The Prophet as Dissident - BOOK REVIEW

What history's resisters and the biblical tradition have in common

[Full review of “How to Be a Dissident” by Gal Beckerman is available here: Sitting Apart, Standing Firm — The Englewood Review of Books]

I picked up How to Be a Dissident by Gal Beckerman expecting something clever like a winking handbook for troublemakers. What I found instead was something closer to a history lesson on dissidents. Beckerman, a staff writer at The Atlantic, excavates two and a half millennia of dissidents, from Socrates and Spinoza to Václav Havel and Edward Snowden, and from the Warsaw Ghetto to Tiananmen Square. He asks what holds them together, and his answer is both simple and demanding. Dissidents, he concludes, are people who, when the question Can I live with myself? pressed in close, discovered they could not look away.

Beckerman calls them people who “sit apart” because the word dissident comes from the Latin dissidere—to sit apart. Not to storm the gates or lead armies, but simply to refuse the comfortable middle position, to honor a principle their society is violating, and accept the cost of being pushed to the margins for it.

If that sounds familiar, it should. The prophetic tradition in Scripture is built on exactly this posture. Consider, for example, Amos interrupting the feast at Bethel. Or Jeremiah accused of treason for telling the truth. Or even Micah, our patron who gives this publication its name, confronting the powerful on behalf of those they were crushing.

These prophets didn’t have institutional backing or strategic communications plans. They had simply reached the point where silence felt like a betrayal of their convictions and identity.

Beckerman’s dissidents occupy the same space in secular history that the prophets occupy in sacred history. They are the uncomfortable ones who couldn’t pretend anymore.

Most useful in the book and most directly applicable to the kind of faith this publication is about is Beckerman’s distinction between pessimism and fatalism. The pessimist believes things will probably get worse unless someone acts, while the fatalist believes things will definitely get worse. In that single word, “probably” lives both urgency and possibility becasuefatalism produces paralysis while pessimism, rightly understood, produces motion. It is the posture of people who act not because they are confident of success, but because they cannot justify standing still.

That is a useful frame for this moment becasue while we are not short on reasons for despair, we are sometimes short on the courage to act without guarantees.

Beckerman also has a sharp chapter on humor as dissidence.; that is, on how parody, ridicule, and exaggerated imagery have long been tools of resistance because they force a moment of recognition that straight argument can’t produce. That’s worth remembering for those of us trying to bear witness in creative and unexpected ways.

This book doesn’t come from a faith framework although it does map cleanly to one. The dissident who keeps the record at great personal cost (like Emanuel Ringelblum, who organized a secret archive buried in milk canisters beneath the Warsaw Ghetto) is doing something the biblical tradition calls bearing witness.

Similarly, the movement that acts as if a freer future were already real (like the Solidarity movement in Poland) is doing something the New Testament calls living by faith.

And Havel’s insistence on “living in truth” as the foundation of all real resistance echoes what the Gospel means when it says the truth will make you free.

The dissident tradition and the prophetic tradition are drawing from the same deep well.

If you’re serious about faith beyond performance and about what it actually costs to live with integrity in a moment that rewards complicity, this book will give you both company and courage.