I attended a webinar the other night with the journalists Pankaj Mishra and Ben Rhodes on “Gaza, Israel, and the American Left,” organized by The New York Review of Books. Since the anti-war movement came up during the talk, I asked Mishra and Rhodes if they had any advice to offer the movement. To my surprise, both claimed not to, on the grounds that it would be “presumptuous” of them to do so. It struck me as a pretty odd thing to say. Here were two world-class journalists who’d just spent the previous hour offering up advice to the world’s most powerful governments. Rhodes, in fact, isn’t just a journalist, but was Deputy National Security Adviser during the Obama Administration. And here they were, for all that worldly wisdom, expressing timidity about the prospect of giving advice to a bunch of college students and faculty.

To be fair, Rhodes’s profession of agnosticism ended up being a bit of a rhetorical dodge. Having said that he wouldn’t give advice, he ended up giving some. The anti-war movement, he said, needs to make some decisions about what it wants. Does it simply want to voice its moral outrage, or does it want to effect some policy changes? In the latter case, are its aims maximalist or moderate? Is the movement looking for a final peace settlement, or just adherence to the Leahy Amendments with respect to arms sales to Israel?

All fair questions, but why the fig-leaf of agnosticism? And why the insistence on questions without answers? The progress of the anti-war movement is not, after all, a classroom exercise in which there’s a special premium on the students’ working out the answers themselves, right or wrong. It’s a real-world venture concerning matters of life and death. Don’t people who’ve professionally dealt in such matters have anything to say about how to get things done?

Let me venture a hypothesis of my own. It’s been interesting to have played a part, however peripheral, in the anti-war movement, and to have processed the commentary on the movement in real time. What strikes me about a great deal of the commentary, whether positive or negative (but particularly when negative), is its spectatorial, Olympian quality. When commentators comment on the anti-war movement, they characteristically adopt a perspective outside of the movement and then peer in at it from some perch at a distance from it. What we get is commentary from afar and from the third-person perspective, as though distance and aloofness from an undertaking were the defining features of objectivity about it.

It’s worth questioning whether they are. Machiavelli famously opens and closes The Prince with the observation that the successful statesman only succeeds through the adoption of two apparently opposed perspectives on his task, the distant and the proximate, the detached and the engaged.  Put somewhat differently: if you want to accomplish something, it helps to get some distance on it, and helps to detach yourself from your immediate passions. But you can’t leave matters there and hope to get it done. To get it done, you have to get right up close to it, and act wholeheartedly on whatever motivates you to start the task and see it to completion.

Practical objectivity–the objectivity of practical or pragmatic intelligence, the kind deployed by first-personal agents acting in the three-dimensional world–is decidedly not spectatorial, aloof, detached, impassive, or neutral. Subtract proximity from the equation, and you lose a focused sense of detail. Subtract engagement and it becomes a total mystery why anyone persists against obstacles. Subtract them both and it becomes a total mystery how you begin a task, how you proceed with it, and how you succeed at it.

Mishra and Rhodes’s reticence is, in this light, diagnostic–and I say this not to pick on them in particular (they’re far better than most), but to illustrate a general problem with journalists today. Contemporary journalists have no idea how to run a movement or promote the aims of one. Most of them have never done it, and have apparently never been inclined to. When they cover the activities of an engaged political movement, they do so in the fashion of zoologists encountering an unfamiliar species in the wild, or else encountering one so familiar as to elicit the contempt engendered by familiarity. In other words, either they have no idea what they’re looking at, or they’re absolutely sure they do. But these are recipes for not really looking or understanding at all, something which, for every new phenomenon, requires looking at it anew, with fresh eyes.

Interfaith vigil, Princeton University, October 8, 2024 (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

It doesn’t really surprise me that even the best journalists out there have no good advice to offer the anti-war movement. What advice would they offer? Where would they get it from? They’re not being asked how one should run the National Security Agency or write a speech for the President. They’re not being asked to evaluate a text or event or social tendency in the past perfect or imperfect. They’re being asked what to do right now, in a context where the stakes are high but the chances of success are low. How do people without power, without resources, under pressure, under scrutiny, take on the powers-that-be? How do they evade censorship, manipulation, defamation, search, seizure, and assault? How do you stop apartheid, conquest, occupation, and genocide in the face of zealous attachment to them and widespread apathy about them?

To answer these questions, you have to do something very unpopular among our smart set. You have to abandon the third-personal perspective of the spectator, do a role-reversal, and adopt the first-personal perspective of the agent, in this case the activist agent. You have to break the habit of being a critic, looking in from the outside or down from on high, and adopt the habit of looking at the world from ground level.

What is the ground level? Adopt it for a moment. You’re a student at a university. You’re a faculty member, possibly without tenure (not that tenure matters that much any more). You’re an alum with a day job. You don’t have much time. You don’t have much money. You don’t have much support. You’re under scrutiny. People defame you with impunity. People call the cops on you, and have you arrested and prosecuted without so much as a second thought. If you’re at a university, it professes a false form of “neutrality” or impartiality, then does its best to destroy your movement. If you’re not at a university, you know that anything you say or do could mean the loss of your job. There are arbitrary, undefended, indefensible taboos on anything you might want to say or do, but no constraints when it comes to the other side.

Now try to act. What happens? Take an action; it’ll be criticized. Refrain, and what people see is your loss of momentum. Discipline those within the movement, and you’re accused of authoritarianism; don’t, and you’re accused of anarchy. Your country is arming and promoting a genocide, but you are the enemy. Stay too anoydyne, and you get eaten alive; become too radical, and the incentive to eat you becomes more transparent. Your fellow citizens are willing to indulge their complacency, indifference, and dogmatism without limits, but failure to produce immediate political results is your fault. You should have the elixir that cures the ills caused by others. You’re outnumbered, outgunned, outspent, and disempowered, but not only is it your duty to stop the runaway train cut loose by others; it’s your obligation to listen with forbearance to recriminations from those whose principal contribution is to stand idly by.

This is the starting point of any inquiry into where the movement is supposed to go, or what it’s supposed to do. Start at the beginning, where we actually are, and work your way out. Once you do, you can see why the actual prospect of advice-giving is met with silence. How many people are willing to start there? Once they do, how long will they stay?

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The success of the movement lies in the quality of its efforts, not the certainty of its successes. All we can know is that comparable movements have arisen in the past, proceeding either to success or failure or some intermediate place in-between, facing the same or worse odds, meeting the same combination of hostility, derision, subversion, indifference, free riding, and sunshine soldiering. And they persisted. That ends up being the only advice that matters: don’t give up–for anyone, for anything, no matter what happens. Succeed or fail, but persist. If the United Mine Workers could do it, if the Freedom Riders could do it, if the National Mobilization Committee could do it, if ACT UP could do it, if the ANC could do it, if the shebab and the women of the Palestinian intifadas could do it, if Bobby Sands and Khader Adnan and Ahed Tamimi could do it, so can we.

Silence is a diagnosis, not an obstacle. Obstacles are a challenge, not an objection. Say what you will, or say nothing at all: the anti-war movement isn’t going anywhere. Wars come and go, but we embody an impulse that outlasts them all. The day we fail is the day we all perish. It’s just that the anti-war movement has more of a stake in avoiding that day than most of you. No worries: we’re used to the asymmetry. You can sit while we stand. You can sleep while we march. The forward momentum will continue until it collides with something that makes it stop. You don’t start a movement to get some rest.