The Need For Holiness in a Secular World

A photo snapped live of Notre-Dame de Paris burning on Monday evening

I cannot imagine how many millions of people worldwide watched the fire unfolding at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Between straight journalism coverage, and the live-streaming from hundreds of smartphones around the city, we sat transfixed, wondering whether a piece of our physical cultural heritage would survive the night. Coverage of the al-Aqsa Mosque fire was more sporadic, but probably because the mosque is harder for outsiders to see.

Most interesting for me, the coverage crossed religious bounds. The most direct reportage of Notre-Dame, not surprisingly, came from France and Britain, the closest large countries. These are countries where the plurality religion is now “no religion.” Yet one needn’t have any specific faith to recognize that the possible destruction of these two iconic sanctuaries cuts into something shared in our culture: something valuable, historic, even—dare I say—holy.

The retreat of religion from modern life has made holiness a loaded concept. I contend, though, that it shouldn’t. Rudolf Otto writes, in The Idea of the Holy, that in its oldest form, calling something holy doesn’t mean calling it “godly” or “pure.” Calling something holy means calling it “separate” or “set apart.” Holy places, holy experiences, holy times are those which we divide from our mundane continuity and recognize as unique.

This may mean having special direct connection to divinity, but that’s only one kind of holiness. We’ll perhaps see this most directly in the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles. Whether the aged former king in Oedipus at Colonus or the exiled master warrior in Philoctetes, both these characters are punished for stepping on “holy ground.” This isn’t ground ritually consecrated, like a church sanctuary; in these plays, the holy ground isn’t even marked.

But it’s set apart from ordinary use, and humans aren’t supposed to walk there.

We all have experience with the holy, or anyway a longing for holiness, even without any particular faith. Some people find holiness in churches, mosques, and temples. Others find holiness in the people who congregate in churches, mosques, and temples.Still others find it in the Louvre, the National Mall in Washington, or their local veterans’ memorial. More would find holiness in the Olympic National Park (supposedly the quietest place in America), hiking from coast to coast, or in a boat on the ocean.

The al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. (Because of Jerusalem's urban design,
few good photos apparently exist of Monday's brief fire in action.)

What transcendent meaning we ascribe to holiness almost doesn’t matter. Holiness isn’t about getting close to God; it’s about a place carved out in life. A place where we are guests, visitors, a place where we’re invited in but never permanent residents. Both Notre-Dame and al-Aqsa have stood, inviolate, for nearly a millennium, surviving wars, occupations, tyrants, and atheists. They are different from our ordinary lives. Even without God, that makes them holy.

In both cases, modern life rushes right up to the perimeters of their sanctuaries. Nearly every photograph or live-stream of Notre-Dame burning is shot between high-rises, Second Empire apartment blocks, and other new-ish development. The sightlines around al-Aqsa are so crowded that I couldn’t even find a good picture of the fire. But in both cases, modernity crowds around the edges of the holy development, and stops.

Because these places are separate.

We watched these landmarks of holiness burn, fearful that we might be watching a dimunition of potential holiness in modern life. Even if we aren’t Christian or Muslim ourselves, we recognize we have diminishing opportunities to experience holiness. Keeping afloat means dedicating longer hours to work. Childrearing expectations have changed, and we’re required to hover over our kids constantly. Very little in life is set apart.

We have fewer places we go simply to be in that place. We have fewer times reserved to exist entirely in that moment, surrounded by people also entirely in that moment. As we discovered at Standing Rock in 2016, those who only value life by its dollar signs are rushing to run pipelines and strip-mines through the few sacred spaces remaining. Modernity cannot stomach something truly set aside.

Thankfully both Notre-Dame and al-Aqsa survived their fires. The spaces remain set apart from modern activities. The surge of mourning we witnessed on Monday and Tuesday, which crossed lines of religion and irreligion, reflects humanity’s desire to step outside ourselves and exist someplace, sometime, outside space and time. Fortunately, such places will continue to exist, at least for a while.

Hopefully, as we reckon with the feelings we felt this week, we’ll also muster gumption enough to create holiness. Because it isn’t enough to mourn when the holy burns.

Do School Resource Officers Do Any Good?

On April 9th, 2019, a St. Lucie County, Florida, sheriff’s deputy rushed a sixth grader outside his school, lifted him overhead, and body-slammed him to the pavement. Another student, safe inside a school bus, captured the incident on his smartphone. It took five days for the story to reach me, a white guy in the hinterlands. And now I find myself wondering what we have public schools for.

Sheriff Kan Mascara of Ft Pierce, FL says the school resource deputy, who lifted an 11 yr old Black student in the air and body-slammed him on a sidewalk, did not use excessive force.

Of course they are referencing alleged former behavior to justify obvious police brutality. pic.twitter.com/8FtdiZLcxN

— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) April 12, 2019

News reports of the incident describe a child behaving in an oppositional-defiant manner, disregarding instructions and disrupting classroom activities. They don’t, however, describe a child engaging in violence. Quotes from the incident report describe the youth as “agitated,” as “punching his fist into the palm of his hand.” But they also describe him, as the video shows, as trying to walk or run away. Nothing describes him as a threat.

Therefore, I question the response: not just the school resource officer’s actions, but the school resource officer’s presence. Enough stories like this have emerged in recent years, about adult police officers using extreme physical force on children, mostly children of color, to make me question whether keeping police in schools does any good. These individual anecdotes aren’t data, certainly, but when enough accumulate, a pattern emerges, and that becomes evidence.

Sociologists have spilled copious ink about how most people, including Black people, perceive young Black men as older than White kids the same age. More recent research has determined this is also true about young Black women. From an earlier age, Black youths are perceived as more mature, more sexual, stronger, and more culpable for their actions, than White youths.

To this deputy, this also apparently means an 11-year-old’s body is more capable of withstanding a body slam.

Do I even need to say the follow-up? But they’re not. Not only will body-slamming a child, regardless of race, cause potential lifelong injuries and pain, it also has maladaptive effects on brain development. This youth, this child, will more likely fear interactions with authority figures, and will therefore behave in more oppositional-defiant ways, making future violent confrontations more likely. He’s also now at greater lifetime risk for addiction.

As a once-and-future academic myself, I have many schoolteachers among my friends. They describe incidents like the one which got this student suspended happening increasingly often: as more parents work longer hours, children start having their adolescent rebellious phase earlier and earlier. This child engaged in the most rudimentary form of in-school resistance: refusing to sit still or follow instructions. It sounds downright boring.

Once the Dean got the school resource officer involved, though, it changed the entire tenor of the event. It went from being a case of routine, if unusually early, adolescent insubordination, to a confrontation between the law and a suspected criminal. Any involvement from school resource officers turns any prosaic administrative action into a potential criminal case. That’s exactly what happened here: a trained cop treated a stroppy kid like a hardened violent felon.

The now-notorious image of a school resource officer flinging a teenaged girl
for failing to get off her cell phone, in 2015

Americans accepted the everyday assigning of police officers inside schools because we wanted to protect kids against outsiders entering and committing crimes. They’re notoriously pretty poor at doing this, though. To cite only one noteworthy example, the armed, uniformed school resource officer failed to enter Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School while an active shooter was inside. The officer’s inaction probably contributed needlessly to the body count.

Rather than preventing outsiders from committing crimes inside schools, the primary stories we hear emerging regarding school resource officers involve them treating students (and, less often, teachers) as suspects. This gets especially compounded when working with children, who haven’t learned to internalize social norms yet. Incidents which teachers would, or should, see as opportunities for instruction, police will see as crimes that need stopped.

I’m glad my high school didn’t have a resource officer. My peers and I sometimes engaged in behavior that was technically illegal. However, we didn’t need busted; we needed patient adults to explain right, appropriate, socially standardized behavior. When you treat children like children, they have opportunities to correct their actions. When you treat them like criminals, you harden them against the future.

If you send trained police into any situation, they will look for crimes. Just like if you sent carpenters into schools, they will find repairs that need done, police will find laws that need enforced, because they’re trained to see that. Presumably that’s what happened in Florida last week. But children aren’t criminals, they’re children. At least, they are until they have a record.

Edit: after publishing this essay, a classmate contacted me and informed me our high school actually had a resource officer. In those pre-Columbine days, he mostly conducted drug enforcement, and little of that; being a resource officer back then wasn't exactly a hardship assignment. The fact that I was free to not know about this makes me feel about the Whitest I've ever been.

Julian Assange: Bit Player In His Own Story

The young, idealistic Julian
Assange we all remember

Watching the storm surrounding WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange’s arrest yesterday, I’ve deduced one clear conclusion: something happened. Beyond that, it’s tough to say. Did free journalism and democratic ideals get dragged kicking and screaming from international asylum? Did a rampant tool get evicted from Ecuador? Depends on who’s asking. Because Assange himself has become a total cypher; his arrest says more about us than him.

I don’t know about anybody else, but WikiLeaks creased my awareness in 2010, when it released reams of documents and hours of footage related to atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. He quickly became a nuisance for powerful people; when he ruffled the Obama Administration’s feathers for exposing their ongoing drone assassination campaign. Politicians love talking about transparency; WikiLeaks revealed they’re less friendly toward the practice.

But despite what some critics claimed after yesterday’s arrest, what Assange and WikiLeaks did wasn’t journalism. WikiLeaks simply deluged audiences with raw, undigested information, mostly in terms general audiences couldn’t understand. We still needed experienced journalists to translate piles and piles of documents, written in specialized jargon and flooded with sloppy data, into language us numpties actually speak. If we’re honest, journalists have done a bad job of this.

This became visible during the 2016 campaign. WikiLeaks became a pipeline of information directed from Moscow, through their website, into American news outlets, which kept the “Hilary’s e-mails” story alive despite a paucity of actual information. Though probably unconnected with the GOP campaign, it became clear WikiLeaks was carrying water for one side when Donald Trump praised the company nearly 150 times at campaign events.

This puts people evaluating the Assange arrest in difficult straits. On one hand, the Pentagon Papers precedent says, provided leaked information doesn’t jeopardize national security or put lives in danger, it’s always better for citizens to know. The democratic process requires informed, literate citizens in full command of the facts, because only debate under such conditions has the ability to flush bad ideas from the body politic.

On the other hand, WikiLeaks didn’t release information neutrally, or in service to democracy generally. It’s tough to say whether they knowingly sat on information regarding corruption at the heart of the Trump campaign, including ties between Russia and Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and others. Maybe they just didn’t have such data. However, they clearly flooded the information market with information damaging to Democrats, imported wholesale from Russia.

And don’t try telling me Assange didn’t run WikiLeaks during his seven years of Ecuadorian asylum. During that time, the embassy needed to rescind first his phone privileges, then his internet access, because he repeatedly violated their stipulation that he not engage in political maneuvers. Standards of international law require asylum seekers to not engage with outside or homeland politics— a standard Assange and Edward Snowden both disregard flagrantly.

The shambling, zombie-like Julian
Assange we saw getting arrested

Watching the mass-media interpretation of Assange’s arrest, and the professional journalists chin-wagging over exactly what it means, it’s clear everyone imbues Assange with their values. He’s a horrible harbinger of dictatorial influence on global electoral politics. Or he’s a martyr to high-handed authoritarian government, getting railroaded by a conspiracy between the Republicans and the Tories. The language reporters have used since the arrest has been downright Manichean.

I’d contend, though, that it’s possible to say Assange represented the best aspirations for the “marketplace of ideas,” while also conceding that his company had become a clearinghouse for the worst realities of partisan hackery. Despite the moral dualism of mythology, nobody is entirely good, nor entirely bad. Humans, including journalists, are sloppy amalgams of ideal and expediency. As the Apostle Paul said, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.”

Furthermore, I’d contend that the hunched-over, unshaven hobo we saw getting evicted from the Ecuadorian embassy yesterday wasn’t the would-be Free Speech Champion who went inside seven years ago. Isolated, lonely, and increasingly desperate, Assange appears to have undergone the same transformation that plagues rock stars and cult leaders. The pure-eyed Assange of 2012 isn’t the broken, captured fugitive of 2019. We all change; some of us decline.

Watching talking heads argue about Assange, I’d assert we aren’t seeing anybody talk about the real human. They’re discussing the ideals he represents to each individual. Assange himself doesn’t matter, probably hasn’t mattered for years. If we look past the figurehead he’s become, and examine the ideals we look for in journalists and other professional truth-tellers, perhaps we can escape the gravitational pull of the current controversy, and fix our long-term problems.

Time For a New American Radicalism

Bernie Sanders

“The Democratic Party is Radicalizing,” screams a headline from The Atlantic Online, one the magazine apparently loves so much that they’ve re-posted it to social media every six or eight hours for the last five days. It’s written by Peter Wehner, a paleoconservative think-tank veteran and “contributing editor” presumably brought on board to decipher the Right to the Left. His previous viral hit was entitled “What I’ve Gained By Leaving the Republican Party.”

The article includes such red meat for rabble rousers as: “If you want to understand just how radicalized the Democratic Party has become in recent years, look at the ascent of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.” Or: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—now the second-most-famous democratic socialist in America—is the unquestioned star among the base.” Wehner apparently thinks we’ll be shocked to discover America’s nominally progressive party supports progressive candidates.

Disregarding Wehner’s tone, which resembles a rough draft for a neo-Nixonian “enemies list,” he clearly thinks asserting that America’s political discourse is “radicalizing” will scare voters into… something. “Radical” has become politics’ greatest bugbear, a monster jumping from behind rocks to gobble centrist discourse right up mwa-ha-ha! The word “radical” deserves its own subclause in Godwin’s Law because, like “Nazi,” speaking that word magically derails discussion.

Except what, exactly, does “radical” mean?

Over a decade ago, I read Shane Claiborne’s book The Irresistible Revolution: Living As an Ordinary Radical. Claiborne describes his Christian community’s mission, living as described in Acts, chapters 2 and 4. He describes this as “ordinary radical.” Ordinary, because it’s something they do every day, a means of living, not some rote observation they perform on Sunday mornings before returning to modern life. But also radical.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“Radical,” Claiborne explains, descends from the Latin root radix, meaning “root.” It’s also the etymology of “radish,” a widespread root crop. To be radical, Claiborne explains, means to live at something’s roots, whether it’s one’s religious roots, political roots, or cultural roots—and, for Claiborne, all these roots are intertwined, becoming one massive expression of living for True Believers. Which, thinking about it, sounds pretty appealing.

For the sake of argument, let’s accept Claiborne’s definition. If “radicalism” means dwelling at your philosophy’s roots, what roots, exactly, are Democrats seeking? Considering the massive preliminary field of 2020 presidential candidates, we spot an array of Christians and atheists, soft-core capitalists and Emma Goldman socialists, career politicians and young upstarts eager to reinforce what they consider core American values. A veritable smorgasbord of ideological precepts.

If we’re seeking big-D Democratic roots, I propose reclaiming the roots of small-d democracy. And that means returning to one book nearly all of America’s Founders read: The Spirit of the Laws, by Charles, Baron de Montesquieu. Published in 1748, it was translated into English in 1750. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had copies in their libraries. Transcripts of America’s Constitutional Convention of 1789 reveal the founders quoted it liberally.

Montesquieu compared different political systems at different historical times. He found political structures rested on distinct foundations. Monarchs required citizens who loved honor, while despots required citizens who loved (or feared) the despot. Republics, however, required citizens who loved virtue, who elected to place common good above personal profit, and who saw themselves as both individuals and members of their communities, at the same time.

Thomas Jefferson pinched his famous saying about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” nearly verbatim from Montesquieu. But he assumed his audience knew Montesquieu intimately, which modern readers generally don’t. Because when Montesquieu identified “life,” he didn’t just mean “not getting killed.” Montesquieu thought free society owed its citizens “a certain subsistence, a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health.”

Charles, Baron de Montesquieu
(Wikimedia Commons)

In plain English, Montesquieu thought republics couldn’t countenance hungry, naked, homeless citizens. He didn’t mention health care, in an era when “medicine” mostly involved leeches and bloodletting, but one can easily imagine that among his precepts. Montesquieu didn’t think society should make everyone rich; he understood a finite world cannot support infinite desires. But he believed free societies provide a secure bottom limit beyond which no citizen can ever fall.

If that’s the radicalism Peter Wehner mentions, I can support that. Considering the two biggest monsters Wehner names, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have based their platforms on making sure America’s most vulnerable citizens aren’t naked and starving, I’d consider that a good description of the current movement’s roots. I’d hope most Americans would agree (as they did during the Eisenhower administration) that these are roots worth watering.

“Joker” and the Will To Destroy

Joaquin Phoenix's Joker

I initially didn’t intend to watch Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker movie trailer. I had various reasons for this: because recent DC movies have been mostly disappointing, or because the makeup scheme looks too deliberate, or because I just can’t keep abreast of today’s overproduced superhero industry. But like countless Americans, I couldn’t resist social media buzz, and I dialed it up. Now I find myself, shall we say, torn.

Audiences who don’t read comics probably accept one of the various prior big-screen Joker depictions, especially Jack Nicholson’s appearance in Tim Burton’s Batman, as authoritative. But Burton arguably damaged the character, by insisting he have the kind of character arc taught in university-level screenwriting classes: he needed to come from somewhere, and be going somewhere else. In the comics, the Joker doesn’t come from anywhere.

When Joker debuted in comics, in Batman #1 (1940), he had no “real” name. He had no visible motivation, made no demands, and simply announced his intent to kill. Then, having made the announcement, he carried through. This begins the arc which carries through today, though inconsistently: Joker destroys because that’s his nature. Unlike, say, Catwoman, a thief, or Scarecrow, a mad scientist, Joker doesn’t want anything. He just kills.

Heath Ledger's Joker

This doesn’t always sit comfortably with comfortably with contemporary writing scholars. Good villains, we’re assured in critical literature, have underlying motivations. Even the Joker’s publisher, DC Comics, has broadly accepted the story from Alan Moore’s 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke, which gives Joker’s insanity roots in a specific incident. It doesn’t clarify or systematize Joker’s actions, but it does establish a concrete inciting moment.

Yet this devalues the character, particularly from the context which birthed him. Gotham, a cartoonized depiction of Depression-era Manhattan, reflected the anomie of its original era pretty accurately. Research at the Santa Fe Institute has persuasively argued that cities, which provide opportunities for random and unanticipated interaction, intensify all aspects of human ingenuity. Large cities create more art, science, and innovation, but also more crime.

The positive and negative of urban life are inseparable. In order to avail ourselves of employment, culture, and other life opportunities, city-dwellers knowingly put themselves at risk of crime. They consider that an acceptable risk. Cities, like Gotham, intensify all aspects of life, creating a richer pallette for creativity, but also occasionally destroying the unprepared. Batman is prepared for city life, and flourishes, albeit violently. Joker is unprepared, and pays.

We see this somewhat in the Joaquin Phoenix trailer. Joker starts as Arthur Fleck, a momma’s boy and aspiring comedian whose domestic life, apparently nurturing his mother through early-onset dementia, leaves him too depleted to pursue his career. His name provides clues. He might be King Arthur, living like a peasant, awaiting rediscovery and coronation. But ultimately he’s a fleck of a man and, like dandruff, destined to get discarded.

See, that’s actually a pretty good kickoff for a story arc. In the Scorsese movies this trailer visually references, like Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, a fundamentally admirable but weak character gets crushed and becomes the very thing he previously deplored. Audiences rightly consider these movies classics because they say something important about us: we all contain the capacity to destroy the very virtues we so assiduously create.

Jack Nicholson's Joker

But. Within the Batman duality, Joker isn’t a put-upon everyman. Understanding Batman’s continuity requires a willingness to resign traditional morality and instead see things through Nietzschean eyes. Nietzsche insisted modernity required superior minds willing to resist reducing everything to “good” and “evil.” Rather, will we complete ourselves by asserting our reality into the world? Most people, he insisted, won’t have courage enough to demand the world notice them.

Faced with the way modernity strips outdated concepts of meaning, Batman and Joker respond in opposite ways. Batman, like the Greek tragic heroes Nietzsche admired, asserts himself boldly on Gotham, creating order, or pockets of order anyway. Joker, by contrast, surrenders to the one force Nietzsche abhorred, nihilism, and simply tries sow chaos. Joker doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t demand anything. He just exists to destroy.

Near the trailer’s end, we see Phoenix’s Arthur applying Joker makeup. That says everything. Arthur chooses to become Joker, and re-applies the makeup daily. “Doing Joker” is, to Arthur, an active and continuing choice. But Joker doesn’t choose to do Joker, he Is Joker, a condition of existence independent of will—and thus, in Nietzschean terms, a failure of will. Arthur continues the action; therefore he wants something. Therefore he isn’t the Joker.