The Unremarked Days

There are things you know that you cannot tell me how you know.

If you are a perceptive person, you will recognise this at once. Perhaps you can think of a friend you instinctively trusted before they had done anything to earn your trust. Perhaps you remember a room you walked into and immediately wanted to leave, although no one in it had said or done anything you could point to. Often, we can feel the arrival of recognition well before our reasoning has even begun. The rightness or wrongness we often feel in our ‘gut’ is difficult to put into words. That is not due to any form of failure of your reasoning, but the resonance of an information channel that is deeper than your reasoning, which was laid down in you long before your reasoning began. I called it, in the last chapter, the channel of what is felt. That phrase is precise enough for what it does, but it does not yet convey the depth at which the feeling happened. What those feelings showed you was not shown to your mind, because you did not have a mind in the sense in which an adult has a mind, at the time you felt it. It was shown to whatever was in you before you had a mind — to the long pre-articulate self that was watching, before words, the people who were holding you and feeding you and looking at you and not quite looking at you. That self, took in everything. It took in the rhythms of the voice that comforted it and the rhythms of the voice that did not. It took in the smell of the rooms it was carried through and the smell of the people who carried it. It took in the texture of being looked at with love and the texture of being looked at with something less than love. By the time you had words, you had a great deal already inside you that words would never quite reach.

What lives at that level cannot be brought up into the open the way the things at the level of speech can. The things at the level of speech can be articulated, repeated, examined, agreed with or rejected, written down and argued with at the dinner table. The things at the level below speech can only be observed by what they make you do and feel. You cannot inspect them directly. You can only see them when they come up in you as a reaction — when something stirs in you and you do not quite know why. That stirring is your first clue that some buried inheritance has been activated.

I want to say two seemingly opposite things about this level, and they have to be held together, because recognizing one without the other will lead you astray.

The first is that this level is often where the soundest wisdom you carry lives. The instant recognition of a person as untrustworthy, before any of the reasons can be articulated, is often the result of a thousand small observations that your pre-articulate self made of similar people in your earliest years, watching what they did and what came of it. The unease you cannot name is often a perfectly accurate reading of a situation that your articulate self has not yet caught up to.

The instinctive movement of compassion and the instinctive refusal to do something dishonourable are the operations of a part of you that knows what it knows by having been formed in a school you do not consciously remember attending, by teachers you cannot consciously name. People who try to live entirely by the channel of speech, distrusting everything that has not been brought up into argument, miss most of the wisdom available to them. They miss it because it does not arrive in the form they have decided to take seriously and they cannot find a place to put it.

The second thing is that this level can be a prison. The same channel that carries the wisdom carries also whatever was wrong in the air you were breathing. If you grew up in a household that had quietly settled into a small cruelty toward an unwelcome animal, distrust of a particular relative, intolerance toward a particular class of person or toward children who did not develop on the household's schedule and by its rules, you would have absorbed that along with everything else, and it is in you now, operating, and you will feel it as a personal instinct rather than as something you have been given. If you grew up in a country that had taught itself, through the air it breathed for generations, to despise certain other peoples or to congratulate itself on its own special character, the despising or the self-congratulation is in you. You will not feel it as an ideology. Instead, you will feel it as the obvious. If you grew up among people who treated certain questions as not worth asking, those questions will not occur to you spontaneously. They will not be there in the field of things you can think of. Whole regions of available human possibility will be missing from your sense of what is possible, and their absence will not feel like an absence at all; it will feel as the world simply having the shape it has.

This is the prison. It is a particularly difficult prison to escape because the bars are made of the same material as the eyes you would need to see them with. The cruelty or the despising or the missing region of possibility cannot be brought up into examination the way a stated belief can, because it never lodged as a stated belief. It just engulfs you and sustains you like the air you breathe. The arguments you might use against it engage the channel of speech; but the channel of speech is not where it lives. This is the domain of what seems obvious and true to you, and you can only recognise it by paying attention to how it differs from some of what seems obvious to others. That requires an immense capacity for empathy.

I want to say something more about how this works, because the difficulty of it is often misunderstood, and the misunderstanding sets people up for a particular kind of failure. The arguments you encounter that contradict what you have felt in your gut from the time you were a child, do not feel to you like arguments to be objectively evaluated. Instead, they feel like the demolition of the house you are living in, while you are inside. That is why, the intuitive response they elicit is the response of a person whose very safety is being threatened. You may not be able to articulate why the new claim is wrong; you only know that it is, that something in you refuses it and that it produces a discomfort in you that you immediately try to find words for, even though the words always feel slightly inadequate to describe the discomfort they are supposed to be expressing.

This is both the gift and burden of having a deep and heavy intuition. The same condition that makes you the bearer of accumulated wisdom makes you, also, the bearer of accumulated error. The error is not in you as a position you hold. Instead, you shelter within it like the roof you sleep under. To question the roof is to risk having to sleep in the cold rain, and having the roof over one's house ripped apart by someone only for you to have to rebuild it alone in harsh weather is much harder than people who have not had to do it would dare to admit. You have to find the new material, and you have to learn to assemble it, and you have to keep your vigilance for long enough to make sure it stays in place during storms and does not leak in the rain. This takes years. It cannot be done in an evening, no matter how good the argument is.

There is a more general fact about the human condition that the discussion in this chapter has been quietly assuming and that I want to make explicit before we go further. You are a finite creature operating with limited information. The eyes you see with respond to a small range of the electromagnetic spectrum — the part we call visible light — and the rest of the spectrum, which is enormously larger than the visible part, passes through and around you every moment of your life without registering on your senses at all. Your ears respond to a similarly small range of the frequencies at which sound can be made. The rest of your senses are constrained in the same way. The world you experience is not the world as it is; the world you experience is the small sample of the world that your particular kind of creature has been built to register. This is not a deficiency of yours; it is the condition of being any particular kind of creature in a universe much larger than any particular kind of creature can hold. But it is worth registering, because the same kind of limitation operates in your capacity to imagine what could be otherwise, and in your capacity to do what you can imagine. You are working with a small instrument in a very large room. The judgements that the small instrument produces deserve to be held with the modesty that the smallness of the instrument warrants.

Since the middle of the 20th century, we have been discovering many new and fascinating insights about how this transmission works at the deepest level. Some of these discoveries are recent enough that you may not have encountered them, and they will bring into sharper focus what the rest of this chapter is going to ask of you.

For a long time, the deepest channel of information was treated by serious people as a matter of teaching and example only. We knew that children watch their adults and that they take in what the adults do. So, it was assumed, and not in complete error, that obedience and observation were the means by which who and what the adults 'are' got reproduced in the children. This was true enough, and it was most of what was going on. But there is increasing reason to think that some of the transmission happens at a level beneath even the watching. The bodies of people who have lived through extreme deprivation, sustained terror and the conditions of famine or persecution, appear to carry epigenetic signatures of that experience that get passed down to children and, in some studies, to their grandchildren. The signatures show up in how the bodies of the descendants regulate stress, in how they metabolise certain substances and in how they respond to certain kinds of pressure. The science is not yet settled on how far down the line this transmission reaches or how reliable the mechanisms are. It is a live area of inquiry and you should not take any strong claims about it on faith. But the broad shape of what is being found is consistent with what people who have done close work on inherited suffering have been saying for decades: that some of what shapes the deepest layer of you came in through your grandparents' bodies as well as through their words and their example. The inheritance runs deeper than was once believed, and it runs through channels that the inheritor cannot reach by introspection alone.

This is sobering and it is also very useful. It is sobering because it tells you that some of what is in you at the deepest level was placed there by events you had no part in and by people who had no part in placing it consciously. It is useful because it removes a certain kind of self-blame that people sometimes carry when they find, in themselves, responses that feel disproportionate to anything in their own life. You have, perhaps, an anxiety that exceeds what your circumstances warrant; perhaps a vigilance that is larger than the threat you face; perhaps a difficulty trusting that runs deeper than the betrayals you have personally suffered. Some of this — not all, but some — may be an inheritance from the community that surrounds you or the one you are descended from. You did not earn it; you inherited it. You can still do the work of replacing your existing roof, but you can do that work without flagellating yourself for the roof that was already there, because the original roof was built for you by others whose names you may not even know.

Before I take up the harder case, I want to describe one of the enduring aspects of human nature that exist just beneath the surface of our conscious selves. The mechanism is what I am going to call, with deliberate plainness, ‘a bargain’. It is one that has been described far more elegantly by Rousseau as follows:

Citizens allow themselves to be oppressed only insofar as they are driven by blind ambition; and looking more below than above them, domination becomes more dear to them than independence, and they consent to be bound by chains in order to be able to earn the right to bind others. It is very difficult to reduce to obedience someone who does not seek to command; and the most adroit politician would never succeed in subjecting men who wanted merely to be free. But inequality spreads easily among ambitious and cowardly souls always ready to run the risks of fortune and, almost indifferently, to dominate or serve, according to whether it becomes favourable or unfavourable to them.

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 1755)

In many of the arrangements human beings live inside - these could be households, workplaces, professions and institutions of every kind that organise their members in hierarchies - the people at the lower levels of the arrangement accept the costs of being where they are. This is in part because they have come to expect, often without quite letting themselves see the expectation in this form, that the costs are a payment toward a future in which they will be the ones at the higher levels of the arrangement, and the costs will be paid to them by those who come after. The bargain is rarely explicit. It is dangled in front of them rather than an explicit promise. It is just assumed, in the way the people at the higher levels carry themselves, in the small honours the arrangement reserves for those who have served long enough to reach them and in the casual remarks about how things were even worse in earlier generations. The bargain is one of the structural reasons that arrangements which inflict costs on their lower members persist across generations. Because the lower members are not merely enduring the costs. They are, in part of themselves, banking the endurance against a future settlement. We will have to come back to the bargain at several points in this book, because the refusal of it is one of the most consequential exercises in freedom a person can make in the course of an adult life. I mentioned it here only so that the term will be familiar when I use it again, and so that I can use it now to distinguish a different mechanism — one that operates where the bargain itself is not available.

We must stay with this question of inherited damage, because there is a particular form of it that has shaped the substrate of more people, in more parts of the world, than is comfortable for most of us to acknowledge, and that the framework of this book needs to be able to both acknowledge and seek to address. The form is the substrate-condition produced in human beings by long systems of structured unfreedom — by chattel slavery and its aftermath, by colonial rule and its long and enduring aftermath, by the caste arrangements that have shaped - and continue to shape - the inner lives of vast populations across millennia, and by the conquests whose victors and victims have continued to share territory across generations.

These cases require care in how we must speak about them, because the surface analogy to what the earlier paragraph called a 'bargain' — the willingness to accept suffering now in exchange for the prospect of power later — does not apply to them in the same form. The enslaved person under chattel slavery was not in a position to expect that their suffering would, in due course, give them the authority to inflict suffering in return. The colonised population was not, in any meaningful sense, choosing to be colonised in exchange for some future reciprocation. The mechanism by which substrate transmission occurred under these conditions was a different mechanism, and it has to be named differently.

What happened in these systems was that human beings were placed in conditions under which resistance to the system meant death, and survival required that the system's account of the world be at least partially internalised. The inferiority the system asserted on those whom it subjugated and the worthiness of those who created such systems so that they could assert their superiority and will over others, and confer upon themselves both honour and righteousness by virtue of the order and wealth the system produced for their benefit. Some of these ideas persist in the substrate of those who survived such systems, not as their explicit beliefs but as the infested water they had to drink to survive. The internalisation was not a form of consent in any morally meaningful sense. It was the price of survival, extracted under conditions where outright refusal was punished by death. The substrate-conditions it produced were carried forward in the descendants, long after the explicit legal arrangements of the system had ended, and the working through of those substrate conditions has been the long work of the populations who inherited them — work that remains incomplete in every country in which the relevant systems operated.

There is a second feature of this transmission that the framework has to both identify and then describe, because failing to do so would make the work harder than it would otherwise be. The systems of structured unfreedom shaped not only the substrate of those they oppressed but also the substrate of those they enriched. The descendants of slaveholders carry, in their formation, the sediment of the system that made their ancestors what they were. The descendants of colonisers carry the sediment of the system that formed their countries' wealth and self-account. The descendants of the higher castes carry the sediment of the order that gave them the position they continue to occupy or lament as having been forced at great pains to relinquish.

These sediments deposit themselves at depths the rest of this chapter has been describing as the ‘substrate’, which is below words, below deliberation and in the air of the households in which the descendants were raised. The working through of substrate damage from systems of structured unfreedom is therefore not the work of the descendants of the oppressed alone; it is the work of all the populations whose substrate was formed by the system, and the work of each is necessary if the larger working through - and indeed healing - is to occur.

The two African-American writers I would point you to if you want to read further on this, because their work is the most precise rendering of the substrate transmission I know of, are W.E.B. Du Bois on what he called double consciousness — the condition of seeing oneself through the eyes of those who had taught one's people to despise themselves — and Toni Morrison, in whose novels the substrate transmission across generations of people formed by slavery and its aftermath is rendered with care that no theoretical account can match. The parallel work for colonial substrate damage has been done by Frantz Fanon and by many writers from the colonised world since. The parallel work for caste has been done by B.R. Ambedkar and many others.

I want to be careful, in closing this section, to reiterate what this book is not claiming. It is not claiming that the people who suffered under these systems consented to the systems, or that they were responsible for the persistence of the systems, or that the slow working through of substrate damage in their descendants is in any way the descendants' fault. The framework outlined in this book is claiming only that the substrate is transmitted across generations through means the inheritor cannot reach by introspection, and that the systems under which the substrate of certain populations was formed were systems that have left, in those populations and in the populations that shared territory with them, accumulated sediment - the extraction of which is the work of generations. This is one of the places where the patient labour the rest of this book will describe finds its hardest application, and one of the places where the truth-bearers each generation needs are most painfully required.

The structural condition I have been describing in this chapter has a consequence that I want to describe clearly before I let you out of it. The two preceding chapters have invited you to take stock of what you have inherited; this chapter has just told you that the deepest part of what you have inherited cannot be inspected directly and cannot be argued out of you. So how, then, are you supposed to know whether the deep channel in you is supplying you with sound formation or with something that has been quietly malforming you?

The answer the book will return to in many places is that you cannot know this on your own. The deepest channel is not, by itself, a reliable witness against its own corruptions. For that, you need company. You need the slow exposure to people whose deepest channels were laid down by different hands and who therefore notice in you what your own deepest channel cannot notice in itself. You need the trustworthy friend who can say, gently, that the response you just had does not look like what you think it looks like from the inside. You need the great traditions — religious and philosophical and literary — which have been doing the work of articulating the corruptions of deep formation for thousands of years and which carry, in their accumulated reflection, much of what an individual cannot work out for themselves in a lifetime. You need the patience to live, for a while, under judgements about yourself that you do not yet agree with, in case the judgements are illuminating something in you that you cannot see in yourself.

This is the part of the work that the popular language of being true to yourself gets exactly wrong. The deepest channel in you is not, in any reliable way, the channel through which you should be told who you really are. It is the channel through which you have been formed, and what it tells you about who you really are is conditioned on what formation laid it down. To trust it absolutely is to make yourself the prisoner of whatever happened in the air of your earliest years. To distrust it absolutely is to cut yourself off from your deepest available wisdom. The only honest path is the difficult middle one: to take what the deepest channel makes you feel, seriously, and to test it slowly, over time, in the company of others who can see in you what you cannot see in yourself. You must do so with the same urgency and enthusiasm with which you do everything else to find out about how to live well.

The next chapter is going to be lighter, because the work of this one has been heavy. But I want to leave you, before we go on, with a small task that is harder than the one at the end of the first chapter. Find, in your own life, an example of a deep intuition of yours that turned out to be sound, such as a wariness you could not justify at the time, a refusal you could not explain to anyone else, or a small unease that proved, later, to have been seeing something real. And then, with the honesty this kind of work requires, find an example of a deep intuition that turned out to have been wrong, such as an aversion that you came eventually to see as having been an inheritance you would not have chosen, a discomfort with a kind of person that, on later examination, you found you could not defend or an instinctive refusal of a possibility that, when you finally tried it, turned out to be the right thing. Both kinds of intuitions are in you. They came from the same channel. The work of becoming a person worth being is in part the work of learning to tell them apart, and the work of telling them apart is not work you can do alone.

That work is also what this book is about. So, the next chapter will turn to what you have been doing with what you have been given, even when you did not know you were doing anything.