Behavioral Therapy
Gal Beckerman ’98 writes about making moral choices when everything feels impossible in How to Be a Dissident.
What qualities can help ordinary people live with integrity in an age of authoritarian drift? In his new book, Gal Beckerman ’98 explores that question and presents a set of considerations for anyone facing the small daily compromises of conscience.
Viewing dissidence as a human capacity we can all cultivate, he examines the lives of defiant thinkers across centuries and culture. These stories are instructive without being didactic, heartbreaking without being maudlin, and Gal interweaves them with his own personal dilemmas about navigating contemporary pressures. For every Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Russia and Václav Havel in Czechia, there is an Etty Hillesum in Germany, a Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Kenya, and a Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia; also we encounter St. Augustine, Diogenes, Arendt, and other old friends from Hum 110 (or 210 or 220). He examines what characteristics these extraordinary figures have in common, including a singular presence of mind and the ability to perceive truths about their own societies.
Etty Hillesum was a Dutch-Jewish woman who left a diary that was both clear-eyed about what was happening in the Nazi transit camp of Westerbork and attuned to beauty in all its unexpected forms. The inner world “that she cultivated and maintained as her defense” became a mode of resistance against the dehumanization perpetrated by the Third Reich. Gal traces a throughline connecting Etty’s conviction “to write, to record, to retain,” the ingenuity of Chilean women under the Pinochet dictatorship who created secret patchwork quilts, and the group baking enacted by Sepideh Gholian and her fellow inmates in an Iranian prison.
Reflecting on the dissident attitude toward courage, death, and immortality, he suggests that it is an outlook distinguished by a unique “sense of immediacy meeting with a sense of continuity.” He finds a kind of immortality in the records people leave behind, “a dissident assertion of life.” An archive created in secret in the Warsaw Ghetto brings this home for Gal, offering him a treasured impression of the place his grandparents met and married. Other autobiographical aspects of the book are equally moving and chilling, including his accounts of being invited to a barbecue by a group of hijackers and volunteering as an interpreter for a Cameroonian man seeking asylum in the United States.
As artificial intelligence insinuates itself into more elements of our lives, he laments that the sensation of “some essential friction” is disappearing. Instead of being prescriptive about how we should behave in response, he appeals to us to utilize “new habits of attention” gained from his treatise to more easily recognize moral choices as choices (it’s the choosing that matters!). Channeling Sartre on acts of self-creation and lessons learned from the featured dissidents, Gal appeals to us to allow for unsettled feelings and apply imagination to the effort of being human: “This doesn’t remove [that] sense of responsibility; it adds to it the thrill of inventiveness, of knowing you’re making something through those choices.”
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