What year is it? "The third year of the new crown calendar".
Similar memes (memes) have become particularly prevalent lately, and "witnesses of changing times" is not a joke.
The great changes in life brought about by the epidemic, the regression and tearing of globalization in a sense, the two Olympic Games held in less than a year, the Russo-Ukrainian War, etc., it seems that in just three years, we have experienced great changes that we have not experienced in many years. And the individual is in the torrent of this era of drastic changes, and he can feel the powerlessness and drifting of the individual even more.
"Inner volumes", hollow heart disease, political depression, existential crisis, etc., topics that originally belonged to the field of psychology, philosophy and sociological research began to be well known to the public, and the hot sales of many books also proved the general confusion of the public about their own fate. What will this era look like? Where is the road ahead? How to reconcile with oneself and get along with the times has become a topic that everyone is more and more concerned about.
If you feel that you can't find the answer at the moment, you may be able to look at history, today's article, we start from a few books about the "small fate under the big era", to see how people in the big waves of the times in the past lived, how they couldn't help themselves, and how they resisted and survived.
01.
The "Evil of Mediocrity" in the Age of High Pressure
There is a group of Germans who can be said to have experienced and witnessed history at every stage of their lives, born in the 1920s. The book Broken Lives: The 20th Century Experienced by Ordinary Germans (hereinafter referred to as "Broken Lives") documents this group, whose lives are marked by the imprint of the times.
Broken Lives: The 20th Century Experienced by Ordinary Germans
Their parents witnessed the First World War, which more or less affected the family. They were born in the Weimar Republic, witnessed the rise of the Third Reich and the Nazis as teenagers, participated in World War II personally or indirectly as adults, witnessed the establishment of concentration camps and the massacre of Jews. After their defeat, they experienced a clash of different social ideals between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR, the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall, and the eventual unification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The book selects more than 70 stories, ranging from persecuted Jews to pro-Nazi nationalists; members of socialism from East Germany and members of democracy from West Germany; about half of the group is generally from the upper middle class, one-third from the petty bourgeoisie, and one-tenth from the working class; most of them are Protestants, and many Catholics; and two-thirds of the group is male. The complexity of these described objects ensures the inspiration that these individual stories bring.
Along with the growth of these characters, there is a shocking trend hidden in the seemingly daily details of daily life such as rowing, riding horses, and buying goods, and through combing, it can be clearly seen that the lives of ordinary people are adapting to Nazi rules little by little, rather than resisting.
Many people came into contact with the Nazis from so-called "social organizations", such as the "Hitler Youth" or the "German Girls' Union". For them as teenagers, the odes of the Hitler Youth pandered to the idealism of young people, suggesting that restoring the unity and greatness of the country was the task of young people, and had a great attraction for those who were in the transition from childhood to adulthood and desperately needed a sense of identity.
Similar hobbies and a common living atmosphere, the "Youth League" or "Girls' League" allows these people to have their own team, their own mission and partners of the same age. Faced with social propaganda and social pressures, almost all young people joined the Nazi Youth League, and although some families suffered from parental opposition, many families tacitly agreed until the Nazis showed more extremes.
Many others were misled by propaganda and did not understand why their parents resisted Nazi propaganda. Parents and teachers who resisted the Nazis were suppressed to varying degrees, and in the future, many terrible terms, such as Nazis, Long live Hitler, etc., all kinds of extreme behavioral ideas, in a way of boiling frogs in warm water, are gradually eroding the youth of these Weimar Republics, so that they unconsciously accept the changes.
At the beginning of the war, for many men, the enlistment of their peers encouraged many people, "not to be left behind countless peers, especially those who knew and befriended", and the constant victory was a temptation for them to take heroic risks, and even many Nazi opponents did not reject joining the army. Although the brutal training of the army and the cruelty of the battlefield have made many people retreat, they can still use patriotism to appease themselves.
There are many people who choose to run away from or don't care about changes in the outside world, and some people think that they can exist as centrists. More people will fall silent, or show no concern for politics, as if they can live well as long as they live in a good personal world.
But these people, who think they don't pay attention to politics, often become complicit in politics: some people carry out "orders" step by step, making themselves part of the chain of evil; some people escape and ignore the emergence and spread of evil.
In the memories of these people, many people will find various reasons for their choices and complicity at that time. Ignorance in youth, friends are involved, feel that they have not taken the initiative to do evil, but for such an era of lack of attention to politics, or allow evil to happen, and even think that they have escaped but become the executors of evil deeds, in fact, they have become another form of "evil".
Hannah Arendt wrote a profound dissection after the war, and Eichmann in Jerusalem addresses an important concept, the "evil of mediocrity," an evil committed without the blind obedience of the mind.
Political scientist Liu Yu's further interpretation of Eichmann's behavior in "The Art of Possibility: 30 Lectures on Comparative Politics", and the inability to reflect on his own actions is the core element of Eichmann's evil:
"This evil does not require creativity, drama, thought, or any beauty of the so-called 'flower of evil', it just needs a little blindness. One of the most crucial words in Arendt's interpretation of Eichmann is 'thoughtlessness'.
...... The staging of evil does not require many real 'bad guys', only the director at the top of the pyramid, and countless slightly a little bit; the average person who is 'nearsighted' - why say slightly 'myopic'? It is that he can't see the 'big picture', or refuses to see the 'big picture', and he stares at the desk in front of him, this carriage, this form.
If someone asks us to kill a person, we don't have enough guts or malice to do it, but if we just let us convey information, to maintain law and order, to register property, to clean up the ashes, to inject some kind of medicine... Most of us tend to do it 'without thinking'. ”
In other words, in such turbulent times, there is no "right" for individuals to stand by, and either to resist in a certain sense or to become "mediocre evil".
02.
Hope exists in the slightest goodwill
Reflecting on the evil of mediocrity is not an easy task, not just for ordinary people in the midst of the great changes of the times. Many thinkers, writers, and so on, who were resolutely opposed to Nazism and totalitarianism, also suffered moments of "mediocrity." Moreover, a person's transformation does not occur in a certain moment, but gradually changes, and even self-contradictions will occur before and after.
Life and Destiny
"Life and Destiny" is a novel masterpiece that records the true face and true reflection of social life in the Soviet Union during the Stalin period, and has been praised as "War and Peace after the war". The author of the novel, Vasily Grossman, confessed that he had done evil himself, and he also wrote this reflection into the novel.
Grossmann was a well-known journalist during the Soviet period, and during World War II, he worked as a war correspondent for the Red Star newspaper for four years, covering a large number of front-line battles in Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin, and was the first person to expose the truth about the death camps in Nazi Germany. In 1952, when the anti-Semitic movement in the Soviet Union was raging, an official letter was published claiming that several Jewish doctors were plotting to kill Stalin, calling for the doctors to be punished by the most severe means. Even though he knew the letter was wrong, Grossman signed it under pressure.
It may be difficult for us to understand this kind of life under political pressure, why they compromise and why they betray others, and it is likely that it is simply attributed to fear, lack of courage, or profit.
In Life and Destiny, Grossman conceived of a character Victor to use for self-reflection. He signed the statement of harm to the Jewish doctor with a clear conscience, not for the privilege and status that he had just arrived, nor because he was afraid that he would be punished. His motivation is nothing more than a seemingly "simple human need", a warm identification from others, a feeling of being surrounded by the same kind.
"Broken Life" and "Life and Destiny" not only describe the complex moral situation under high pressure, but also provide a profound analysis of various behaviors.
In "Broken Life", ordinary people who can find the salvation of the soul rely on this reflection on themselves, painfully face the evil deeds they have done, and take action to try to save them. Although the broken life cannot be restored, it can be gradually glued and rebuilt.
Therefore, in these individual lives that have been shattered by the times, what is more touching is the active resistance of individuals and the existence of goodwill between individuals.
In "Broken Life", there are also many details recorded, in the face of the Nazi government's demands for political propaganda, the teacher insisted on his neutral position and even opposed the new regime, through various ways to "skillfully fulfill his teaching responsibilities", the principal will try to squeeze out the time for classes and daily education outside the students' tense military training time.
During the period when the Late Third Reich began to expel and capture Jews on a large scale, there were many ordinary people who came to their aid:
SS classmates smuggled food; an ordinary family secretly hid their Jewish friends in Kristallnacht and managed to smuggle money, jewelry, etc. out of the jewish group when they left; a luxembourg border guard turned a blind eye to a Jewish family crossing the border; another Belgian provided refuge for the family; an aviation officer helped several Jews get seats on the last few planes from Berlin.
They could have been like Eichmann, as ordinary people, holding on to their posts and fulfilling their duties. But perhaps it is the good instinct in human nature, or perhaps it is the disapproval of high-pressure policies, these people choose to listen to their own inner justice and make individual good choices.
In "Life and Destiny", the scene that moves many readers is a Russian wife who has just seen her son's body on the ground, who was originally sad and indignant, but when she watched a German prisoner of war walk by, she forgot to take revenge, but instead gave the bread in her hand to the thin young man, and even she herself could not figure out why she did it.
In his book, Grossman calls this kind of "abnormal" good deed "the seed of human nature," a seed that has no cause and is inconspicuous. He said: "The history of mankind is not a struggle between the good and the evil, but the great evil that strives to crush the seeds of human nature. ”
In the three years since the epidemic, we have also witnessed many stories of individual efforts and perseverance, reaching out to the helplessness of the group.
The "Sister Epidemic Relief Action" has been providing menstrual supplies for medical workers involved in epidemic prevention; during the lockdown and heavy rains, countless people have been saved, including various online rescue documents initiated by students, office workers, etc., as well as civil relays.
During the epidemic in Shanghai, we still saw the "Shanghai Medical Emergency Assistance" shared document, everyone collected the information of the recipients through the documents, sorted out the information of the community group purchase, and recruited volunteers to help; some volunteers touched the situation of the elderly and special disease patients in the community, and made their needs information into eye-catching and concise posters, which were widely disseminated.
The countless volunteer group buying organizers who have emerged in each community, as well as the delivery workers and truck drivers who support and participate in the rescue, are the existence of these people that try to connect the broken life that has been broken by the times, flashing in it, and it is a tiny human brilliance that has gathered up little by little.
03.
In the big era, individuals still have the possibility of perseverance
Often, we can hear such voices. "What's the use of you doing this?" One can't change anything", live your own life well. Or say, "You'll never wake up a person pretending to be asleep."
There is another implication of this statement. People in high positions know a lot, they control the general direction, ordinary people do not understand anything, just follow it. Even a more grand perspective, often looking at the big picture, pointing out the country, each individual is just "data and cost". In this way, people can only live as smart as possible and accept the operation of this set of rules of the game.
The scholar Xu Ben has a profound analysis of this, which is a self-reducing perspective to "small people", a social role of a voluntary obedience, and this mentality of small people gives them a good reason to obey the leadership of the elite ("big people"), "precisely because their obedience is voluntary, they think they are free."
But in fact, what can effectively fight back against these clichés is precisely the "micro perspective" we are discussing today.
Creating evil requires individuals, and rebelling against evil or fighting against evil naturally requires the participation of each individual. What can break the shackles of those "big pictures" is, first of all, from the perspective of the individual, respect the presentation of personal feelings, and have a relatively open attitude towards unthinking history and existing cognition.
The Cannes Palme d'Or film about the Irish Revolutionary War, "The Wind Blows wheat waves", tries to preserve the objective writing of history in addition to the traditional war movies, starting from the individual. As a war movie, the film is full of greenery, undulating wheat waves, and running crowds of people.
For example, the protagonist Damien must shoot and kill "his own people who are not firm and may betray him", and also need to inform the victim's mother who has just finished dinner and is waiting for them to return to dinner. What Demien was asked to kill was actually his playmate from childhood to adulthood, and the scene of expressing sadness was only the neighbor's mother who covered her face and was silent.
Director Ken Lodge said that he wanted to show the terrible things that both sides of the war had done, not to deliberately avoid the facts. So, he decided to "tell history from the perspective of the nameless, to give those who did not have a chance to speak in the history books a chance to speak", from the perspective of the loser and even the bystander, leading the audience back to history.
Ken Lodge reminded, "Now, in Iraq, we know the names of the British and Americans who died, but we don't know how many Iraqis were killed." The value of the lives of the people of the occupied territories is considered to be much lower than the value of the lives of the occupiers. I'm just saying that this is just an example, but stories like Ireland are always happening over and over again. ”
For example, Alang's comment in "The Great Movies of the 21st Century" is a kind of "open question of history". Such perspectives are open, but perhaps more importantly, these "micro perspectives" are not multi-perspectives for the sake of multiple perspectives, nor are they opposed for the sake of counter-mainstream.
It is a reminder to resist the temptation of a definitive answer, against a law that can explain all, against the impulses and hurts of some kind of fanaticism.
In this way, we know the complexity of history and the preciousness of individual perspectives. And this kind of preciousness is something that everyone can have. It can even reverberate over thousands of years.
"Microhistory", "Cheese and Maggots", which tells the story of a miller who was executed by a church in the 16th century, presents the small people in history who have been destroyed and ignored, and their thinking sparks and wonderful lives that are not gray.
Domenico Scandella, known as "Menocchio", was an ordinary 16th-century miller in eastern Italy who could read and write, read and write, read many "miscellaneous books" such as the Decameron, the Bible, and Mandeville's Travels, and could retell them in his own language.
He confronted his neighbors, priests, and judges of the Inquisition, and expounded his views on the church and the world. This seemed very outrageous at the time, he did not believe in Christ's salvation, doubted the bible text, and ridiculed baptism and other sacraments as nothing more than a business. Menocchio said that the universe is a big cheese of chaos, God is a wisp of air, and the angels are maggots in the cheese.
Cheese and Maggots
Menocchio's behavior was not so firm from the beginning, he also had inconsistencies, and he had said many contradictory words under the majesty of the church.
After the first trial, perhaps an irrepressible action in nature, or some uncontrollable cry, he was again tried by the church 15 years later. This time, he denounced the priests and nobles who oppressed the poor even louder, calling on the church to give up its privileges, return to poverty, and even aspire to launch a radical reformation.
Eventually, after spending his life in near obscurity, he was burned at the stake by order of the Inquisition due to the direct intervention of the Pope.
Through the author's combing through all kinds of seemingly cold court records, this brings him very close to us: Menocchio is a person like us, like one of us. Those who have been arbitrarily described by the authoritarian as "the common people of civilized society" actually have their own culture and their own shining points, no less than the elites and imperial generals who have been praised.
In fact, whether it's Cheese and Maggots or more microhistory, the protagonist may be someone, but you can see that there are more ordinary people around him, listening to him, helping him, thinking and acting with him.
This is perhaps the most important thing: the love and mutual help between individuals in the big times may be the antidote we use to fight the restlessness of the times.
The Love of the Gulag, a non-fiction work compiled from a couple's communication letters during the Gulag, presents vivid individual memories of how people told and supported each other in difficult times.
From 1946 to 1954, Svetlana Ivanova and Lev Mischenko, a couple, wrote more than twelve hundred letters, which were real-time records of Gulag's daily life: "You once asked whether it is easy for people to live if there is hope, or if it is easy to live without hope." I couldn't summon any hope, but without hope, my heart was at peace. ”
Svetlana's letter shows the attitude and support of ordinary residents towards the Gulag, and the Soviet people know that the Gulag is nearby, but they do not say it, and the barbed wire of the labor camp cannot stop their sympathy, and their sense of justice is constantly separated - if it is not for the assistance of many ordinary people under great pressure, these letters cannot be delivered to the labor camp.
"When I saw the letter, I didn't know what I should write to you." Write I miss you? You know it in your heart. I felt like I was living outside of time, and I was waiting, waiting for the day when my life would really begin, and now it seemed like just an episode. Whatever I do, it's like I'm just passing the time. ”
In their letters, romantic emotions are written very little. Although it is difficult to see the word love between the lines, every page is full of love. They listened to each other affectionately and understood each other's tiniest hints. With these letters, they finally persevered until the reunion.
This book is not only a love story, but also a spirit of human solidarity, kindness and love, perseverance and struggle to survive under the power. Because they love themselves and the people around them, they build a "hard alliance" to the greatest extent possible in the evil environment, and watch over each other and help each other.
It proves to the world that humanity, human dignity, a sense of justice, loyalty, and bravery can never be completely destroyed.