The Unremarked Days

The work of trying to set right something that has gone wrong in a place is harder than the people who have not done it tend to assume. It is not harder for the reasons that get talked about most, which have to do with the courage required to begin. It is harder for a reason that gets talked about less, which has to do with the discrimination required to continue. Once you have begun, you will meet resistance, and the resistance will not be of one kind. It will be of three quite different kinds, and they will be intermingled in the same encounters and sometimes in the same person, and the work of telling them apart is one of the most important pieces of equipment you can carry into the doing of the work.

I have watched, more than once, an honest reformer come to grief not because the reform was wrong, not because the courage failed, but because the reformer could not tell the kinds of resistance apart and ended up treating all the resistance as the same kind. The kind they assumed it to be was usually the worst kind which also happened to be the kind they were most prepared to fight. They fought it. They fought against the people who were not, in fact, offering the kind of resistance they assumed it was. Many people they fought had a capacity to be won over, not only to end their resistance but even to share the burdens of the reform. But once the reformer decided to fight them, they lost their willingness to be brought along, and the reform died not from the opposition of its enemies but from the alienation of the people who should have been its supporters. This is one of the structural patterns by which good work often gets defeated, and it is mostly self-inflicted. That is why the ability to discriminate between the three kinds of resistance is so important.

I want to take the three kinds in order, beginning with the one that is most often misread.

The first kind of resistance comes from people whose lives are bound up in the arrangements you are trying to change. They are not corrupt. They are not, in any normal sense of the word, defenders of injustice or inefficiency or waste of corruption. They are people who, in many cases over the course of decades, have built lives that depend on the arrangements as they are. The carpenter who spent thirty years learning to build a frame that a new safety regulation will require to be built differently. The official whose dignity rests on a custom that the new arrangements will eliminate as waste. The shopkeeper whose modest income depends on a trade that the new arrangements will restrict or reroute. The analyst who has become indispensable in the team because of an Excel tool that he had spent years building and refining, that will be superseded by a new system. These people, when they resist what you are doing, are resisting the loss of lives they have built. They are not contemptible in their resistance. They are defending something that any honest accounting must register as having been worth building, and that the change you propose will, by no fault of theirs, threaten.

The first thing to say about this kind of resistance is that you owe the people who carry it a particular respect. Their resistance is not the resistance of the wicked or the corrupt; it is the resistance of human beings to the disruption of lives they have invested in. If your reform requires that the disruption proceed — and many real reforms do require it — the disruption is not free, and the cost it imposes on these people should not be discounted in your moral accounting just because the reform is, on the whole, just or even essential. The carpenter does not deserve to be told that his thirty years of skill have suddenly become valueless because the world has moved on. The analyst does not deserve to have his ingenuity and innovation dismissed as wasted effort or his special status in the team undermined. These people are paying a price for a change that is largely not of their making and largely not in their interest. The least they are owed is the honest acknowledgement that they are paying it.

The second thing to say is that this kind of resistance is, in most cases, workable. You are not in adversarial relation to these people, even if it sometimes feels as if you are. You share with them an interest in the well-being of the community to which they belong, and the well-being of that community includes the well-being of the lives they have built within it. A reform that finds ways to honour what they have built — that finds ways to use their accumulated skill in the new arrangements, that finds ways to preserve their dignity in the transition, that finds ways to give them a stake in the outcome rather than treating them as obstacles — has, in many cases, the materials for bringing them along. The bringing may not be quick. It will likely require patience, and listening, and taking seriously the things they are telling you about what your reform will cost. Sometimes what they tell you is information that should modify the reform. Sometimes it is information that should change the pace at which the reform is implemented. Sometimes it is information about a kind of cost you had not accounted for and have to find a way to absorb. Listening to them is not a weakness. In the least, it is an essential step towards ensuring the reform gets to be the kind of reform that does not generate, by its own conduct, the opposition that defeats it.

I have laboured this point because the temptation, when you are in the early enthusiasm of trying to change something, is to treat these people as obstacles to be overcome rather than as fellow members of the place whose objections deserve a hearing. The temptation has produced more failed reforms than perhaps any other single error, and it has alienated more people who would otherwise have been your allies than any other single error. The temptation is to be resisted. The carpenter is not your enemy. The carpenter is a person whose life will be disrupted by what you are trying to do, and the disruption is real, and the carpenter's resistance is the human response to having one's life disrupted. Treat it as that, and you will often find that the carpenter, given enough time and enough honest engagement, becomes one of the more useful members of the eventual coalition that brings the reform across.

The second kind of resistance is different in kind. It comes from people whose interests are served by the arrangements you are trying to change — not because the arrangements gave them a life they built honestly, but because the arrangements give them an advantage that is, in some way, taken from others. The moneylender whose income depends on the desperation of the borrower. The owner whose profits depend on wages held below what the labour is worth. The official whose position depends on the kickback. The faction that has, by some sequence of historical accidents, come to occupy a position from which it extracts a benefit it has not earned and would not survive a fair competition. These are not people defending lives they built; they are people defending advantages they have accumulated by means that would not bear close inspection.

The first thing to say about this second kind of resistance is that it has to be called out for what it is. The conflation of this kind of resistance with the first kind is one of the more reliable rhetorical moves used by those who want to defeat reform, and it works precisely because the first kind exists alongside it. The interests that depend on unjust advantage will, in many cases, deliberately put forward the interests that depend on honestly built lives, and ask the reformer to acknowledge those interests, and then take the reformer's acknowledgement of the legitimate interests as cover for the protection of the illegitimate ones. The reformer who cannot tell the difference between the two will find that their patience and their willingness to listen, which were the right disposition toward the first kind of resistance, are being used to protect a second kind of resistance that the patience and the listening do not, in fact, deserve.

The discrimination here is not always easy. The same person may carry both kinds of interest, and the proportions may be hard to assess. But the discrimination has to be attempted, because the appropriate response to the two kinds is different. The first kind is to be engaged in good faith; the second kind is to be named and resisted. To engage the second kind in good faith is to allow oneself to be exploited; to name and resist the first kind is to make enemies out of potential allies. The reformer who has done the discrimination well can negotiate with the first kind and contest the second, and the work can go forward on both fronts in the way the work needs to go forward. The reformer who has done the discrimination poorly will, in many cases, do the opposite of what is needed in each case, and the work will founder.

The third kind of resistance is the one that is hardest to address and the one that does the most damage, and I want to spend the rest of the chapter on it.

The third kind of resistance comes from people whose formation has taught them, often across many years and through many channels at once, to call wrong what is right and to call right what is wrong. They are not acting from the defence of honestly built lives. Nor are they fighting to protect unjust advantages. They are acting from what they believe with their whole hearts to be the defence of what is good against what is threatening it. The wrong they would do, to the people the reform is supposed to help, they would do with full conviction that the wrong was right. The harm they would inflict, on the people who are trying to do the work, they would inflict with the satisfaction of having performed a difficult duty well. They have been so formed that the very things the reform is trying to address have come to feel, to them, like the things the reform is attacking. The reform is, in their formation, a threat to what their formation has taught them to value, and they will resist it with all the moral seriousness they bring to anything else in their lives.

This is the gravest of the three kinds of resistance, for a precise reason. It cannot be ended by appeal to the consciences of those carrying out the resistance, because their consciences are clear. They are not acting against their own better judgement because their better judgement is what is producing the resistance in the first place. The reformer cannot reach them by demonstrating the wrong of what they are doing, because the demonstration uses categories that their formation has taught them to read differently. The reformer cannot persuade them through argument, because the argument depends on premises their formation has taught them to reject. They are operating, in good faith, from a formation that has put them on the wrong side of what justice requires, and the wrongness of the side is not visible to them from within the formation.

The historical record is full of this. The people who burned the heretics were not, in most cases, conscious sadists; they were people whose formation had taught them that the burning of heretics was a duty they were required to perform to protect the souls of the people who would otherwise have been led astray. The people who carried out the laws of segregation in the American South were not, in most cases, conscious villains; they were people whose formation had taught them that the laws preserved a social order whose dissolution would be catastrophic for everyone, including the people the laws were oppressing. The people who informed on their Jewish neighbours under the Nazi regime were not, in most cases, conscious betrayers of decency; they were people whose formation had taught them that the regime was restoring a moral order their society had been losing, and that the laws against the Jews were a regrettable but necessary part of that restoration. The people who did these things believed, with their whole hearts, that they were doing right. They were wrong. But they were not wrong in the way someone is wrong who has been caught in a deliberate lie. They were wrong in the way someone is wrong whose formation has installed an error so deep that they cannot see it as an error at all.

This is the kind of resistance the reformer must learn to recognise, because the temptations in dealing with it are particularly dangerous. There is a temptation to treat the people carrying this resistance as if they were carrying the second kind — as if they were defending advantage in bad faith — and to fight them with the energy that fighting bad-faith defenders warrants. The temptation will lead the reformer astray, because the people carrying the third kind of resistance are not, in fact, acting in bad faith. They are acting in good faith from a corrupted formation, and the corruption of the formation is the real adversary. The people are not the adversary; they are the carriers of the adversary, and fighting them as if they were the adversary leaves the adversary itself untouched. Worse, fighting them as if they were the adversary gives their formation a confirmation it would not otherwise have had — the confirmation that the reformer is, in fact, the enemy their formation has taught them to see. The reformer's anger becomes, in their formation, evidence that the formation was right all along.

The work, with the third kind of resistance, is necessarily slow, and it is not the work of confrontation. It is the work of restoring honesty between word and deed in the places the formation is reproduced such as the family, the school, the religious community, the professional formation, and the means of public communication. This kind of work is generational. Its visible effects accumulate so slowly as to be almost imperceptible. The people carrying the third kind of resistance now will, in many cases, not be persuaded in their own lifetimes. Some of them will go to their graves believing they were defending what was good. What will change is what the next generation absorbs, and the generation after that, and across enough generations the formation will produce different kinds of people, and the people carrying the formation forward will, eventually, be people whose formation has been calibrated against what was once defended. This is the slow work of how a people corrects itself when it has gone wrong, and it is slower than the impatient reformer wants to hear, and it is the only work that addresses the third kind of resistance at the level at which the resistance actually operates.

I want to say one more thing, before this chapter closes, about something that follows from what I have just said. The reformer who has done the discrimination among the three kinds of resistance, and who has learned to address each kind in the way it requires, will find that they have become a particular kind of person. They will have lost a certain pleasure that the cruder reformer enjoys — the pleasure of having clear enemies, the pleasure of self-righteousness, and the pleasure of the dramatic confrontation. They will have gained, in exchange, a different quality, which is harder to describe but which is, in my observation, the quality that distinguishes reformers who eventually succeed from reformers who do not. The quality is something like a patient steadiness combined with a refusal to be deflected from the work. The steadiness is what allows them to keep engaging the first kind of resistance in good faith over years. The refusal to be deflected is what allows them to keep naming the second kind of resistance without losing their nerve. Their patience is what allows them to do the slow generational work that the third kind requires. The combination is not common, and the world does not particularly cultivate it. But it is what the work calls for, and the people who have done the work that has held over time have, on the whole, have always possessed it.

The next movement of the book turns from the small dense places where the work has to be done to the larger scales at which the same patterns operate. We will explore what becomes of a country when the failures of trust and the misfiring of defences have settled as customs and social norms, what becomes of a country that has begun to find its way back, and what the question is that any of us would answer, when the moment came, by what we had been becoming across the unremarked days.