined it was possible. I wondered if it was because no one had ever played with them. The thought made me terribly sad.

The passage struck me because it’s been one of several of recent instances in which I’ve found myself relating to a bird.

This is because the 5 years I’ve spent as a parent have done strange things to me: I’d had a pretty good sense of who I was as a person in my earlier adult life, and I felt I had a solid grasp on how the world worked. I thought of myself as smart, I thought of myself as sarcastic and somewhat jaded, an atheist or an existentialist, depending on the day. I knew I listened primarily to rock, alternative, and blues music, I knew I read horror novels and long books written by old Russians, I read nonfiction on politics and philosophy. I knew I was good at debate, I knew I was more of a city guy than an outdoors guy, I knew I liked to travel and write. I had a ground to stand on.

And my kids stuck a shovel into that earth, pried it loose, and flipped it. I was suddenly a cryer. Sarcasm and debate were useless with toddlers, and I couldn’t read bleak books on climate change and existentialist philosophy and come home prepared to deal with a smiling baby. Suddenly I wasn’t smart — there were emotional skills I needed for children that I was not only bad at, I was completely stunted on.

Not only that, my tastes had suddenly changed — I was all of the sudden really connecting with metal, with synthpop bands like CHVRCHES, with niche genres like witch house, and, god help me, Sovietwave. And oh yeah! No big deal! Atheism wasn’t working anymore! I was all of the sudden slipping towards a weird version of neopagan spirituality, and was lighting ritual fires with my kids on the winter solstice while telling them stories about The Wild Hunt.

I’d had a fixed idea of who I was, and it was not big enough to hold what I am.

Beach walks

One of my shifts has been by necessity — I live close to both New York City and Philadelphia in a physical sense, but having two young kids means I rarely go there. So I just don’t really get the opportunity to be a city guy anymore. I do, however, live less than a mile from the beach. Which means that I can go there early in the morning, before the kids wake up, or after lunch for a stroll.

While I walk, I try to use the eBird app to keep track of the birds I’ve spotted. I convince myself this is for citizen science, but really, I just want to get to know my neighbors, because they made me feel better on a day I’d been feeling sad.

After a rough morning (followed by an intense therapy session) I’d gone to the beach in the rain, and had gotten cold and drenched. The shore was covered in birds — common loons, long-tailed ducks, great black-backed gulls — and at one point, I saw a flock of brants in a V-formation, their wing tips barely missing the waves.

It was one of those brief out of body experiences you have when you see something wild — the sudden realization that these are living creatures, and that even though they are literally in your neighborhood, they are having experiences that are completely outside your world of doomscrolling and daycare drop-offs and pots of coffee. Their lives are rain and sea spray and eating seaweed and moss and huddling together with their flock on the cold nights. What’s more — I felt like I could imagine myself as them.

When we left our COVID-era apartment, we moved to a house in a nearby town. I set up three birdfeeders in the yard so I can bring the wild animals a little closer to me. I now strategize about keeping local cats out of my yard and away from my birds (cats are invasive species, people, keep yours indoors), and I go on hikes through a nearby woods in the hopes I’ll see the local fox (whom I’ve named Kaiser Fuzzyface) darting away from me through the dead leaves.

After a lifetime of putting myself and my world into understandable boxes, it’s nice to have these constant reminders, not that I was wrong, necessarily, but that the boxes were never big enough to fit everything in them. There is still more to discover, even about myself.

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I live right by the beach, and a few weeks ago, I had a pretty cool experience. It was rainy, so I went for a walk, and I saw a lot of cool ducks.

That’s it — that’s the entire experience.

Getting out into nature a bit more has been an incredibly pleasant experience for me — I spent much of my childhood in the woods at the bottom of our street, and I rarely saw wildlife beyond squirrels. But now, here on the shore, I regularly see hawks, migratory birds, and occasionally foxes, snapping turtles, dolphins, and whales.

Seeing an animal instantly improves my day. I will usually go find and read a book about that animal, but half the time these days, nature writing is about the grief associated with climate change, and how all is lost.

I understand the importance of communicating the emergency, but also… nature’s still super cool? There’s still really neat stuff happening? And wonder and awe are what truly fuel our love of nature and our desire to save it. So here are books that didn’t completely depress me about the state of nature (and at least one that kinda did, but gave me reason to hope).

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1. The Pine Barrens by John McPhee

One of my favorite things about living in New Jersey is that there’s this massive swath of the state — the most densely populated state in the country, and smack dab in the middle of the massive Mid-Atlantic urban sprawl extending from Boston all the way down to D.C. — that is just empty coastal pinelands.

New Jersey’s Pine Barrens have bad soil, which kept them from getting overdeveloped like the rest of the Mid-Atlantic sprawl, and have a long history of hiding people who didn’t want to be found: Revolutionary War deserters, runaway slaves, raiding pirates, and, as in The Sopranos, whatever bodies the New York and New Jersey mobsters needed to dispose of so they’d never be found.

John McPhee’s book is a bit old — it came out in 1968 — but it’s still beautiful writing. He goes into the area’s history, its ecology, and its culture. It’s an amazing glimpse into the most maligned place in America’s most maligned state.

2. The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

This was my favorite book of 2021. It’s about the matsutake mushroom, which is a type of fungus that thrives in desolated landscapes. It is rumored to be the first thing that grew in the ruins of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, and it now thrives in the clear-cut pinelands of the Pacific Northwest.

It’s also a culinary delicacy in Japan, which means that people who know how to find the mushroom can sell it at a high price. The work is not entirely legitimate — often, matsutake foragers have to hunt on private or protected land — which means that most of the people who do this are on the fringes of society.

Matsutake hunters include undocumented Hispanic immigrants, Vietnamese Hmong refugees, and far-right Vietnam Vets who have retreated to the woods, and see the fungi as a means of remaining self-sufficient and hidden from Uncle Sam.

Lowenhaupt Tsing sees the matsutake as indicative of how life can go on even in the face of environmental collapse, and the book, while dealing with dark shit, is ultimately a hopeful, even happy book.

3. The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

The more we learn about Octopi, the smarter we realize they are: Sy Montgomery’s book The Soul of an Octopus is an investigation into the intelligence and personalities of these curious cephalopods.

The majority of the book is focused on Montgomery’s relationship with octopi living in the New England aquarium near her home, and her realization that different octopi have distinct and diverse personalities. Octopi’s neurological wiring is enormously different to that of humans (our common ancestor existed 518 million years ago), but that doesn’t mean they aren’t smart — they seem to have evolved a totally different but still-impressive form of intelligence that we are just beginning to understand.

4. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

While mourning the sudden death of her beloved father, falconer Helen Macdonald decided to train a goshawk named Mabel. Goshawks are considered difficult, wild birds in the falconry community, and in the immersive act of training this bird to both trust her and to hunt with her, Macdonald was able to first blot out, and then come to terms with her grief. The book is a meditation on loss and mourning, but the most spectacular bits of it are when she begins to see that there is more to Mabel than she can even comprehend.

This is often a sad book, but it’s not a bummer. There’s as much awe in it as there is sadness.

5. The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

Okay — hear me out. Technically, this Pulitzer Prize-winning book is about the human-caused sixth mass extinction of animals on the planet. It should be incredibly bleak. But I didn’t find it depressing!

Kolbert’s book tracks the history of extinctions and also the history of humanity’s understanding of how they work. For a long time, we didn’t understand dinosaur bones, because the idea that God would put a species on earth and then take it off was inconceivable — his design, after all, was flawless.

But as we began to explore more of the world, we began to find evidence of creatures that we just couldn’t find anywhere. The concept of mass extinction events was controversial for a long time, but we now know there have been at least 5 mass extinction events in earth’s history. We are in the middle of the sixth.

The reason this isn’t a depressing book is because Kolbert’s view of it is so big-picture. There’s a very real sense in which humans have always fundamentally altered our environments (we did, after all, kill off all the wooly mammoths and mastodons), but we also have the ability to not destroy everything around us — she finishes the book with ways in which we’ve already managed to save species that, without action, would already be gone.

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When my daughter was born, my wife and I decided to not post pictures of her publicly online. It was mostly about giving our kids a sense of autonomy about their digital lives when they reach the age where they care, but it’s been a more controversial decision than we anticipated.

This week’s podcast is an attempt to explain our stance!

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This is an adaptation of a speech I made in 2019 at Brookdale Community College.

A few years back, I was invited to a local community college to discuss what we, in the modest little corner of New Jersey that we live in, can do about issues as huge and seemingly untouchable as global human rights. It is a terrible topic for a speech. Human rights, for most of us, is just something to be depressed about, and that is because activists and advocates like myself are notoriously bad at making people feel hope about the state of the world. 

The problem, of course, is that we advocates have pet issues we want to fix, and in order to fix them, we first have to tell you about them. 

If I want you to donate money to my cause to save the Uighurs in China, I first have to tell you about the Uighurs in China, and that is going to make you feel sad. Then, my compatriot over at the charity next door will come in and tell you about the plight of the Ukrainian refugee, and this, too, will make you feel sad. This, too, will make you open your wallet, or maybe pick up the phone to call your congressperson.

We have no shortages of causes we’re fighting for, so this cycle will continue with a parade of us detailing the modern world’s atrocities and catastrophes, and eventually, you will not only run out of money, you’ll start to feel numb to the virtually endless suffering of other people around the world.

Activists have a name for this. We call it “compassion fatigue.” You yourself have experienced compassion fatigue if you, like me, mute the TV every time that Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercial comes on. 

Closing our eyes to the pain of another living being may make us feel cold and callous, but really, the problem is simply that our individual capacity for compassion is finite, and the world’s suffering is infinite.

The choice, it appears to us, is to either numb yourself or to die of empathy.

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Helplessness Blues

So when we read the news about the Syrian civil war and the refugee crisis growing out of it, many of us feel helpless, like there’s not much that can be done. And to an extent, this is true. The time where the uprising posed a serious threat to Bashar al-Assad’s government has passed, so the dictator who gasses his own people will likely remain in power, now firmly backed with the military might of Russia and Iran. Even if we intervened now, that core fact would not likely change, nor would the fact that the United States government is hardly likely to throw its weight behind revolutionary Rojava, the anarchist-feminist commune that defeated ISIS and is now facing down both the Turkish and Syrian governments.

When it comes to refugees, we’re also past the point of being able to do very much: If they were here, we could welcome them to our neighborhoods and help them rebuild their lives, but modern American governments seem more or less allergic to refugees, unless they’re from traditionally white countries like Ukraine.

We can give money to organizations that support refugees, we can vote for candidates who are pro-refugee, we can get involved with activist groups, and we can educate ourselves on the conflict, it’s context, and it’s history, but short of actually leaving our homes and going to Europe or the Middle East, our ability to directly help is limited.

The reality of the situation right now is that most of what needs to be done for Syria and Syrians needs to be done at very high levels of government, and most of what really needed to be done to stem the violence should’ve been done years ago. 

The details differ, but the same is basically true of the case of the Rohingya in Burma, or the gang violence in Central America, or the ongoing pandemic — the decisions that caused and worsened these events were made high up, and they were made in the past. By the time they’ve hit our newspapers, we’ve already failed in the ways that really matter. 

That, I admit, is a pretty depressing thought. It’s thoughts like this that make us feel helpless about the state of the world.

I’d like to argue that any sense of helplessness you feel when confronted with these humanitarian catastrophes, though, is misplaced, and that it stems from thinking about it in the wrong way. So before we can figure out what we can do to fight for human rights, we first need to change our thinking about it. And to do that, we need to address the elephant in the room.

Nazis Ruin Everything

There’s a rule on the internet known as “Godwin’s Law.” Godwin’s Law states:

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

There’s a corollary to this, which is that whoever is the first to bring up Hitler loses the argument. 

There’s a good reason for this: Nazis poison everything. They were such an extreme political cult that to call someone a Nazi is to effectively shut down any possibility of conversation, because it’s like calling someone a baby-killer or a kitten-puncher. It’s meant to end reasonable discussion, because Nazis notoriously aren’t capable of being reasoned with.

They are the black hole of humanitarian work and political activism. You can’t escape them, and your thoughts and actions bend around them.

Most modern human rights work was built in direct response to the atrocities the Nazis and their allies committed during World War II, and much of what drives modern human rights workers is the specter of the Holocaust. So instead of trying to avoid the Nazis, we should take a moment to confront them: There’s a major problem with how the Nazis influence the way we talk and think about the world. They make us lazy thinkers, and worse still, this lazy thinking disempowers us.

I’ll explain.

Inevitably, whenever people discuss how to stop human rights abuses before they occur, they bring up the failure of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy when he went to Munich to negotiate with Hitler. The idea being that, if Chamberlain had been more forceful at Munich, World War II would have been averted. 

Here’s the thing: This is not the moment in which we could’ve stopped World War II. It’s chosen more or less arbitrarily, and usually by people who are trying to justify the use of pre-emptive force. Chamberlain went to Munich in 1938. This is one year before the start of the war. It is five years after the Reichstag fire, five years after Hitler banned all other parties in Germany, five years after Germany had begun to rearm. It would be very easy to argue that 1938 was already far, far too late. 

If you chose to, you could make the argument that the right time to stop the Nazis was 5 years earlier, when they started violating the peace agreement from World War I.

But why stop there? If we wanted to really stop World War II, the Holocaust, and the Nuclear Era, we could just as easily go back to the mid-20’s and build a less speculative American banking system, averting the crash of ‘29, the Great Depression, and the global rise of authoritarianism that came with it. 

Or we could go back to the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI, which put such onerous terms on the Germans that their interim democracy was pretty much doomed from the start. We could go back and prevent the absurd and utterly pointless violence of WWI, we could undo all of those antiquated alliances and pointless squabbling, all the constant jostling for colonial supremacy. 

At this point, if you’re keeping track, we’re reaching back into the 19th and even 18th century.

I could keep going back and never stop, but I’ll spare you, as doing so would miss the point. The point is that there is no one moment in history where we could’ve prevented World War II. There were millions of moments. The point is that when we discuss the big moments where the course of history could’ve been changed, we almost exclusively focus on moments where old powerful men were making important decisions in closed rooms. Most of us weren’t alive when these decisions were made, and if we had been, we would not have been in the rooms where they were being made. 

Looking at history in this manner, where the only people ever making a difference are powerful old men, and where there’s only one moment in which the right decision can be made, is fundamentally disempowering to the rest of us.

Gentler alternative histories

I would like to offer a few alternative moments to when the horrors of Hitler could have been prevented: like the moment in 1905 or so, when, at a dinner table in Austria or Germany, someone could have spoken out against an anti-Semitic, war-mongering, or hypernationalist comment made by a friend or relative, and didn’t.

We do not know anything about this moment specifically, but we’re all more familiar with what it would have felt like than we are with what sitting in the room at Munich or Versailles would have felt like. This is because we have all been having these types of conversations lately. These conversations are often terrible. They are tense and awkward and sometimes they lead to fights we would rather not have. 

But they are as important now as they were in 1905 Germany, for a single reason: there are often children present at dinner tables, and children listen. Children that hear about how war is glorious, that hear their country is destined to rule all, and that hear that Jews or gays or immigrants are untrustworthy and subhuman, are going to have a very hard time shaking those ideas off in adulthood, no matter how well-meaning and decent they grow up to be.

It would be tempting to imagine that if Hitler had heard an adult he respected speak up for the humanity of the Jews at a young and impressionable age, that he would never have been more than a failed painter, of the harmless type that still lives in your Uncle’s basement. But I think most of us have trouble imagining Hitler as a child, without the mustache and swastika, without the seething, furious charisma. It is hard to imagine the most evil, warped human being most of us can think of as ever being anything but evil and warped, even if we ourselves have never met a truly evil 5-year-old.

Instead of trying to imagine a better Hitler, let’s think about all of the other dinner tables in Germany, the ones filled with the 5-year-olds that would one day join the stormtroopers, attend the rallies, work in the factories, and turn a blind eye as their neighbors were beaten in the streets and dragged into cattle cars.

Imagine if they had learned, at a young age, that a person is a person, regardless of race or religion, that their country was beautiful but that others were, too, that their destiny was not one of conquest and domination, but of peace and cooperation. Imagine if a country full of those kids would have been quite so willing to follow an embittered, failed painter into the violent oblivion of the Second World War.

Now: None of the parents of 1905 could have possibly seen the future that was bearing down on them and their children. None of them could have possibly fathomed the decades that lay in front of them. You can’t really fault them for not being able to see the future. But if you can judge a parent by the children they raise, they were among the worst parents in history.

It is because these kitchen table moments are not recorded in our history books that we don’t remember them, but there were far more of these moments than there were treaties, sanctions, or proclamations, and even in those important, historic instances, all of the men who were in those big important rooms had once sat as children at humble kitchen tables.

The argument is not that the acts of the powerful do not matter, but that the tone of them is set by the accumulation of millions of tiny little acts of kindness or cruelty in a thousand little communities over the preceding centuries. 

What is true of genocides is true of hurricanes: the real life saving work is done long before the crisis point hits.

The darker timelines we didn’t live

Most importantly, you do not hear about the genocides that didn’t happen. You don’t hear about lives that were saved, about children that were unharmed, about women that weren’t raped, about family heirlooms that weren’t stolen, because if we’re successful in our work, those people don’t exist. If we’re successful in our work, no one will ever thank us, because no one will know there’s a reason to give thanks. 

It’s impossible for us to compare ourselves to darker, more violent timelines that may have resulted had people been crueler in the past, or brighter, more peaceful timelines had we chosen to be kinder and wiser. But there is reason to think that we’ve been getting better as a species over time.

There’s a school of thought out there right now, most notably put forward by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, that says that rather than focusing on short-term, horrifying anecdotes, we should be looking at the broader trends of history. And the broader trends of history are much more positive than you might imagine: violence has steadily declined over the course of history, as have the number of wars, massacres, and genocides. Fewer people are dying of preventable disease, life expectancies have lengthened, and respect for human rights has risen around the world.

There are, of course, major weaknesses in this theory: past performance is not an indicator of future success, and “fewer genocides” is not the ideal, “no genocides” is. A decrease in violence and hardship also doesn’t really matter all that much if we destroy the world with nuclear weapons or climate change in the next few decades, which seems increasingly possible by the day. 

But this outlook does give us a dose of much-needed hope for the future. It does show that human beings can change, and that they seem to gradually, glacially, on an almost generational scale, change for the better. 

A more realistic system of thinking is offered by Rebecca Solnit in her physically slim but emotionally massive 2004 book, Hope in the Dark. Solnit, unlike Pinker, sees the flaws of humanity with clear eyes, but she suggests that hopelessness is still an irrational response to the world. The sheer amount that has changed in our small lifespans alone should lead us to reject the idea that we can see the future and that it’s bleak. 

When I was a kid, virtually no one used the internet, which, for good or for ill, now shapes the world in massive, unpredictable ways. When I was 3, the Berlin Wall fell. A few years before, a world without the USSR was unthinkable. Until I was 16, gay sex was still illegal in 14 states. After Bush’s devastating reelection in 2004, virtually no one would have told you a black man could ever be President, let alone in the next Presidential term. A mere 8 years ago, before Obergefell v. Hodges, there were 15 states where gay marriage was either banned or was not totally legal.

The work that led to these changes started small. It was not Reagan who knocked down the wall, but ordinary Germans, Czechs, Poles, and Russians, dissidents who for decades had been writing poetry and fiction and essays in jail cells and gulags and in the secret corners of their homes. It was not the Supreme Court that legalized gay sex and, eventually, gay marriage, but groups of activists who insisted on their dignity for decades, and were willing to sacrifice their time, money, and personal lives to demand that dignity in court. It was not Obama who brought us a black President, it was thousands of activists who, for centuries, demanded equal rights for blacks, even if it meant being beaten, imprisoned, and sometimes murdered by the very state that was supposed to protect them. 

The "great men" are just surfers. Ordinary people are the waves.

A butterfly flaps its wings

Most people are terrified of the apparent chaos of the world, but there’s something beautiful about it. Chaos, for one thing, makes the future impossible to predict. This is because small, even microscopically insignificant actions now, can snowball into something massive. This, for those of us who feel insignificant or small, should inspire hope rather than dread.

Most of us are familiar with the Butterfly Effect, the idea that a butterfly can flap its wings in China and that this can cause a hurricane in the Atlantic months later. While no one has ever caught this asshole butterfly in the act, the idea itself is now widely accepted among meteorologists and climate scientists. 

In historical terms, the idea is similarly expressed by the old proverb.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

You cannot predict what will change our future. You cannot predict what it will look like. We do not see the horrible futures that collapse every time we choose to act with kindness rather than cruelty, or the bright, beautiful utopias that evaporate when we lash out at those around us, but those futures are as real for us now as they were for the parents of 1905.

Push it in the right direction. Start seeding more good into this chaos. Flap those wings.

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