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Andrew Roos Bell's avatar

I feel like it's so important for people to extend assumed trust to strangers that might not be merited, but the problem is, it's easy for me to say that because nothing terribly bad has happened to me and I'm in a much less vulnerable position than some. At the same time, I'm not sure how we have a civilization without people unilaterally taking that first step.

I also struggle because I can have relationships of close trust with people I'm in community with, but then I also suspect some of these people fall into the same ideological camps that I universally condemn as evil whenever I read about what they are doing on the news. It sounds like that personal/political identity distinction is also in play in the book, and it's so foregrounded for me that as soon as you described the plot I started trying to calculate how bad the fictional anarchists must be relative to Chesterton, given my distrust of the man as someone looked up to by traditionalist-conservatives who just like the status quo.

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Sarah Coogan's avatar

Yeah, I think the calculus of trust is necessarily different for everyone, especially for people recovering from trauma or in vulnerable groups. Trust can't be dictated or demanded. But it is necessary for a civilisation, as you say.

I think it helps to jettison any notion of moral or ideological purity, especially in interpersonal relationships. Reconciliation and growth happen in relationship. Granted, if we think an individual is truly vicious or hateful, then maybe that particular relationship needs to end. But most people are a mix of virtue and vice, wisdom and foolishness. I think part of today's polarisation can be attributed to the notion that our opinions are contaminants: holding the wrong view on one subject is automatically a sign of bad character or moral decay. But I think most of us know that that's not the case. But the internet sure encourages us to think that way.

I mean, Chesterton has some real flaws that I won't make excuses for. He was definitely racist, for one thing. I think the anarchism he writes about in Thursday may have been, to some extent, an imagined danger: it seems to me that the ideology he's really combatting is nihilism. But then again, by my understanding, groups inspired by or associated with anarchism did advocate political violence and carry out assassinations at the end of the nineteenth century. So there is that...

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Andrew Roos Bell's avatar

Yeah, I think I would make a distinction between the anarchist throwing a bomb into a cafe and the anarchist fighting against Franco in Spain (both of which were very much real).

I'm just reading every day about innocent people being kidnapped and disappeared by a nascent police state, and meanwhile there are people acting like everything is fine and they feel offended if you actually react in a human way to what they are doing to real people.

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Sarah Coogan's avatar

It's an important distinction, to be sure.

And I totally understand the sense of maddening helplessness that attends just... being in the world today. Wish I had a good strategy for those interactions.

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Shannon Hood's avatar

Love this review/teaser of a book that I have been wanting to read for years!

(And ask that neighbor to grab you a gallon of milk next time! I have been without a car for the past two years during the weekdays, and the number of friends and neighbors I have gotten closer to simply because I have been forced to ask for rides to the grocery store, or to book club, is not a few. It *is* hard the first time, but I would guess that your neighbors would *love* to help you out!)

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Sarah Coogan's avatar

Oh, let me know what you think when you get to it! It's a great palette cleanser between long reads, because the prose is beautiful, but the story is SO fast paced.

Being without a car can be a blessing, can't it? I'm likewise carless on weekdays, and while I'm still working on the asking for help part, I know our town so much better because I walk everywhere and see the same people every day.

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