At the Same Table Again

He met the head of that team again, later on. It was the team he went to tell in the first essay. That year, when he told her, she did not blame him for interfering, and did not push the problem onto the junior who had made the error; she gathered her people that day and went through it line by line. For years the two worked in different departments and ran into each other at meetings. This year the company set up a cross-department data group, and both were called in.

She had her own thing. She cared about the people on her team: when a report goes wrong, the young person who produced the data usually carries it, and the error is often in someone else’s basis. He cared about something else: a report is for people to read, and the readers must not be led astray by its numbers. What they cared about differed. At the group’s first meeting they found they wanted the same thing: every report in the company would state its basis plainly, and say so whenever the basis changed.

That they could sit at one table again took luck, and a place able to catch them: that group. Other times may not have one. In some times a person who lives by his own law never finds anyone who answers; in some, such people write to each other across borders, recognise each other in a village, and hide strangers together; and there may be times when finding each other is no longer rare, but daily. This essay is about how two people who each live by their own law find each other, do one thing together, and do not merge into one person.

Finding Is Not Certifying

How does he know she, too, lives by her own law? He doesn’t. He knows a few things: that year she did not blame the messenger; she did not push the error down; over the years he heard two or three times that when someone on her team got into trouble, she protected the person first and investigated the matter after. Look at how a person treats others — from a distance, many times, together with what others say of him. The more ways of looking, the more a performance tends to show.

These are clues, not certification. What a person does outwardly does not read off what he has owned inside; watch for twenty years and the picture may be right at every point and still not yield now I have seen all of it. So there is no test here for deciding from outside who lives by his own law. He sought her out because, in one matter after another, he had seen some things and wanted to do something with her. It was not issuing her a certificate.

Those not found are ends all the same. The colleague in the last essay who used the rankings to call people out — he did not count him among those he could find; that does not make him one bit less a person. Finding is for doing things together, not for sorting people into two piles.

Finding, Across the Three Phases

In germination, finding often happens across generations. Those who live by their own law are scattered and often don’t know others exist; no one questions them from outside; a characteristic failure is a lonely sacrifice later read as saint or tragedy. But their words often survive, attached to no institution, and later people can walk back into them. Someone reads a sentence written long ago and recognises another who also lived by his own law. That finding runs one way: the earlier person never knows he was found and cannot answer. It is not certification either — what is recognised is a deed, a sentence, not a statue.

In inversion, there begin to be places that catch people. Letters, publishing, communities across distances. Sugihara, signing transit visas, coordinated with fellow consuls there. The French doctor Adelaide Hautval, in 1943–44 at Auschwitz, refused to take part in medical experiments on Jewish women, in coordination with doctor colleagues in the resistance. In 1939 American colleagues offered the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer a post in New York — a safe road; about a month later he decided to go back to Germany. Sophie Scholl’s White Rose was a group of students and a professor saying one thing together. Vavilov had colleagues across borders who knew his science. It was not easier. It was no longer wholly alone.

In court Sophie Scholl said something to this effect: somebody had to make a start; what they wrote and said was believed by many others too, who just did not dare to say it as they had. The wording varies across accounts. There is one shape of inversion’s finding in it: knowing others are there, even when they are silent. In Le Chambon there was another: not everyone checked everyone; trust passed along a chain — this person can be trusted because another trusted person says so. The chain let people find each other. What it passed along was still clues, not certificates. Inversion also has its failure: people find each other, and that mutual illumination is absorbed into a movement or a strategy, and treating people as means comes back in another form.

In establishment — not yet arrived — finding becomes daily. One need not wait for a crisis, or first form a small group; being found and connecting are open by default. Clues are still only clues; where everyone says respect and recognition, outward shapes are tidier and harder to read. And in all three phases one thing does not change: people who find each other do not thereby become a circle that leaves the unfound outside. Le Chambon and the Dutch village of Nieuwlande hid people they did not know. There are two kinds of welcome: taking strangers in as your own, so they are no longer strangers; and strangers remaining strangers, and being acknowledged as ends. Those villages hid strangers.

Consensus Is Not Sameness

At the group’s second meeting they settled it: pilot it in two teams first; every report states its basis on page one; a basis change gets a note. That is a consensus. It is real, and it really bound what both did afterwards. But it is not the two becoming the same person. He did it so readers are not led astray; she did it so report-makers don’t carry others’ errors. Two things landed on one practice; what each of them cared about did not merge into one.

Consensus comes in two kinds. In one, neither law changes; the two find an arrangement under which both demands can be met. In the other, one or both change themselves, and the demands fit. Theirs was the first. The villages can be seen the same way. The people of Le Chambon were not alike: some were afraid, some went along, some kept silent, some quarrelled. They were at one on one thing: not to hand these people over. The reasons given differ too. Pastor André Trocmé spoke from the Gospel: whenever our adversaries demand of us an obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel, we will resist — without fear, but also without pride and without hate. His wife Magda had one sentence: How could we refuse them? They needed help. One from faith, one from the person in front of her; one practice.

Consensus has an edge. Persuasion can give reasons and prompt someone to change; a successful persuader does not thereby have a consensus. Consensus lands on each side’s own owning, so no one can announce the other side’s agreement. Le Chambon was not a decision passed down; it was many households’ small decisions lining up, and no one declared any household’s agreement for it. In the data group, a director once asked him whether she, too, agreed to extending the pilot to the whole department. He said: You’ll have to ask her.

In the year of working together, each got something from the other. She showed him something he had never considered: when a basis changes, the error travels down through several reports and lands on someone; he had only ever thought of readers, never of the people who make the reports. He showed her something else: what a basis note has to look like before people actually read it; her team’s notes were later cut by half. That is mutual cultivation: one person’s unfolding lights the other’s. Difference is not an impurity to be cleaned out — precisely because what she cared about differed, she could see what he could not. And consensus is not a contract to stop asking questions: after it was settled she still picked at his wording and he still asked where her numbers came from.

Doing Things Together, Without Becoming One Subject

He does it for A: readers not led astray. She does it for B: report-makers not carrying others’ errors. Together they cannot not do C: make every report state its basis plainly. C is not A’s and not B’s; it is what the two ends, meeting, force into being. Both own it — not one owning it and saying the other does too. Both can do it — he handles how the notes are written, she handles the process; without either side it fails. Neither monopolises it — not his A using her hands, nor her B using his name, and how it’s done is not one side’s call. It is doing something together, not a shared law. What they changed was how reports are written in the company, not each other’s law.

Once they got stuck: in the second quarter, which department first — they judged differently. They had agreed in advance that such things would go to the group’s convener. The convener decided; they did as decided. That is a limited shared procedure: it governs how this one thing is ordered; its authority comes from both having accepted the method beforehand; it does not become a position that legislates their own laws for them. Handing one matter to an outside procedure is handing that matter over — not reaching consensus on it.

At My Lai in 1968 there were three men in that helicopter. Hugh Thompson set it down and gave the order; the gunner Lawrence Colburn held the gun; Glenn Andreotta went down into a ditch full of bodies and carried out the boy still alive. That day the three did one thing: protect those villagers. What each owned inwardly, the series does not say for them. What can be seen is that they did not merge into one man. Thompson reported what he saw and later received death threats; thirty years on, Thompson and Colburn were decorated for that day; Andreotta had been killed in Vietnam about three weeks afterwards. The day was done together; what came after, each bore as his own.

Standing Bear, in 1879, sued with two American lawyers, John Webster and Andrew Poppleton, to challenge his detention. He brought his own thing — burying his son in their homeland, his living people not being erased; they brought the legal procedure that let a federal court hear it. He borrowed American law’s language of person, because it was the only language that state machine could hear; what he owned throughout was his living people, not that legal concept. Borrowing a language to do a thing with others is not owning that language as your law.

The company’s group put the two of them back at one table. That is what institutions can do: let people who already live by their own law find each other, protect them, penalise what harms people. What they cannot do is produce a we for them. Working together does not of itself produce a position above both that legislates for both. Nieuwlande, a village in Drenthe of about a hundred and seventeen people under occupation: from 1942 to 1945 nearly every household hid someone at some point, some two to five hundred people in all; Johannes Post and Arnold Douwes coordinated. On 16 July 1944 Post was arrested and executed; the village went on hiding people until liberation. Douwes said later: What we did was nothing special. We did what had to be done. If we hadn’t done it, who would have? That we is many people’s separate deeds said together — not a we standing above them, deciding for them. From outside it looks like one actor; inside, it is many people each doing, on one thing.

What You Did Is Not Owned by Someone Else

In the third quarter, a report from his team, written under the new rule, still misled its readers: the note was correct, but the change was buried on page three. He said in the group: This one was done on my side. It could easily have been owned by someone else: the pilot isn’t mature yet, the rule isn’t detailed enough, her side’s process didn’t keep up. There may be a little truth in each. But that report was done on his side. A person cannot have the first-person share of his own action carried by someone else. Working together does not turn what you did into what we did, or what nobody did.

History has an extreme form of this. On 18 February 1943 Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans distributed the White Rose’s sixth leaflet at the University of Munich; a caretaker spotted them and handed them to the Gestapo. Under interrogation she was offered a way out: deny taking part, say her brother had manipulated her, and be spared. She did not take it; she kept saying this was her own decision. On 22 February she, her brother and Christoph Probst were tried in the People’s Court and executed the same day. That way out was exactly owning her deed through someone else — through her brother. Had she taken it, she would have reduced the one she did it with to the one who manipulated her.

The series does not measure anyone by this. The law does not ask anyone to destroy himself to prove it; sacrifice is a cost, not a medal. Those who said something else in such an interrogation, the series judges no one: what to say in that moment is the doing layer, and belongs to that person’s own judgment in that moment. This sentence sits at the regarding layer: what was done is the doer’s. The words can change; the doer cannot. And it goes only so far. Who holds what duties in the matter, fault, consequences and repair each have their own accounts, not settled here. Later some said the basis rule was her doing, others said his; credit and authorship are yet another account.

The rule went company-wide the next year. The group was dissolved; the two went back to their own departments. They are still two people. She still cares about her team’s people; he still cares about the readers. That year they did one thing together, and each owned it; when it was done, neither had become the other, and no we was left behind to legislate for them. A village hiding people for four years, a chief and two lawyers winning a suit, a group of students handing out leaflets — large and small, hard times and easier ones — the sentence holds: two people, or many, can do things together without becoming one subject.