Sitting Apart

WHAT DOES DIOGENES of Sinope have in common with Alexei Navalny and the unnamed man who stood before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square in 1989? Tracing 10 qualities of moral resistance across two-and-a-half millennia, Gal Beckerman argues, in his new book How to Be a Dissident, that these figures share something more elemental than politics, ideology, or biography. Each of them, at a defining moment, refused to move out of the way. Each of them, in the face of overwhelming pressure to conform, kept walking home. The author’s reading of the “Tank Man” is particularly telling. Rather than a figure who steps forward to block power, he becomes someone simply trying to continue his day, whose path is obstructed by history itself. The dissident, in this account, is not the one who stops but the one who refuses to. What Beckerman ultimately cannot resolve is whether dissidence is a universal moral category or a historically contingent role. The tension between these definitions shapes both his book’s insight and its limits.