We have heard hundreds of accounts of the Second World War when, in the face of the advance of Nazism, small groups of brave men and women organized to oppose the razing.
Partisans gathered in the forests, combatants or ordinary citizens who defended with their own lives and with precarious weapons the values of a world that was at risk of succumbing to the madness of blood. In the ghettos of Poland, in a thousand corners of towns and fields and cities the weak rose up against the strong, the defenseless against the powerful, the free against the oppressors.
Today the news brings us heartbreaking scenes of Ukraine under the fire of the Russian invader, of Armenians in Artsakh, of brave Syrian women or of so many who, in various parts of the world, rise up to rescue freedom, rights and dignity. Religious, political or military tyrannies descend on the defenseless to impose unique models of life and thought, threatening with death those who do not submit to their omnipotent delusions.
It is in these extremely dramatic contexts that the word "resistance" acquires its full meaning. A word too precious to be used wastefully, a gem of high value that evokes vital deeds and that cannot be cheapened by an opportunistic and demagogic use.
But what are the fundamental features that all these situations have in common? First, asymmetry.
The figure of David and Goliath that is repeated again and again in history. And as a consequence, the razing of legality that every despot carries out to realize his ambitions. The excessiveness of the tyrant implies, necessarily, ignoring all limits, ignoring any brake that limits his whims and any law that puts him in a box. Because the Law, as such, equalizes humans, distributes power and distributes forces. Fundamentally, it separates between permitted and prohibited.
In a remarkable article, Diana Wang – daughter of Shoah survivors – asks "how to survive in a state of affairs in which rules are elastic, norms are subverted, expectations are uncertain, the future is bleak."
It alludes to "the confusion about what to respect and what can be altered a little" (Clarín, 13/5/23). It is that if the limits are diffuse and the law is optional, according to tastes and conveniences, nothing and nobody protects us against the abuse of the powerful. The (misnamed) law of the jungle – the opposite of the law – will prevail everywhere.
One of the founding myths of Western thought is that of the flood: at the beginning of chapter 6 of Genesis it is said that some mysterious characters, the "children of the gods", "took for women who liked them most" going over the restrictions that society imposed.
Representatives of pagan heroes and demigods, these "alpha males" did not consider themselves concerned by interdiction or restraint. The flood that divinity commands in response to such pride is a mirror metaphor for the actions of such energúmenos: to break down every barrier, to ignore every separation.
Thus, waterlogging destroys the distinction between dry and wet, light and dark, upstream and downwater. The formless mixture and the resulting chaos make human life impossible and generate a swampy terrain where horror nests.
An "anything goes" suitable for excess and abuse. Indeed, as Wang says, we are all tempted to ride the "ma' yes" wave, shirk our civic duties, sneak in line, obstruct ramps, fail to pay taxes, or bribe the policeman on duty.
Total, if everyone does it... But history shows that this is the serpent's egg: contempt for rules entails indifference to the other, an attitude that unhurriedly and without pause hordes the civilized world in which we aspire to live.
As Kant would say, my maxim of conduct must be able to be applied to everyone and always. In his version by the negative, "do not do to the other what you do not want done to you." What makes us human is that peculiar trait: responsibility for others. Hence, even in contexts where everything seems to fall apart, adherence to the law is the most modest and at the same time the highest form of resistance. Resist chaos and anomie to preserve our humanity.
It seems a less dramatic scenario than those of war and genocide, but these everyday situations are the broth where the greatest horrors are brewing. Small gestures of respect for the law are hominizing and put into action the indispensable ethics of living with others.
The word "resistance" - along with others such as "holocaust", "disappeared", "genocide" ... - always runs the risk of trivialization. And this is another form – insidious, underhanded – of anomie: ignoring the distinction between use and abuse, between the legitimate and the spurious.
We do not own language, we cannot twist it at will and use it for selfish purposes: preserving the value of words also implies sustaining the social pact that makes a truly human life possible.
Diana Sperling is a philosopher and essayist.