On Slow Horses and Long Recovery Arcs
How we heal in a world where one person's harm affects us all
Maybe you haven’t had a chance to watch Slow Horses: a tight little political thriller, six episodes a season, on Apple TV+. That’s fair. I cycle sparingly through subscriptions myself, and this series, inspired by Mick Herron’s Slough House novels, has only been around since 2022. Maybe it hasn’t hit your rotation yet? Featuring Gary Oldman in the story of a bureaucratic dumping ground for MI5 agents who’ve screwed up, it might well be worth your time—so I promise, no big spoilers below.
But I’ve been thinking about one facet of the first season this past month: the scenes involving the white-supremacist kidnappers of a Pakistani British university student. They’ve picked up this kid with the express desire to behead him on a live feed, as a way of “standing up” for Britain against immigration. The irony of doing something barbaric to push back on what they see as an invasion of barbarians is not lost in this series, and the scripting has just enough of a light touch to present the similarity of terrorists across all ideological backdrops without coming off as hamfisted.
At one point, a kidnapper even lectures the hostage about the importance of being part of something “bigger” than oneself—even though that’s the whole problem he has with the second-generation immigrant: that his “kind” are a problem collectively, even if not all immigrants (by a long shot) are out raping and killing.
What makes these kidnappers interesting, though, is that they are not uniformly in favour of killing the kid. Some thought the threat was supposed to be enough to wake people up. Some regret their involvement, and even try to make things better.
But therein lies the deep, haunting challenge of being part of the human species: even if an individual wants to change, they might not be allowed to—and even worse, their desire to make a different choice might entrench others in their own.
How on Earth do we heal our broken world, when change on an individual level is so dangerous? When trying to do better oneself might only infuriate one’s neighbours, and exacerbate a situation’s danger for everyone else?
Living with people who do wrong
A second example, from everyday life in my region:
The ecosystem of street vendors in my barrio is delicate. Along with the many individuals and whole families out begging with candies or token trinkets, there are a few who’ve scratched out enough stability to run a juice cart, or a tinto (coffee) stand, or to sell fruit, eggs, arepas, empanadas, cakes, socks, knock-off caps and T-shirts, cold drinks, or card protectors and cellular accessories.
These folks are part of the informal economy that makes up half of Colombia’s workforce. They don’t have access to pensions, or any guarantee of a minimum salary. Life can be very, very tough no matter how hard they work every day.
One fellow in my barrio is in his late twenties or early thirties, and his life hasn’t been the kindest. He had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and it took him time to put together the cash needed to set up a little stand offering coffee, sweets, cigarettes, and bread to folks waiting for busses along the highway.
He was always fairly friendly when I came by, and I always made a point to greet him the way I did others in my neighbourhood—believing, as I do, that a friendly neighbourhood is a safer neighbourhood. When he was robbed in plain daylight a few months back, I stopped to check in after he’d mustered the confidence to return to his post. Many in my barrio did likewise.
So on another day, when I was out walking a great grandmother in my building who needed help with an errand, and I saw this fellow in a difficult argument with an angry man in his mid-twenties, we offered our presence as a calming technique. Fellows here can get a little hot-blooded, but onlookers to an altercation are often a good reminder to de-escalate and act civilly.
Another street friend of mine stepped in to clarify the matter, too, and ultimately his suggestion, that maybe enforcement needed to be called, quelled the heated stand-off. While he was talking with the angry young man, I asked the vendor if he was okay… but his face was strange. He looked very uncomfortable to have others watching.
With my friend “D” in control of the situation, the great grandmother and I walked on, but I got an update on my return. It turned out that this vendor had tried to steal the young man’s cellphone when he set it down on the coffee cart and stepped out to hail a passing bus. The vendor had tried to slip it into his pocket and claim that someone else had stolen it—but the young man wasn’t convinced, and for good reason. He knew the vendor was the only one close enough to have nicked it.
I’d run into the young man later, and he’d tell me the same story, too—but with a different sort of urgency, upset that for a heartbeat passersby had thought him the culprit, harassing a poor vendor with a visible disability. Thankfully, no police had been involved: D’s threat had been enough for the cellphone to make a miraculous reappearance, and all went on with their days. The young man was not going to frequent the cart again, and the vendor’s reputation was immediately tarnished as the story spread to others in the region—but no one was going to jail.
In the initial aftermath, I was struck by how foolish a thing this vendor had done. As I joked with others, “If you’re going to steal, at least don’t do it at your workplace. Pick another location, another time, so it doesn’t get in the way of your livelihood.”
But after my initial shock at the vendor’s actions, a different lesson came into play: how people continue to live with each other, after one among them has done something very stupid, and very wrong.
D belongs to a different part of the informal vendor economy. Every day, he carries out the vending carts for a few of the street workers, which are stored on his property, where he keeps chickens and collects scrap. He runs errands for the vendors who are stuck at their posts all day—more hot water for the tinto-sellers, more ice for the folks with cold drinks, various refills of convenience items running out during the day. For his services he gets paid a pittance from each of the vendors—but together they add up to enough to get by. He lives on a diet of rice, sardines, eggs, tree fruit from his lot, and the occasional beer and bit of weed shared among friends. He’s in his mid-forties, and like other mid-forties to early-fifties fellows in his group, is a strong support of the elders in his family—his mother especially.
When D and I talked about this vendor’s transgression, we discussed how fortunate the fellow was that the police hadn’t gotten involved, and also that he won’t lose all his clients from this mark against his character—because those waiting for busses won’t know the story, by and large. And even if they do? Well, maybe there won’t be much other choice for their morning snacks and smokes, without going out of their way to find another vendor on the next block.
D noted that he hopes the fellow will learn from his shameful action, and do better—and mentioned how sharply he’d lectured the vendor the first time they were alone together after the incident.
D still stores this vendor’s cart, and hauls it out for the partially paralyzed man every morning, so the fellow can continue to try to make a living. At the end of the day, D hauls it back. The two still seem to talk amicably when D drops by to run errands.
Would D still do this for the fellow if there were other options for his own employment? If the ecosystem of street labour wasn’t so fragile that one simply had to work with the people in one’s region, whoever they might be?
That’s the question, isn’t it?
While Slow Horses offers a fairly dramatic story of transgression—and one person’s attempt to change course after the transgression has been set into motion—real life involves many situations closer to this neighbourhood altercation.
We might not all be part of the informal economy, but how many of us have the ability to be as selective as we want to be? And what does it say about Western activist culture, when the crux of moral outrage lies so frequently with who we choose to associate with, or what tools we use for our services, without any introduction of socioeconomic complexity into the equation?
Is it really “moral discernment” that allows us to choose the company we keep?
Or are there different kinds of moral choice set before us, depending on our socioeconomic positions?
The privilege of choosing association is far too often treated as a virtue—but for those who have less agency in our fragile world, the necessity of finding ways to show grace every day to people who transgress and can’t be as easily abandoned is rarely recognized as such.
If you were really moral, you’d be a purist, the argument seems to go.
But what if this test of morality excludes most people, who have very little choice about the circumstances into which they were born, and the communities they move through to survive? What use is such a measure of virtue, if it cannot reach us all?
Moral uplift as a communal activity
Recently, The Atlantic published a piece written by another person with a Substack, “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.” In it, Jonathan M. Katz rightly calls attention to the fact that Substack hosts content that is often hateful:
An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters on a site that had more than 17,000 paid writers as of March, according to Axios, and has many other writers who do not charge for their work. But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake.
Katz goes on to note that banning content isn’t an automatic win for suppressing hateful rhetoric, and that the real problem is the fact that Substack sometimes promotes hateful writers, instead of merely giving them a place to post.
But there are two blatant oversights in Katz’s piece. One is fairly simple: it lies with one of the names that Katz selects as upstanding examples of writers who might not be willing to “stake their reputations” on such a platform, if it keeps hosting Nazis.
Bari Weiss is a “culture war” journalist who has defended far-right accounts on Twitter, and signal-boosted a great deal of inflammatory and fear-mongering anecdote around trans experience. She toes a delicate line in her writing, expressing criticism of MAGA and similar political groups as being anti-American, while often replicating far right rhetoric against the menace of progressivism. She’s not unlike David Brooks in this way: someone who affects just enough leftist sympathy to be viewed as an expert on what is and isn’t a sign of the left “going too far”—which is, of course, then her bread and butter when it comes to writing on politics today.
If Katz sees her as an upstanding writer whose reputation might be tainted for sharing a forum with overt Nazis on Substack, instead of from defending extremists on Twitter and echoing their rhetoric elsewhere, that’s his prerogative.
But it also speaks to the problem with sharing a forum with others at all: one person’s toxic writer might be another writer’s moral exemplar—and one person’s line in the sand might not go far enough for everyone else. This is precisely why content moderation is such a complex affair: who gets to decide where that line is, and will it ever be enough for some? Choices do have to be made, and they are always telling… but it’s also telling when an article fails to acknowledge the choice of a line in the sand the writer is making himself.
The other problem runs deeper, though.
In Katz’s op-ed for The Atlantic, an implicit argument is never brought to the surface: the idea that what’s happening on Substack is at all different from what’s happening everywhere. Is it?
In every facet of our world, there are hateful people. When we cheer on Ukraine in its fight against Russian invasion, we’re also indirectly hoping for the success of some Neo-Nazis in the ranks—and hoping that, by and large, Ukraine’s hateful demographics are smaller and less powerful than hate groups in Russia. Similarly, many displaced Ukrainians have found themselves quite at home with the hate of other white Europeans toward immigrants with darker skin, from non-Christian-dominant countries.
Obviously, too, there are hateful Islamic groups whose form of jihad calls for the eradication of whole other demographics. Hamas was not subtle in its charter. The PIJ, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, and other such outfits are all-or-nothing extremists.
In Israel, too, there are many settlers who hate Palestinians and want them eradicated. There are also Israelis who extend their hateful views to Arab and brown peoples in general. Jewish supremacists are also real, and supported by extremist interpretations of their faith that consider everyone who isn’t Jewish as fodder in a world where only their sects were chosen by YHWH.
This isn’t shocking—or at least, it shouldn’t be, if you see people as people. We contain multitudes, and no identity is a hivemind.
But when we in the West insist on flattening a demographic to fit our narrative of a perfect victim, someone we can support only because we feel sorry for them, and only if their conduct as a demographic is impeccable, well… this might unsettle.
Because we don’t know how to live in a world filled with people who do harm.
We don’t.
We keep pretending we can just walk away, cut ties, and rise above all complicity.
And in the process, we fail to cultivate a deeper moral virtue: of learning how to live with the brokenness of our human family, writ large.
No ethical consumption under capitalism, etc.
A more nuanced article than the one The Atlantic published would have highlighted the deeper complicity we’re all stuck within—on social media, but also in political systems that do very little about the rise of hateful rhetoric in general society.
As a Canadian, for instance—and one who definitely leans more bleeding-heart—I’m routinely gobsmacked by the freedoms for public hate speech protected in the US. What does it mean, exactly, for US citizens to demand more censor from their private enterprises than exists in their public sphere? Shouldn’t the argument be reversed? Shouldn’t they push for legislation that standardizes the unacceptability of platforming hate, and from that legal doctrine put pressure on private companies providing any service that seeks to emulate public discourse?
I’m being a touch facetious, though, because we all know why this isn’t the path taken by activists: it’s impossible. To create more limits to the First Amendment? With today’s SCOTUS? In a way that has any chance of being ratified? Call me when hell freezes over.
And so, activists in the US especially are left with a very strange position for moral outrage: they’re trying to use the markets to make hate speech unpopular, even as Nazis march comfortably in the streets beyond whatever businesses they’re boycotting. And even as many are resigned to Nazis marching comfortably in the streets beyond whatever businesses they’re boycotting, because there are white supremacists in government, too.
Katz, for instance, was calling for Substack owners to stop signal-boosting the dozens of white supremacists here, and intimating that a few famous names will eventually have had enough and leave if Substack doesn’t try harder. Elsewhere, I’m seeing writers with more options and financial stability move to platforms with less functionality but (one hopes) also fewer hateful accounts—and good for them. Buttondown is the service I’m seeing recommended by folks with enough of a fan base, and fewer multimedia needs, to make the next market transition.
This form of commercial activism isn’t wrong, but it also isn’t complete. The boycotts on Spotify, Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X… they all serve to make a statement, and to try to emphasize the power we have as consumers.
The problem is that they also oversell the power we have as consumers—forever hustled from one corrupt platform to the next at the behest of the latest whistleblower, and in ways that cost the most in terms of time and retraining for those who are already marginalized, and/or struggling to get by. A shift in social media or entertainment service, for instance, is an absolute nightmare for many people with disabilities. While some people are busy sharply condemning a given platform for its content moderation policies, and accusing everyone who stays of being complicit, some folks with different sensory needs are floundering to find another site or service they can learn to navigate even half as well.
(You’d be surprised how little disability is factored into site design even now, after all these years.)
Commercial activism may be important, in other words, but it cannot be the only way we seek to heal ourselves, and do better individually, in such an unjust world.
What, then, remains?
We’re all stuck in the van with kidnappers and hostages
In Slow Horses, one person tries to do better while he’s stuck with extremists, even though he was an extremist, too, until moments earlier. It’s a rough journey for him, but not just because his desire to do better infuriates those around him.
It’s also because the showrunners are constrained by a culture that won’t let this person have a happy ending. In a staggering amount of mainstream media, the only way that a male person who has done wrong can be redeemed is by dying (ideally sacrificially) after realizing the error of their ways. We have very little narrative capacity for imagining how to recover from past complicity in awful parts of our broken world.
The Bear does it well. Avatar: The Last Airbender does, too. (The series, not the movie.)
But more often than not, providing an “out” is seen as excusing the original offense.
So too is daring to talk about worldly context: the people in our neighbourhoods, the people at our jobs, the people with whom we share an ethnic or national identity.
Fine, fine, so you maybe can’t leave your neighbourhood, your job, or your ethnic or national identity—but then surely you must at least spend your whole life repudiating the transgressors among them, if you want to be seen as any better, right?
What other path to healing could possibly exist?
The problem with commercial activism—its incompleteness—can be answered by a recognition that some of the most important work we do to heal our world doesn’t happen at marches, under banners, or through petitions for redress from private and public authorities alike.
Yes, I’ll always keep an eye out for ways to be a more ethical consumer—within my budget, and my means. I’ll probably continue to be inconsistent about it, but I’ll try.
Meanwhile, though, I try my best not to forget that I am living in a van with kidnappers and hostages alike: sharing a planet, that is, with people who have transgressed and want to do better; people who have transgressed and now consider themselves too far gone for change; people in denial that they have transgressed at all; and people who have been hurt so badly by past transgression that they themselves might transgress if their pain is not alleviated now.
It doesn’t always look like a kidnapping, though, does it?
Sometimes it’s as innocuous as a struggling street vendor who has hijacked the calm of your neighbourhood with one very bad deed—and in so doing, compelled everyone else in that precarious ecosystem to figure out how to heal.
How exquisite the fantasy of simply firing up the jet-pack and “noping” the heck out of every association with someone who has done wrong.
How invigorating the moral outcry that gives us to believe we have more commercial agency to change the world than ever exists so long as public policy won’t budge.
But also—
How important the work, however grinding and murky and relentlessly unfinished, taken on by those who cannot get away.
The people stuck in our figurative van with the harmed and the harmful, who have maybe done harm themselves and now want to do better, are pursuing social reform on a level that commercial activism always forgets.
One is not “better” than the other, mind you. There is no more virtue to leaving when one has plenty of options, than there is to staying when one has far less flexibility: in a neighbourhood, in a job market, or in an ethno-national context.
But the two forms of activism (one loud, one less so) can complement one another—and need to, if we’re to have any hope of transforming our hurting world at all.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
This essay is excellent! I became so excited reading this in part because the core issue you discuss is one I've regularly encountered while working at an "independent" school. Such an institution will only go so far with its acceptance of certain ideas, and some people from parents to colleagues voice horrific beliefs, but it's still a job, and no place of employment can be perfect and pure. I also maintain the hope of incremental change, a slow push for the better, of convincing people even of a couple new ways of seeing the world. It will never be perfect (should it ever?), but we can still make space and offer more forgiving narrative arcs than our media will allow.
Thank you! Even though I don't always comment, I've been enjoying your essays - you find fascinating ways of tackling each topic!