The Lifeguards
All along the watchtower/princes kept the view… - Jimi Hendrix
I took my toddler to the pool today. It was scorching hot, and the pool was filled with people. I carefully pushed my daughter into the pool complex, miraculously finding a spot in the shade, and quickly got us sun blocked up. Logistics handled, Katydid grabbed me by the hand and started pulling. “Big pool, mommy!” She said.
Two lifeguards sat at the big pool. One of them was focused solely on the pool’s slide. The slide was a water slide, long, sleek, and steel; depending on the weight of the swimmer landing in the water, people on the other end of the pool can get splashed. It’s every kid’s dream - and the dream of many adults, who frequently go down it as well.
Katydid and I played with her boat at the other end of the pool, and she practiced dog paddling. I jumped at a shrill whistle from the lifeguard. I quickly looked up, and realized he was pointing at a young boy who’d just gone down the slide. The lifeguard beckoned him over. The boy, face now white, climbed out of the water and ran the opposite direction.
Several things occurred to me as I watched him flee. First, that young boy was terrified of being called out by the lifeguard. There could have been a number of reasons for this. Maybe he’d been banned from the pool, or the adult accompanying him had been banned. Maybe his parents or guardians were abusive, and he associated any kind of authority with pain and terror. For that matter, maybe he was a refugee, and used to authority on a grand scale being abused. It was impossible to tell.
I have met many people, all of whom had different experiences with authority. Some were abused by parents and/or guardians. Some were born in repressive regimes, where speaking one’s own mind was a death sentence, along with wearing the wrong clothes or belonging to the wrong religion. There is a reason that the refugee community in the United States is frequently reluctant to call police. It’s partly because of the fear of being handed over to ICE for deportation, which is unfortunately somewhat founded. It’s also partly because the police in their home countries are frequently weapons of the state, to a degree we almost cannot imagine in the United States of America.
People frequently wonder why things are the way they are, in Venezuela, or Colombia, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia. We in the United States, and much of the Western world, were largely raised in an atmosphere that praised tolerance, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of religion. Dissidence was often praised, as was critical thinking. Difference in opinion was accepted as a matter of course. We do not find it unusual to witness protests on the streets of Washington, DC. As a Black Lives Matter protestor and activist in general, I would often think about the difference between protests now and protests during the Civil Rights era. Now, tear gas deployed against protestors is widely condemned. Then, dogs were loosed against protestors with almost no second thought.
Going back to that young boy and the lifeguard… what example of political authority would that young boy have had to grown up with, to be absolutely terrified of a relatively benign lifeguard figure - and what courage would it have taken a people to face and throw down such a regime?
Political theory offers different reasons for how these authoritarian regimes attain power - and, perhaps more importantly, how they maintain that power. Sometimes, yes, it is through force of arms, which might also include disease. When the Belgians conquered the Congo, they did so with superior weaponry and through exploiting pre-existing political instability. Cortez swept through the Americas with horses, superior weaponry, and an added dash of devastating illness. In each case, the native populations were decimated. There was really no need to establish a complicated story to justify conquering these territories. Most of the people who would have protested were dead.
Then there are the more complex cases, like Iran. Popular revolt against a repressive regime swept the religious authorities into power. But what kept them there? How were the people of Iran able to unseat one unpopular regime, and then substitute it for another? In this case, religious authority backed political power and military might. Clerics introduced the idea of velayat e faqih, championed by the government and enforced by the Revolutionary Guard. Tapping into the power of faith and faith tradition - Islam itself has a thousand-plus year history in the region - cemented the new Iranian government as part of a long tradition of Muslim rule and ascendancy. To quote Ayatollah Khomeini, “The Iranian people’s revolution is only a point in the start of the revolution of the great world of Islam.”
The power of faith can be a difficult one to revolt against, when it is state-sanctioned and codified. Slaves throughout the American south, Latin, and Central America were carefully educated on a slave owner and plantation friendly version of the Bible. According to one 1863 sermon, given at Christ Church in Savannah, Georgia:
Two years of the war have rid every one of any evil anticipations upon this head, and have satisfied the United States government that if these people are to change their condition, it must be changed for them by external force. And while this quiescence on the part of our servants vindicates us from the charges of cruelty and barbarity which have been so industriously circulated against us, it is also teaching us that we can, hereafter, with entire safety, and with most excellent results to ourselves, introduce them gradually to a higher moral and religious life.
When a people are born into an existing structure of state, the tendency is to accept it. It takes will, intelligence, a certain rebelliousness of spirit, and, yes, sometimes external encouragement to question one’s lot. This is why teaching reading to slaves was forbidden. What would happen if a slave managed to read Descartes? Or Rousseau? Or even one of the abolitionist pamphlets that the Underground Railroad did try to write and circulate?
There’s a philosophical concept, largely developed by philosopher Michel Foucault, called the Watchtower. Foucault builds on the work of prison reformer Jeremy Bentham to develop the idea of authority and social diffusion. Essentially, in a prison, there might be a single watchtower looming tall over the prison and its yards. The walls themselves need not be manned; prisoners must simply believe there is a man in the watchtower, with a weapon, standing guard against revolt. The prisoners go about their day knowing that they might be shot at any time, particularly for disobeying the rules.
This is a powerful analogy. Slaves on plantations often vastly outnumbered the plantation owners and overseers… and yet mass revolts were uncommon. Part of this is likely due to another modus operandi of the man in the watchtower: perhaps he had a loudspeaker. Perhaps he could use it to advise the prisoners he knew what they were planning, and the slave catchers were right down the road and could be brought in at any time. To continue the analogy, perhaps the prisoner’s families had been sold to a different prison, and retribution would fall quickly on them should this prison revolt.
It is not difficult to look at Foucault’s tower and think of the lifeguard at the pool, and the terrified young boy. The scars of repression do not heal easily. Revolutionary movements do not start easily, either, but with pain and hope and courage. It starts with revolutionary ideas quietly communicated to others, who then buy into them. It starts with a grassroots level of courage and commitment and belief.
Now: if you have a good recommendation for others to go deeper - documentary, podcast, TV series, book - please drop it in the comments!