The Abstract and the Concrete
Although I have heard it countless times, I still feel a strange surge of emotion whenever someone mentions the Christmas Truce between British and German troops during the First World War in 1914. Over the years I have seen many new clues, read reconstructed diaries from soldiers on both sides, and heard different interpretations of the event. But many things that have happened recently keep bringing me back to that century-old Christmas. The British National Archives preserve some of the soldiers’ wartime diaries, and several entries have not left me. Graham Williams of the Fifth London Rifle Brigade wrote:
‘First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up “O Come, All Ye Faithful” the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words Adeste Fideles. And I thought, well, this is really a most extraordinary thing - two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.’
British and German soldiers also played an unscored football match on Christmas night. Afterwards, A. D. Chater of the 2nd Gordon Highlanders wrote:
‘We are, at any rate, having another truce on New Year’s Day, as the Germans want to see how the photos come out!’
I cannot imagine anyone being immune to the feeling this event produces. In Behave, the Stanford stress neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky writes that after the truce, the soldiers who had taken part wanted to remain inside that brief interval of peace and did not want to fire on the trenches across from them. Many front-line soldiers resumed firing only because orders backed by court martial forced them to. Many soldiers also recorded an interesting ritual: their snipers would fire several times at a safe spot, almost like sending a challenge to the other side: look at our marksman. Most of the time, the other side would call up its own sniper to answer. After the Christmas Truce, there were even scenes in which, when a shell ‘accidentally’ fell into the opposing trench, soldiers would shout, ‘sorry for that and we hope no one was hurt.’
Sapolsky says that there were three main reasons behind the 1914 Christmas Truce. The first was how British and German soldiers understood the war in front of them: Britain had not been invaded by Germany, and many soldiers believed that they were fighting the Germans in order to protect the French. The second was the cultural overlap between Britain and Germany. But the most important third factor was the particular nature of trench warfare in the First World War. Looking at the materials preserved in the National Archives, many British soldiers wrote about scenes of mutual shouting, whether the shouts carried apology or hatred. Around Christmas 1914, communication between soldiers on the battlefield, combined with the long stalemate, fostered some knowledge between opposing soldiers along individual stretches of the front. The emotional line dividing ‘them’ from ‘us’ became blurrier. To a German soldier a hundred metres away, an enemy British soldier ‘looked more like a person’. Beyond that, the ‘marksman competitions’ were tacitly accepted by both sides, while ‘accidental’ bombardments would ritually bring two shells from the other side. For many soldiers, ceasefire gradually became an unspoken wish.
In psychological terms, war is deindividuated. In the unjust war the United States launched in Iraq, the soldiers who often suffered the most serious psychological trauma were those operating drones. After long periods observing the individual lives of their enemies, after seeing them embrace and talk with children and family, they still had to carry out attacks under orders. For them, these were attacks carried out after reindividuation. Their targets were no longer ‘them’, but ‘him’, ‘her’, ‘it’. By the same logic, the British and German soldiers in the European trenches of 1914 and 1915 achieved their own kind of reindividuation through shouting and listening, through ritualisation.
Fortunately, this process of ritualisation and reindividuation also exists to some degree in our increasingly divided modern society. Players of Dark Souls, unexpectedly, have achieved ritualisation and individuation in online combat through self-organisation and cultural inheritance. For example, player-versus-player mode in Dark Souls III consists of invasion and co-op. Different covenants can be hostile to one another, but they can also form cooperative relationships in particular PvP situations. Invasion means life or death, but over more than ten years, players have built their own rituals. During invasions, they use gestures to let others know their intentions. Certain gestures mean the player does not want this duel; the invader bows at random and leaves. When multiple players invade, they usually take turns duelling the host of the world even without any written rule requiring it. Hostile sides can occasionally form seemingly absurd friendships. In this kind of competitive play, the deindividuation and reindividuation of enemy players gives the game an entirely new, even slightly warm layer of experience.
These two things, otherwise almost unrelated, have been circling my mind again lately. This is a subject I have probably written about many times before: the high-speed flow of information and opinion in the internet age turns ‘them’ and ‘us’ into fortified hostile cities. Around June last year, Ent’s Weibo account was mobbed and banned because of several political deviations in his popular science work. Scientific Squirrels, a science-writing collective with more than a decade of history and connected to him, was also banned. ‘Refusal to communicate’ has become a constant part of how opinions spread. You are one of ‘them’, so I will not listen to a single word you say. Better yet: you are one of ‘them’; let me see what you wrote; you used one punctuation mark incorrectly; there it is, I knew ‘they’ were uneducated people who had not read anything. Taken to its extreme, this produces some of the deranged exchanges on Weibo today. As @Chaos Cruiser put it: ‘I say the weather is nice, you say Japan released nuclear waste, it flowed into the Yangtze and turned into rain, so how could the weather be nice? Strike down this great traitor to the Han.’
The most immediate result of refusing to communicate is that the natural tendency to label people and take sides is strengthened and solidified. The deindividuation caused by that tendency never has a chance to become reindividuation. In other words, ‘us’ is made of clear, distinct, living people, each with thoughts and feelings, family and work, while ‘them’ is a blurred mass of air. ‘Them’ is not ‘us’. The concrete against the abstract, the living against the dead. Over time, people standing on one side stop caring whether the people on the other side live or die.
For leftist arguments, this slide is especially fatal. Among leftists who value individuation, sometimes to the point of being called sanctimonious, there are many who refuse to see the ‘them’ beside them as concrete people, and who may even hate them intensely. This attitude is, of course, a personal choice. But if the people beside you are not concrete, then however concrete the people far away may be, the argument becomes special pleading. Rational exchange, set against this, now appears arduous and unrewarding. But if every Democrat wanted to destroy Florida with a nuclear weapon the way the comedian Trevor Noah joked about doing, what would remain of fighting for the middle ground? So I keep asking myself, however angry the answer may make me: if I do not curse at someone, is there a chance to pull this individual ‘them’ over to ‘us’? If I do not become angry out of embarrassment, can I let this individual ‘them’ see the reason of ‘us’, and our hunger for discussion? Even after everything that has happened over these two years, after so much conflict and division, I still want to try to fight for the middle ground, and to keep warning myself: the abstract ‘them’ will not change, but a concrete him, her, or thon might. I want to speak with the latter.
In the 1914 Christmas Truce, another German corporal wrote:
‘Such a thing should not happen in wartime. Have you no German sense of honor left?’
That corporal was twenty-five-year-old Adolf Hitler.
Originally published in Chinese as 「抽象和具体，我要和后者对话」 on 阿莫東森的無聊生活. The original referred to Sapolsky’s ‘new book’; this has been corrected, as Behave was published in 2017.
