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07 - The New American Barbarism | Lawrence Aronovitch
15 Plays15 days ago
Why would a society turn on itself? What darkness hides in the hidden depths of the social body? Doesn't it seem paradoxical that a country living its peak cultural moment can turn that dynamic on its head and become unrecognizably repressive and barbaric? And finally, riddle me this - are these questions about N4zi Germany or the US?
Many decades after attending a university class about the rise of N4zism together, Gerry visits Lawrence in Ottawa to talk about the same subject, but under a different context, one that's a bit too close to home. Specifically, directly south of home.
Lawrence Aronovitch is a Canadian playwright and actor based in Ottawa, Ontario. He is the playwright in residence at the Great Canadian Theatre Company. His stubborn optimism about the final outcome of the US' dark descent into barbarism contrasts Gerry's calculated pessimism. Maybe he's right - disruptive, challenging, disrespectful art that challenges these barbaric narratives might just be what we need. Who would've thought that "purple dinosaurs against f4scism" might actually be a valid political statement in 2025!
Thank you for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the interview.
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Transcript
Censorship and Audience Support Challenges
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to the 5th Column Podcast. Our work is anything but conventional, and the narratives we're trying to support are currently public enemy number one in the United States. Which means that, unfortunately, social media platforms are doing their best to shadow ban, strike down, and censor most of the promotional content we publish.
00:00:29
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00:00:42
Speaker
Everyone's welcome in our community. Thanks again for tuning in and enjoy the episode.
Introducing Lawrence Aronovich and Academic Journey
00:00:53
Speaker
So today i am in Ottawa talking with one of my oldest friends, Lawrence Aronovich, who lives here. And we've been friends for a very long time. I've been trying to think of the best way to introduce how we met. And the only explanation for it is that we had an affinity for the same undergraduate courses. Well, and we were two lonely Canadians yeah in a sea of Americans.
Exploring Family Trauma and WWII History
00:01:26
Speaker
But we happened to actually meet in one particular course that we were both taking in our first year at university, which was a course, I think the title was something like Moral Dilemmas in a Repressive Society. That was exactly the title.
00:01:44
Speaker
And it was a history course about Nazi Germany, which seems like a subject that might be of interest to people today.
00:01:55
Speaker
Why did you pick that course? I think I picked it because I was preoccupied with my dad and his survival. barely physically and emotionally not at all in the war in Europe and he immigrated to Canada after the war with his soul in little pieces and never recovered and so I think I was at that age really curious about my dad like who's my dad having been raised by him i didn't even know how traumatized he was until later until I realized just how
00:02:30
Speaker
He had PTSD untreated his entire life. And so I think unconsciously I was curious about the system that did that to him. And did that course enlighten you with respect to your father?
00:02:44
Speaker
No, not really. i mean, the course was all about heroes who resisted it. And my father was a victim. I didn't come away understanding him any better at all.
00:02:57
Speaker
But you met me. i i did meet you. why did Why did you take that course? Or was it more like, oh, that sounds interesting. Let's just do that. Well, I mean, it it did sound interesting. But ah if pressed, I suppose, I could find a more profound reason.
00:03:17
Speaker
Most anyone know who is Jewish has an obsessive compulsive interest in the history of Nazi Germany for obvious reasons, and generally is likely to have a very long term sense of history.
Interest in Nazi Germany and Societal Barbarism
00:03:38
Speaker
That was just one particularly horrible example of Jews living in the midst of a larger society that turned on them.
00:03:50
Speaker
And there's several thousand years of history of that happening. My own family got kicked out of Spain and Portugal over 500 years ago.
00:04:01
Speaker
I don't have immediate family that perished in the Holocaust that I'm aware of because most of my family had moved to North America back at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century.
00:04:16
Speaker
But it always did seem... peculiar that as advanced a culture and society as Germany in the early 20th century could turn into what it turned into.
00:04:30
Speaker
and it seems also curious that there was or was not as much moral questioning about what kind of society was it becoming on the part of the people who lived there at the time. So the title of the course was attractive in that way.
00:04:54
Speaker
would it Would you say that barbarism underlies every culture, but it's ah the most worrisome when it underlies a culture that prides itself on its civility?
00:05:07
Speaker
Like Germany in the 19th century, center of European learning, center of European universities, self-congratulatory, a peak of civilization, and yet lurking really dark, barbaric impulses. So a good Freudian would tell you that's true everywhere.
00:05:23
Speaker
But it's most offensive and surprising in a culture that prides itself on its laws, its constitution, its learning, its liberality, its education, its inclusiveness.
00:05:36
Speaker
And that's what's really frightening, what caught Jewish Germans particularly off guard, because they felt part of that edifice of civilization and accomplishment and even bourgeois self-congratulatory narrative, right?
00:05:53
Speaker
I can see where you're going to go with that. Am I that transparent? But I think the answer to your question depends on what your personal assumptions are about human nature.
00:06:08
Speaker
Are humans by nature barbaric or not? The way you frame the question suggests that you think they are. i i do. I do. i think everyone has a lurking barbarism and that the the the struggle to tame that part of yourself or at least to make peace with it and keep it in its place is...
00:06:33
Speaker
what everyone has to do, um and what some people fail spectacularly to do, ah sort of the gleeful indulgence in cruelty, the clapping at the suffering of others, i find horrific.
00:06:50
Speaker
ah I don't feel that in myself, but I see that glee in some of these people, and I'm appalled. And i I worry that... It's in me too, were I to be sufficiently drunk or angry or mentally ill that it would bubble up.
00:07:08
Speaker
Well, there's no question that barbarity exists, but I wonder whether you would consider that its opposite exists as well. And I don't know which one is the more fundamental.
00:07:24
Speaker
In any society, because in any society, not just Germany, not just Western society, you find barbarity and cruelty and all the things you talked about, but you also find beauty and art and kindness and generosity.
00:07:42
Speaker
One doesn't necessarily overwhelm the other, but maybe sometimes it does. Would you say that a repressive society like Germany in the 30s is like regular life everywhere else, only more so?
00:08:02
Speaker
So that barbarity and cruelty and gleeful sadism is celebrated, but so also are unusual acts of empathy and compassion and self-sacrifice and heroism that aren't possible in ordinary peacetime.
00:08:16
Speaker
so that, you know, Miep Gies hiding the Frank family in Amsterdam isn't possible unless the Frank family needs to be hidden. And so her heroism as an ordinary Protestant Amsterdam lady, it wasn't her moment until she felt called to bring them groceries because it was the right thing to do.
00:08:37
Speaker
She didn't know she would be a hero.
00:08:42
Speaker
Well, but there are probably lots of people that wouldn't know they're going to be sadistic either until they get the opportunity. Most quote unquote civilized cultures find means to repress the undesirable instincts that you're talking about and promote the more desirable instincts that might lead people to, if not hide neighbors in the attic, donate to the local food bank.
00:09:18
Speaker
Yeah.
Public Protests and Societal Dissatisfaction
00:09:20
Speaker
I think at this moment, somewhere in the United States, a little girl named Maria Ramirez is starting a diary. Sure, there's probably a lot of people that are starting diaries.
00:09:31
Speaker
But there's a lot of people who are... recording the incidents with their phones that's new in a way that did not happen 90 years ago.
00:09:44
Speaker
So the phenomena, much more visible today than they were then, that's a two-edged sword because it can be both frightening and inspiring.
00:09:58
Speaker
Inspiring in a good way and inspiring in the way that it is encouraging bystanders to intervene in that it's encouraging 7 million people to show up and a protest in the US s on a weekend.
00:10:15
Speaker
And that's a few million more than the last protest. And presumably if they organize another there'll be even more. Yeah, that's and that's encouraging, although the economic and political forces that prompted the whole breakdown in the first place are still there. so like the let's make Germany, oops, I mean America great again comes from somewhere and those disaffected angry people are still out there. So no matter how many purple dinosaurs show up on Boston Common waving signs, the anger and the resentment and the economic uncertainty is going to persist and will drive of political violence for sure. And probably anarchism, street violence.
00:11:01
Speaker
You are determined to be pessimistic here. Oh, oh am I? That's how you are sounding. i grant that you have eight point.
00:11:11
Speaker
But one of the things that I observed was that you had those 7 million purple dinosaurs and frogs and so forth.
00:11:22
Speaker
But there was not, as far as I'm aware, a very significant counter-protest going on. No, this is true. And that suggests to me that, yes, there's lots of quite justifiably dispossessed, angry souls out there that are looking for...
00:11:41
Speaker
someone one to save them and looking therefore to a strong man and that's what's happened in many societies over the generations but it's not clear to me that the number of those disaffected overwhelms the number of the people putting on silly costumes yeah In the long run, the solution has to be to address the issues that cause people to be angry and disaffected and feel that they have been disenfranchised or impoverished or lost opportunities. And generally, these are forces that, from their perspective, are beyond their control. And so they look or some figure to make everything great again for them until those underlying forces are
Challenges in U.S. Scientific Research
00:12:22
Speaker
addressed.
00:12:24
Speaker
They will remain unsatisfied and grumbly, but I don't know that it's impossible to address those issues. Some part of it for me is that it feels fundamentally personally broken for me. So I built a scientific career in the United States at a time when I thought the the the value of science was unquestioned and the point of investing in basic science was so obvious and built on a brilliant series of scientific and technical triumphs like sending men to the moon and bringing them home safely within my lifetime. i mean, I remember the 1969 moon landing.
00:13:14
Speaker
was a big deal and I thought, how great and ah look at all of the money and shared a belief and collegial effort here that will push forward science and medicine and cancer research and In a very short space of time, that feels to have been incinerated, just like suddenly measles is popular again, and cancer research and cancer care has been cut, slashed. I feel the door has been slammed on my face in that country.
00:13:46
Speaker
I feel misled. I feel... oh How dare you? Like, you're going to you're going to do what? You're going to slash what?
00:13:59
Speaker
I'm having a very strong, angry reaction on the behalf of children dying of whooping cough, on behalf of cancer patients who will go without treatment, on behalf of future of cures that we won't we will not have.
00:14:14
Speaker
I'm incandescent with anger. I can't believe what I'm seeing. And that's quite understandable. This is a very reactionary environment in the sense that it's reacting not just to some new political development or social phenomenon. It's a reaction against the last several hundred years worth of enlightenment, to use a very Western-centric
00:14:45
Speaker
term, but of belief in rational thought, which at the end of the day is a belief in science, in knowledge that is discovered based on and inquiry into the world we live in.
00:15:07
Speaker
and that might be an inquiry into scientific questions, but it can be an inquiry into artistic questions, philosophical questions, as opposed to a model of society built on faith, small f, faith, in faith in the great leader who will tell us what to do.
00:15:29
Speaker
And that model does not really seem to make for a better, happier society than the model that you are mourning the loss of.
00:15:42
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's left me feeling very much like a German-Jewish scientist seeking for the exit. Like, really? Like, better have my passport current so that I can get the last plane from Lisbon.
00:15:58
Speaker
feels like that. And I'm not alone. i mean, the the journal Nature did a survey that of American scientists a couple months ago asking, how many of you are thinking of leaving the country? And the answer was 75%. And there's a response bias there of the people who actually responded. But 75% of American scientists want to become expats. They want to flee.
00:16:17
Speaker
i'm but I'm blown away. I think when you look at the landscape and see what's coming or imagine what's coming, that urge to flee is real. And i i need I need to have freedom of thought. I do not want to be told what to study or do or research what the important hypotheses are. i don't want some Soviet commissar telling me the government approves of this idea and not of that. And that's exactly what's happening. It feels very Soviet to me.
00:16:44
Speaker
Like, you're not allowed to study that. So my work in looking at breast cancer in African-American women or prostate cancer in African-American men suddenly out of fashion. I'm like, excuse me?
00:16:56
Speaker
And I don't want to be told, no, you can't do that. And like, we're going to cut your funding for it. What? The problem hasn't gone away. just You declared it somehow not a political priority anymore.
00:17:08
Speaker
I need to be somewhere where those questions are open and you can study them because they're important. Well, you're you're speaking at a very understandable personal level, but I would expand that to say that society needs that.
00:17:21
Speaker
as well because the absence of that kind of research means the absence of cures, which means the absence of health, which means lots more people getting sick or dying.
00:17:32
Speaker
And you can expand that to other spheres of life as well. It's perfectly understandable at a personal level that individuals are going to make a rational choice to seek a place where their work is going to be welcome, but it's impoverishing the society that they are leaving.
00:17:51
Speaker
And that perhaps does not bode well for the health of the Republic as it moves forward in the 21st century. Maybe that's not your problem.
00:18:02
Speaker
Yeah. Well, how how do you think about it personally? I mean, you and i we started at the same, the very same starting point as undergraduates and then diverged, evolved. I have lived in the United States for a long time and you've lived in Canada for a long time. How do you think about that? I mean, how do you think about where you are, but also ah where you're from intellectually? And how do you how do you see it now?
00:18:33
Speaker
How do you, you know, Margaret Atwood said Canadians feel like Gauls looking over the Rubicon into the into the Roman Republic or or the empire and saying, what is going on? Like as Gauls, you perfectly understand the political system and speak Latin, but you're not Romans.
00:18:53
Speaker
And so there's a kind of objectivity that comes from being Canadian that Americans don't seem to have. Well, Canadians have their own peculiarities and challenges.
00:19:05
Speaker
And I'm not sure from an American perspective, the things that we are preoccupied with north of the border, they just may not be of great interest.
00:19:20
Speaker
But we have to be conscious of our southern neighbors because they're kind of big. And... It's like a former prime minister reminded us many times, they're an elephant and when you're next to an elephant, you got to be careful of where the elephant's going to sit. so we watch, we observe, we like to think that we are friends and most Canadian sentiment these days seems to be
00:19:54
Speaker
ah a certain sadness about the government, but I don't think that translates into a hostility against individuals.
Symbols of Unity and Hope
00:20:05
Speaker
We all have friends and family south of the border. But maybe we're just not going to go visit them for a little while. There's this public library that straddles the border between Canada and the US. And it used to be you just went in the library and we're all here in the building for the same reason. and They can't do that now.
00:20:32
Speaker
But the people that used to go to the library think that maybe someday in the future they will. Whether that's going to be tomorrow or next month or a little further down the road is not up to us as Canadians to foresee.
00:20:49
Speaker
It's going to depend on what those purple dinosaurs choose to do.
00:20:58
Speaker
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00:21:10
Speaker
Back to the show.
00:21:16
Speaker
So we were thinking about what's the role of government and protest and civilized behavior as a response to barbarism and anarchy.
Societal Stress and Emerging Public Health Issues
00:21:27
Speaker
And I think too about the consequences for public health when there's a breakdown of trust and structure and representation. And we're actually seeing that in real time with emerging epidemics now of measles and whooping cough and kind of crazy ah sort of descent into crazy. So there's a literal impact on public health and I think it's going to affect the blood supply. It's going to affect
00:21:55
Speaker
people and their self-medicating behaviors, alcohol consumption is going to go up. Just the ah stress of this time with this rising rising barbarism is going to be bad for public health in general.
00:22:06
Speaker
And that's almost a marker of society's stress. Just like when political cohesion breaks down and barbarism takes over, everyone's health declines, including the sadists and violent people. So that's where I see that we are at.
00:22:23
Speaker
I think the key word from what you were saying is trust. And trust as a social bond has been breaking down for decades. One can debate as to where the breakdown started. Did it start with the election of 2016? Did it start with the election of 2008? Did it start with September 11th? Did it start with the Tea Party? Did it start with Newt Gingrich in the 90s? Did it start with Reagan in the 80s?
00:22:55
Speaker
Did it start with civil rights in the 60s? Did it start in 1776? The answer to that question doesn't really matter very much. What matters is that It has reached what you might choose to label an epidemic state at this point in time.
00:23:12
Speaker
And repairing that absence of trust is what you need to do in order to be able to address the symptoms that you're describing about public health.
00:23:23
Speaker
But there are symptoms elsewhere in society. being a good neighbor, being responsible economic citizen, being a responsible ecological citizen.
00:23:36
Speaker
I started off in the sciences as you did back in the day when we were both roommates at university together. But I branched off into the arts and I think the arts and offer its own insights into the symptoms of this societal disease.
00:24:02
Speaker
Arts, I think, throughout history have served as a kind of bellwether, a way of monitoring the health of the body politic.
00:24:14
Speaker
And i think we are seeing all sorts of red lights going off from an artistic perspective, as well as the scientific and public health perspective that you're describing today.
00:24:27
Speaker
A repressive society almost always starts by repressing the arts. And where there is no art that is questioning, art that is challenging, art that is disrespectful, if that art is suppressed, then you know that the society that's repressing it is going to go through some hard times.
00:24:50
Speaker
I agree, and I think scientists and medical practitioners and engineers have not done a good job in the way that the arts have done to warn about the misuse of science and technology.
Role of Science and Art in Bridging Divides
00:25:04
Speaker
Most scientists are introverts and inarticulate and think if they simply keep close to the data and do their work well, that everything will be fine, but they are in denial that... um all of their new innovations and discoveries are going to have any use at all if the society doesn't trust them or doesn't want to use discovery to add to advance human health or bring everybody forward. if the
00:25:35
Speaker
benefits of medical innovation accrue to a very few because they cost a million dollars. They're useless in my view. And a lot of scientists have forgotten to connect the dots. It's like the old joke about why science can teach you how to clone a dinosaur from ancient DNA, but the arts tell you why that might be a bad idea.
00:25:56
Speaker
And so I think as scientists, we failed the public and we failed each other. We failed society to communicate the value of what we do and how it is good for everyone.
00:26:08
Speaker
And the tribalism that we've all descended into is also a problem of a failure in scientific communication. It's a failure to say that what is good For one group of people, could be good for everybody. it's It has to be good for everybody. Otherwise, what's the point?
00:26:23
Speaker
It's only exacerbating this lack of trust and this multi-tiered system where there's a few plutocratic people who get every medical treatment they want, but ignores a vast, seething, angry underclass of people in poor health.
00:26:38
Speaker
Well, both the arts and the sciences can, but perhaps haven't been successful in doing so, but can speak to members of society and help them to understand what binds us.
00:27:00
Speaker
I think it comes back to this strange kind of faith that that has in recent times supplanted what science offers as a way of thinking and what art offers as a way of thinking.
00:27:19
Speaker
And I say that because this kind of faith is all about not thinking. There's a kind of epidemic of not thinking going on. People choose not to think, but rather to outsource the thinking to someone that they believe will tell them what they need to do.
00:27:44
Speaker
And that usually ends up unhappily. So how should the arts address this scientific, technological, economic gap between the people who feel they're doing well and don't mind the system as it is, and the much larger number of people who feel angry, distrustful, disenfranchised? How does art speak to the really angry cohort?
00:28:10
Speaker
Art enables us to dream. to show what can be, what is possible. And science does many of the same things too. i think they the artists and the scientists are not really all that far apart in their genetic makeup, if you will.
00:28:33
Speaker
They're both about understanding the world that we live in. That understanding may focus on genes or moon rocks, but it focuses on how we think and how we feel as well.
00:28:50
Speaker
The challenge is to reach these people who choose not to think. And if you don't think, you are not going to be receptive to these messages.
00:29:05
Speaker
Right now, i see a lot of quote-unquote art. In the way we choose to protest, it's been, i think, quite revealing how much mockery there has been in the protests because repressive societies, going back again to that course we took,
00:29:28
Speaker
don't like to be laughed at. And art is very good at laughing at people. So maybe that is route to an answer to your question.
00:29:42
Speaker
I like that. I was thinking earlier about are there causes for hope or sources of hope and not coming up with much, but laughter, i can go with that.
00:29:54
Speaker
I love to laugh at the self-important. that Laughter is the best medicine, says the cliche.
00:30:11
Speaker
You've been listening to The Fifth Column, a series of podcasts documenting the intersecting stresses of our time. I'm Gerry Dennis. Please tune in again soon.