Whether it’s blameless tragedies, like ice cream faceplanted onto pavement, or injurious words offending a visible minority, unfairness is rife in this world of ours. It takes a noble spirit to face the forces of darkness and disappointment, a stance augmented by post-secondary education where we learn the reasons and details for assorted social maladies. Even at a distance we learn that others see the world like us. To be sure, binding us to others with regard to an external reality is as human as being bonded to others over love; but, whereas love is blind, activism can be more akin to the blind leading the blind.
Che Guevara summarized the social value of being a social justice warrior: “Try always to be able to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person anywhere in the world.” Of course, not all social causes are a matter of good and evil: the devil of activism abides in shady realms of grey. To parse out what is merely a tantrum and what counts as a thoroughgoing critique is what critical academic thought is all about.
To begin with, feelings of injustice depend on your point of view. We’re all on the same earth, or tube if you will. New York’s subway, an instance of comedy skits more than celebrations of togetherness within modernity, was lately inundated with activists seeking a better outcome for the people of Palestine, even if it comes at the expense of Israel. They marched into the subway car with their banners blaring and flags waving and proceeded to block the doors. Then they unfurled verbal injunctions on the subway’s occupants:
“’Raise your hands if you’re a Zionist, this is your chance to get out!”
Then, when no hands climbed into view, the activists continued: “’Okay, no Zionists here, we’re good’, as a woman adds, ‘We don’t want no Zionists here!”
Applause followed, the sort of clapping you can imagine at a political rally where dissidents could face a fiery fate if they spoke up to criticize Dear Leader.
The notion of a mass of people displaying loyalty to a cause, complete with righteous indignation about the acts of a perceived Other, is a timeless archetype. A classic, ocean-going, clamouring horde of loyal minions arises in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Echoing campus activists ever on the lookout to call out the mythic oppressive white male, Moby Dick is about one man’s ruthless pursuit of what he deems to be a destructive and oppressive white whale. Captain Ahab, saw in an albino (or leucistic) whale (itself of a species so ruthlessly hunted that its very name, the Right Whale, implied an invitation to kill) a villain most nefarious. Ahab proves willing to risk the life and limb of he and his crew in pursuit of the beast’s destruction; indeed, in Ahab’s case, the other limb was on offer, as he’d already lost one leg to the very same whale.
Grudges, like mosquito bites, get worse the more we focus on them and the more we join with others of our bent. Like many an obsessive young activist who gloms onto issues one after the other, ever in pursuit of freedom from an existential state of aggravation, Ahab presents as an everyman in terms of moral upsets. Crucially, the White Whale seems to him the arch-enemy, not because it is different, as would be the case in racism, but because the whale is seen as purposely or innately aggressive and oppressive. Given a platform, the whale would likely deny any ill intent but, just like a reality TV participant called on the carpet at a live audience tell-all session, no amount of denial can avert the impending guilty verdict. The whale, by de-legging a whaling captain in the course of the creature’s escape from harpoons, has no chance of a fair trial in the court of public sailor opinion.
Just as economic reality means than it takes many activists to make a difference in the face of Mammon (or Big Tech), Ahab alone cannot get far in the fight with this oversized foe. Like a YouTube lynch mob incensed at a topic after it was drawn to their attention by an influencer, Ahab has to attain the conviction and support of his sailors, his followers. Ahab’s sailors are thus, one by one, sucked into clicking the like button on his foolhardy mission.
“I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetic feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.”
As in social media, by showing parts of the story to paint the most lopsided of narratives, Ahab succeeds at convincing his crew to pursue a mission of passion rather than reason—vengeance masked as justice. We see this reality all the time in current events, where the larger reality of a given situation gives way to a narrow view of what happened or, equally as dangerous, the small details of one plight are taken to be symptomatic indicators for the geopolitical reality of the whole.
In a way each of us, when we feel deeply about a topic, become little Ahabs. Feeling personally aggrieved becomes a trigger not for deeper thought but for us to focus, like a magnifying glass onto dry tinder, all of our life’s discontents onto an external reality. All that remains is to find like-minded others to share our narrow analysis with. There’s a reason, for instance, that the phrase “kvetching” was once explained to me as literally stemming from people who were stomping hazelnuts under their heels to squeeze out the nut inside. It took a group of kvechers to shell bushels of nuts. But the nuts are merely a means to an end, an excuse to exert some pent-up frustrations that go far, far, beyond the making of a hazelnut pie. Like Ahab, we easily see an immense wrong in the world and seek to force things right—without ever questioning whether our emotions say more about us than about the topic on offer.
Ahab explains:
“That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then I could do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations.”
From more recent annals, or waters…
Perhaps we’re wise to keep aware that whenever people pledge themselves to a goal that has risen to the level of a moral crusade, we’ve been drawn into a dangerous tide. A lifetime ago (or more, if you’re in the front half of your 20s) American President George W. Bush drawled in a speech that “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”. This was during the fight against global Jihadists who had laid waste to three thousand souls on 9/11 in their particular pursuit of truth and reconciliation vis a vis Anglo-American colonialist ambitions in the Middle East dating back a century. Anyone abstaining from Bush’s noble goal, to stamp out these dissidents to the global capitalist order, was said to be like a rat jumping from a ship at the sight of distant shore. To stay the course towards the eradication of a vicious foe meant total loyalty. And in 2001, until Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans brought Mother Nature’s wrath back in sight in 2005, bourgeois consensus was largely assured.
So today, when discursive lines are drawn in the parlour activism of the internet or in one’s workplace or classroom, we best remember that, unlike the heroic protagonist of Moby Dick named Ishmael, we are not press-ganged into service of one or another Ahab-like dogmas. We can think for ourselves and even, with noble minds in tow, bow out of any argument to research in depth the complexities and contradictions that make any crusade seem a worthy voyage.
References
Bush, G.W. (2001). ‘You are either with us or against us.’ Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/
Guevara, C. Retrieved from https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7f/7b/07/7f7b07e4fc2b6072c975e15e3ea5b5c2.jpg
Melville, H. (1861). Moby Dick. Quotes retrieved from https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mobydick/quotes/character/ahab/ and https://genius.com/Herman-melville-moby-dick-chap-41-moby-dick-annotated
Sexton, B. (2024). ‘Pro-Palestinian Subway Mob Chant ‘Raise Your Hands if You’re a Zionist’. MSN.com. Retrieved from https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/other/pro-palestine-subway-mob-chant-raise-your-hands-if-youre-a-zionist/ar-BB1o2BBd