Doppelganger, page 38
Though rare, I have seen this happen. I have been in factories taken over by their workers and squares occupied by the people and cities in the grips of revolutionary fervor—moments when everyone you meet is your political comrade and lifelong friend rolled into one. And it was there, too, in that U.S. presidential campaign that united millions with three words that began as a slogan and became a kind of social justice prayer: “Not me. Us.” The campaign’s pivotal moment took place at a rally in Queens, New York, in October 2019. That’s when Sanders, in front of a crowd of twenty-five thousand people, did something he hadn’t done before. He exhorted everyone there to look to someone in their midst, someone they did not know, “maybe somebody who doesn’t look kinda like you, maybe somebody who might be of a different religion than you, maybe they come from a different country … My question now to you is are you willing to fight for that person who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?”
Would they fight to end student debt, even if they had no debt? Would they fight for the rights of immigrants, even if they were a citizen themselves? Would they fight for the rights of people who hadn’t been born yet to live a life safe from climate breakdown? In the roar of the crowd, people were more than moved—they were altered. Altered by the power represented by the idea of standing up and fighting beyond the narrowest conception of self and identity.
The trouble is, a presidential campaign isn’t capable of making good on a promise like that. By definition, an electoral campaign has a finite life span, and it ends when the candidate wins or loses. When Bernie lost and that end arrived, the unselfing we felt so powerfully on the campaign trail seemed to end right along with it. Shut in our homes by the first wave of strict lockdowns, severed from the movement that had held us together, so many of us who had been overcome by the power of “us” felt as if we had just been summarily dropped into a deep sea of “me.”
Still, we glimpsed what was possible, and we learned a critical lesson: An election is too fleeting and unstable a container to hold a message as important as “Not me. Us.” But that doesn’t mean the message was wrong.
Rebuilding the Roads Not Taken
This brings us to one last way of understanding doppelgangers and the messages they carry, one that may be useful in thinking about the difficult collective work that lies ahead. Freud speculated that the figure of the doppelganger recurs in the culture in part because the idea of there being duplicate selves stands in for the vast potentialities that our lives hold. We are the product of choices—made by us, and made by others. But, Freud wrote, those never are the only choices available. There are also “all the possibilities which, had they been realized, might have shaped our destiny, and to which our imagination still clings, all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of volition that fostered the illusion of free will.”
Seen in this way, the idea of our duplicates walking around stands in for the roads not taken. Who might we be if the choices that determined our lives had been slightly—or radically—different? What latent versions of ourselves exist but never got the chance to be realized because we took one road rather than another? Or lived in one type of society rather than another?
This is the kind of doppelganger explored in multiverse stories like Everything Everywhere All at Once. In the film, Michelle Yeoh plays an overburdened immigrant to the United States who is juggling a husband serving her with divorce papers, a daughter she doesn’t know how to love, a father she is disappointing, and a laundry business facing a government audit. But then this downtrodden woman turns out to be a multiverse-traveling superhero who, in one universe, is a glamorous film star, much like Yeoh herself (the directors used real footage of Yeoh on the red carpet for earlier films). The movie, and particularly that footage, underlines how thin the membrane is between the lives any of us end up with and the lives we might have had if circumstances had been different. Having a child is a decision to close off some potential lives and open others. So is taking a job, or not taking one.
Yet we all know (or should know) that the choices available to us are hardly random. They radically expand and contract based on which countries we happened to be born into, which bodies, which genders, which races, which families. It’s not only individual lives that hold doppelganger potentialities—so, too, do whole societies. Because we all embody Philip Roth’s that-and-this-ness. Kind and callous. Compassionate and out for our narrowest self-interest. Open to one another and harrowingly closed.
My dive into doppelganger culture helped attune me to many examples of that-and-thisness, in myself and in others. Extreme cases, like Hans Asperger, who went from a doctor who was curious and caring toward people like my son, to a man who sent kids who were a little different to their deaths. Or even my own Jewish culture—the way it flipped from a place of such bold and elastic debate to the rigid orthodoxies of with-Israel-or-against-us that are only now beginning to crack. Or the way many people joined the 2020 racial justice uprisings, full of revolutionary hope at the prospects for transforming a society based on principles of equality and care—and then, one year later, some of those very same people seemed unreachable, lost to despair and, at times, conspiracy. “If you have never believed yourself to be entitled to anything, you are less likely to turn against others than you are to turn against yourself,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor told me. Each flip is different, but we are all surrounded by evidence of the different people we might have been, and might still become, under slightly different circumstances.
Take those two trucker convoys: the noisy one and the quieter one eight months earlier, which was organized in solidarity with Indigenous communities grieving their stolen children. They made such a stark contrast. So, one way of seeing the two convoys is that one was good and the other bad. One was progress, the other a white-lash. That would be a comforting binary to choose between, and, in way, that’s how I told the story. But here is where the ground starts moving: some truckers participated in both convoys. In June 2021, they felt sorrow and solidarity; in February 2022, rage and self-righteousness. They were, like everyone, both that and this. And marginally different circumstances—social, political, economic—brought out different sides of them.
When I try to understand Other Naomi, I see something similar. She, too, is both that and this. As a young writer, she helped inspire countless women to become feminists. In middle age, she took stands that required real moral courage—as when she walked out of that synagogue or shared her platform with people being pounded by missiles. She has also, especially lately, done a great many things that are extremely harmful, and I think many of the reasons behind them are pretty uninteresting: a desire for attention, for ego gratification, for cash; perhaps a drive to prove that she was right and that every person who ever attacked her was wrong. But all of those baser impulses have been greatly exacerbated by a culture that places limitless value on attention and money, while creating information tools that seem designed to turn every person’s screwup into an opportunity for public shaming, mockery, abandonment, and humiliation on a scale previously unimaginable.
Which, I suppose, is another way of saying that my doppelganger doesn’t just look like me. To borrow from Jordan Peele, she looks like Us.
A Struggle Between Care and Uncare
The question I am left with is not the one I hear so frequently about her: How did a person like that turn into a person like this? But: What kind of system is most likely to light up the best parts of all of us—and sustain the fire beyond a protest, or a summer uprising, or a presidential campaign?
“I believe the starting point for building a more caring society,” writes Sally Weintrobe, a psychoanalyst who specializes in the climate crisis, “is never forgetting that care and uncare are inherent parts of us all, and that each seeks expression and dominance over the other.” In other words, we (not just those evil others) are all in a perpetual struggle with our that-and-thisness. The trouble is, we live in a society that encourages and rewards the uncaring parts of ourselves, while making it hard to care for others outside our immediate family (and often within it) in any sustained way. So, Weintrobe, argues, if we want more people to make better choices—not to shop for useless stuff as a source of solace, not to spread disinformation for clicks and clout, not to see other people’s vulnerability and need as a threat to our own interests—we need better structures and systems.
Personally, and to no one’s surprise, I think the jury is in on capitalism: it lights up our most uncaring, competitive parts and is failing us on every front that matters. What we need are systems that light up our better selves, the parts of ourselves that want to look outward at a world in crisis and join the work of repair. Systems that make it easier, in ways big and small, for care to win the battle over uncare.
Where do we find models for a society like that? If doppelgangers remind us of the lives we might have lived, the people we might have been, perhaps we could look to the roads not taken.
Red Vienna Lives
Here, then, is one possible portal out of doppelganger world: those ways of organizing societies that were once on the table, that were even tried, and that we could try again. Dig deep enough into any culture, and we will find alternative ways of resisting and living, and even some models that have been carefully protected from the steamroller that calls itself “progress” and “civilization.” In this book, I have tried to excavate some of those often forgotten roads-not-taken within my own (Jewish, leftist) tradition. Models like the Jewish Labor Bund and its commitment to being part of a multiethnic alliance of workers. As well as the Bundists’ commitment to “hereness,” to fighting for justice wherever they were— an idea that has great applicability to our time, when so many millions are being forced to move and find new homes and need a framework to claim their right to “here,” wherever that is. Or the democratic socialism that Rosa Luxemburg imagined as the only alternative to barbarism. The ideas that built our world are failing us, but there are always other logics and ideas that can be picked up. Ideas about how to protect distinct cultures, languages, and identities without building fortressed state borders around them. About unity and solidarity among all the peoples forced to carry treacherous shadow doubles. A new story drawing on a patchwork of older stories.
I think about Abram Leon, writing his book The Jewish Question as the Nazis closed in, carefully explaining how racist conspiracies change the subject from capitalism to cabals. He wrote those words in his midtwenties knowing that millions of his people had already died and that his ideas might soon be all that was left of him. But he believed in ideas enough to write them down—and that means they are still available to be picked up.
This is not about what-ifs: What if the understanding of Hitler as a doppelganger to the colonial project—as expressed by W. E. B. Du Bois and Aimé Césaire and Walter Benjamin and Abram Leon—had been heeded eight decades ago? It wasn’t. But it’s not too late to listen now, and to have what we hear inform what we do next. We are told that the way things are is the only way they can be, because every other model has supposedly already been tried, and all have failed. But these ideas about different ways of being and thinking and living did not all fail; rather, many of them fell, crushed by political violence and racial terror. Being crushed is not the same as failing, because what was crushed can be revived, reimagined anew. For Freud, doppelgangers represented paths not taken, choices not made. We could also choose to see them as reminders of roads that can still be taken, of pasts that are still pertinent to our present.
The one I think about most is Red Vienna, and the extraordinary child-centered society it built in the rubble of the First World War. That experiment fell under the boot of fascist force—but the spirit that built metaphorical palaces for children in order to tear down prisons was an enormous success. Democratic socialists organized at every level—from the workplace to the neighborhood to elected office—and enacted policies that were staggeringly popular and effective. The armies of care workers. The free diapers and clothing for babies. The light-filled social housing for workers, much of which still stands today. The parks and the swimming pools. The right to nature. The artistic and creative approaches to children’s education. The refusal to write off poor or neurodiverse children. The insistent welcoming of refugees and victims of ethnic hatred. The commitment to providing an alternative to the evils of nationalism that were sweeping the continent.
The First World War maimed a generation of soldiers on the field of battle and left them disabled, while also creating countless orphans. It was in that context that Red Vienna’s soaring vision transformed an impoverished, disease-ridden city into a beacon of another way of living, of relating, despite imperfections and impairments. Or, more precisely, because of imperfections and impairments.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and artist, said something to me more than a decade ago that I still think of often. She was talking about living in a part of Ontario that has been a site of intense industrial pollution, and the draw of moving to more “pristine” wilderness. But, she said, “when I think of the land as my mother or if I think of it as a familial relationship, I don’t hate my mother because she’s sick, or because she’s been abused. I don’t stop visiting her because she’s been in an abusive relationship and she has scars and bruises. If anything, you need to intensify that relationship.” You visit her even more. I related to this on many levels, as the daughter of a mother who became severely disabled and as the mother of a child with what is officially classified as a disability (though we prefer to see it as a different way of being human). Simpson’s formulation calls on us to reckon with the sickened and impaired state of our world, but not to use that as an excuse to walk away in search of perfection. On the contrary, when we are surrounded by need, we are called upon to become better caretakers.
The disability rights theorist Sunaura Taylor has thought and written a lot about what a care-based society might mean in our time of planetary shocks and layered disasters. For Taylor, there are many parallels between the state of our natural world and the states of so many disabled bodies and minds trying to figure out how to live in that world. The ecological crisis is not a simple binary of health and death, she argues. Yes, some species are going extinct and some ecologies no longer support life. But the most prevalent state of our depleted soils and drought-struck riverbeds and diminished wild creatures and overlogged forests is chronic impairment, and the impaired environment is “precarious, dependent, filled with loss and struggle, requiring assistance, accommodation, and creative forms of care.” She goes on:
As a disabled person I recognize this as disability … What we live with in the present and will for decades to come, even under the best-case scenarios, is mass ecological disablement of the more than human world, a disablement that is utterly entangled with the disablement of human beings. Given this, it seems vital to consider what forms of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability will require.
Her challenge is the antithesis of the quest for individual perfection and optimized strength that has done so much damage in the Covid era. It is also markedly different from the ways that pain and trauma are so often performed as currency in the attention economy—as points of separation between us rather than possible connection. Taylor’s approach seems particularly urgent, given that long Covid, especially after multiple reinfections, may well play out as a mass disabling event, with a great many formerly healthy, able-bodied people struggling with new limitations for which there is no quick fix.
Taylor does not deny that disability can represent real loss—for both humans and nonhumans—but she calls for an “environmentalism of the injured: the insistence on fighting for a world in which the injured can flourish.” This is not charity or good deeds; none of us stand apart from injury. We are all, in some way, damaged by this world, soon to be damaged by it, and/or causing damage. Like everything else we project onto the other, injury and disability will not stay “over there”; they will eventually come for us—our bodies, our families, our beloved places. If we fail to build infrastructures of care, the cruelties and derangements of the Covid era will be only the barest glimpse of the barbarism to come. Taylor is offering a vision for the other side of the portal out of doppelganger culture: a society without sacrificial people and places, a world that no longer requires Shadow Lands. An end to running away from our second bodies. True integration.
Double Vision
I have written about settler colonialism in these pages as a violent and annihilatory practice, which it is. It also strikes me that it must have been frightening for the early European settlers of these lands to come to places they did not know or understand, places that, for them, had no stories, no myths, no sacredness. One of the ways that they attempted to orient themselves was by giving these places that were so new to them the names of other, more familiar places, or giving the new places their own names. The towns in the part of the world where I live mainly bear the names of men who happened to arrive with their families in the mid-1800s and had the audacity to name the land after themselves. Gibsons. Roberts Creek. Wilson Creek.
Gradually, the real names of these places are becoming visible, the names behind and beneath those names. Now the green road signs along the highway often have two names: they will read TS’UKW’UM (WILSON CREEK) or XWESAM (ROBERTS CREEK); the two worlds occupy the same space. It makes for a challenging twinning, holding in one’s consciousness the names colonists gave places they barely knew and the names the shíshálh Nation had and never stopped having for these same places. The signs invite those of us who are not Indigenous to have a double consciousness—to remember that we are living in a nation that imposed itself onto other nations and tried to relegate those nations—their people, languages, cultures, ways of knowing—to the Shadow Lands.
