Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Today's Fanatic, Tomorrow's Saint
It's popular to think that the world gets changed by nice people, but the lives of activists past and present tell us otherwise
By fanaticism we usually mean two things. One is that someone is dedicated in the extreme to their cause, belief, or agenda, willing to live and die and maybe kill for it, as John Brown was. The other is that the cause, belief or agenda is not ours, and in 1859 John Brown's beliefs were not those of most Americans. No one calls himself or herself a fanatic. It's what you call people who are weird or threatening, extremists in the defence of something other than your own worldview. I've been around activists all my adult life, and though it's popular to think the world gets changed by delightful people, a lot of the saints and agents of change are obsessive, intransigent, unreasonable, and demanding, of themselves and of us. That's what it generally takes to change the world. Gandhi knew this when he said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Conventional people give up when they laugh at you. Timid people back off when they fight you. They don't win, and neither do those who prize ease and security. The prize is for those who risk and persevere.
That slavery was an intolerable evil is something slaves have tended to believe all along; a few free men caught up with them in England in the 1770s, as Adam Hochschild's wonderful history Bury the Chains relates, and that handful of Quakers and dissenters persevered until they won, half a century later. I am not so sure about John Brown's means, or that his actions were necessary to start a war that was already brewing, but I am sure that slavery needed to be abolished, and that his general ends were good. The really interesting thing is that in 1839 to be against slavery in the US was an disruptive, extreme position, often seen as an attack on property rights rather than a defence of human rights. Half a century later we held those truths to be self-evident that no one should own anyone else. (Except husbands owning wives, but that's another story that got revised in the 1970s and 1980s when things like domestic violence came to be taken seriously by the legal system of many countries. Sort of.)
Lincoln called John Brown a "misguided fanatic." Thoreau wrote a defence of him in which he remarked, "The only government that I recognise - and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army - is that power that establishes justice in the land." Some 13 years before Brown's bloody raid on Harper's Ferry, Thoreau went to jail, in a quiet, half-comic way, to protest slavery and the US's territorial war on Mexico. I'm writing this the evening before the global day of climate action, on the 10th anniversary of the Seattle WTO uprisings. I was in Seattle when the mainstream considered us nuts to think corporate globalisation was a bad idea; that perspective is mainstream now; and I can see the world waking up and shifting its sense of what we need to do about climate change. A quick online search reveals quite a lot of people have been called "climate-change fanatics," mostly for believing the change is real and it requires some fairly profound responses. But the baseline of belief is shifting, thanks to the dedicated and unreasonable among us.
Fanatic is a troublesome word. I've written a book about disasters in which I propose throwing out the words panic and looting, because they're incendiary terms more often used to misrepresent and justify authoritarian response than to describe reality on the ground. Maybe fanaticism is another such term, since my hero is your fanatic, and yesterday's fanatic is so often tomorrow's saint. Maybe we should all be a little more - not fanatical, but unreasonable and intransigent in our commitment to truth, to justice, to a better world.
15 Comments so far
Show AllThank you, Rebecca. I've gone through being laughed at to being forbidden to speak at family dinner parties to being fired from jobs and I hope to continue on...
I have loved your writing since I first found it 8 years ago. May God grant you infinite strength and heart to continue on.
Today's college students need to wake up and start protesting more than tuition increases.
Unless they start putting the pressure on to restore New Deal financial industry regulation, enact single-payer health care, meaningful environmental legislation and restore habeas corpus, their degrees won't be worth much in the job market and they won't have much of a world to live in.
matthew loughran
reydelcamino, you are so right about college students today.
we are seeing many people today who have college education that has become worth less and less in the labor market of 'Murka and their world is being destroyed to enrich the wealthy assholes of the this country.
seattle 1999 was a wake up call for everyone in the world and in our dick country in particular that globlization does not work and will never work for people. it will only enrich corporations and elite assholes especially in the US.
matt loughran
harris country green party
houston tx
I believe you two guys will find that the real problem lies with the education they are getting. Its not very good and it doesn't encourage them to think fopr themselves.
I'm pleased to tell you that two of the better colleges are here in Texas and provide educations that are closer to teaching how to think than what to think. University of Texas and (yuk) Texas A&M.
"Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
Joan of Arc was illiterate, maybe insane, certainly very lucky---not lucky personally but the phenomenon of Joan was a series of extremely unlikely events combined with a to say the least, unlikely person.
Henry David Thoreau was a hot house plant; fragile. He was surrounded by the likes of Emerson, James Russel Lowell, and, as chance would have it, a whole gaggle of transcendentalists. And that in the then tiny town of Concord. He would never have found any sympathy for his ideas on the prairie or in a logging camp.
As it was his community barely tolerated him. Emerson called him a bum even as he befriended him. He had to publish his own books and never enjoyed success while he lived. When John Brown died Thoreau died too, or rather just gave up on life. He became sick and died soon thereafter.
"He had to publish his own books and never enjoyed success while he lived."
What... we would have Thoreau invent the moonwalk and open an amusement park? Or run a media empire that is based as much on diversion, deception and crass mass manipulation and smoke and mirrors as it is on the tenets of the fourth estate?
Funny how many erstwhile progressives depend upon a rather mundane, status quo, and certainly neo-capitalist idea of what success looks like to bemoan and defame people like Thoreau, who never claimed to desire or aspire to it.
There was of course another genius in Thoreau's community whose success could never be defined by its currently rather obscene and gluttonous standards: Emily Dickinson... yet hers and Thoreau’s influence on thought and language will always stand a whole body length and more above and beyond any modern more traditionally "successful" artist I can think of.
Perhaps it is time to rethink such a perspective, as Solnit aptly surmises, behind our automatic assumptions and viewpoints about success. How much of what you hold to as truth is merely the status quo super-capitalist's B.S. unquestioned by an unthinking acceptance of what lesser, less influential (but perhaps more “successful”) people have defined it to be.
Who is actually the more successful? The guy who is fanatical about money who molds his integrity and honor and art to whatever will make him the most immediate influence and money, or someone who knows something is right, even when they are not sure how they know it or of what ultimate importance it is (or where it will lead him or her) and sticks to it come hell or high water.... or centuries of respect and renown? We would like to think there is an overlap between these two endpoints, and perhaps there is (I think automatically of people like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens) but perhaps they are the fortunate few who have arrived on the scene when it is ripe for and can make the truth popular: they had their own difficult social idiosyncrasies as, I would propose, everyone does. Everyone has their own level of intransigence and fanaticism, just as everyone’s greatest suffering is proportionally equal.
There was one fellow in Thoreau's day who was the biggest success, in fact may have a great deal to do with how we measure it today, that American society had seen up until then: P.T. Barnum. His ability to dupe and fool people, and take advantage of the misfortunes of those he paraded around as freaks was unparalleled and has been copied so broadly that it is hard to tell the difference these days between a circus and a newscast or a political campaign. The PR industry is a paean to Barnum. Quite a legacy, and the connection to how the lead-ups and maintenance of our current series of wars for resources are conducted owes him much. Of course Thoreau and Dickinson were either or in equal parts disdainful, disinterested or entirely overwhelmed and frightened by such fame, such success, such fanatical adherence to profit at any cost.
Also interesting that the writer takes as an alias yet another genius who rivaled Thoreau in misanthropy and lack or ignorance of a success that depends on who sells the most books to the most people... and he had syphilis to boot!
I could not be more enthusiastic in agreeing with you, and admit I was careless with the word 'success'.
I reread my entry and yours and felt I was being a little reactionary, though I stand by the sentiments I've expressed. I'm glad there's no hard feelings.
Some fanatics have not a drop of Saintly blood in them. They may be heroic in the sense of having the courage to die for their convictions but not saintly.
The great names in the protestant reformation were about as unsaintly as can be imagined. Chief among them was Martin Luther. Brilliant and intolerant, he would have burned his rivals if he had not been busy evading the fire himself.
I suppose you could have called Jesus a radical fanatic; after all he turned the world view of what it takes to BE a saint upside down. He did not resist arrest, throw rocks, build bombs or even marginally hurt anybody, yet, he was tried as a revolutionary by a judge who could not define Truth! MLK said you do not have to be smart, or beautiful, or wise , or wealthy, or strong, or powerful to serve. What a great formula for ....
Peace
There is no "fire in the belly" anymore, for a desire for that which in the past, some would have even died for - Freedom from tyranny, Freedom of speech, various Constitutional Rights, etc.
I have oft talked to some close friends about the impending direction of things, only to hear "I don't want to know about it!" and they MEAN it.
They would rather live in their little fake dream world, believing all is well, than to face the Truth about what is happening, and where we are going.
Same people, who whine about how things are, also whine that "it doesn't make any difference" so there's "no point in voting"!
Sigh.
When, oh when, did apathy become in vogue?
At what point did we succumb to the dumbing-down of education to such a point that I hear, on numerous occasions, the inquiry "What's that word mean?" as a friend sits in front of their computer, unwilling to look it up, admitting almost with pride to laziness, or even worse, "Why are you always using such 'big' words!?" as if we are preteen children, instead of adults.
I believe all of this is interconnected, with a devious, even diabolical, intent on Control.
"Dumbing down of education" So true. I once saw a copy of a 6th grade McGuffey's (spelling?)Reader from the mid-19th century. It included the writings of Jefferson, Edmund Burke and John Locke.
If your friends don't want to hear about it, dump them.
Find some others.
All of our lives (and I include all species) depend on dumping the folks who are just on the planet to masturbate by shopping, watching the boob tube, having empty sex, binging on food, booze and drugs--and beating the war drum to make themselves feel they are there.