Denouncing Nazis is easy. Living together is hard.

Facebook reminded me that a year ago I posted a piece titled There Are No Enemies.

It's not the most popular piece I've ever published, not by a long shot. It did pretty well - a little over 200 hits - but nothing special.

Re-reading it today, I think it may be one of the most important and difficult things I've ever written. And it helped me codify something that's been bugging me ever since the violence in Charleston and the political fallout that ensued.

In the aftermath of the Charleston violence, nearly everybody took to the airwaves and social media to condemn the assortment of white supremacists, Nazis, and KKK types who instigated the violence. This was easy to do: their brandishing of hateful symbols, their chants against Jews, blacks, and others outside their tribe, their obvious anger and aggression - all these put them squarely against core American values.

President Trump, of course, took tremendous political flak for his response. He tried to lay blame for the violence on "many sides" and seemed to go out of his way to serve as an apologist for the white supremacy movement. They themselves clearly saw it that way, judging by their reactions, especially after his Tuesday press conference. For this, Trump was roundly criticized by pretty much everyone across the political spectrum. The few people in his own White House who didn't distance themselves from this view now no longer work there.

That's all a pretty pat and easy story: Nazis and white supremacists are bad, we're the good guys, etc. Trump aside, almost everyone else will jump on this bandwagon.

But then I come back to my piece from last year: there are no enemies. And I also recall a lesson learned from decades of studying conflicts: conflict only ends when the different sides learn to live with each other.

Yes, white supremacy is morally wrong, and yes, Nazism is a horrible set of ideas. But because we say these things, however forcefully we may say them and however many of us "stand up" to do so, we are stuck with two unavoidable realities:

1) Some people will continue to hold to these ideas, despite (or even because of) our efforts to shout them down.

2) Those people are still our fellow Americans. And, if you hold to the Gospel of Christ, they are still Children of God.

We sort of know these things, deep down, though we don't know what to do with them. These are the reason why so many supporters of Hillary Clinton cringed when she made her famous "basket of deplorables" gaffe. She said in public what we wanted emotionally to say but know is morally wrong: that there are groups of people who are bad people.

In the language of revivalist Christianity, we failed to separate the sin from the sinner.

The problem with that logic, of course, is the conclusion to which it leads. If there are people who are irreducibly bad, then they must be either eliminated from society, driven out, or contained. It is, in fact, exactly the same logic that white supremacists operate under. They're just more open about it.

Lots of political movements - from the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge to the Interahamwe to the founders of Republika Srpska - have taken this idea that those people need to be gotten rid of and tried to put it into action. Every single of one of them failed. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, "purifying" the nation - it never works. It creates a lot of pain and a lot of dead bodies, but in the end you still end up living in a diverse society, and you tend to end up poor and miserable to boot.

That's an easy argument to make when confronting Nazis. But we need to think beyond confrontation, because confrontation itself isn't going to resolve anything.

We thought we had gotten rid of Creationism, until we discovered in the 1990s that it never went away. Most of us read Inherit the Wind in high school and saw it as an historical tale about the last gasp of Young Earth Creationism. Creationists read it and saw it as inspiration. We didn't notice until they started to take over school boards again.

White supremacy isn't going to go away simply because we shout at it, and it isn't going to go away because it's wrong. People are quite capable of holding morally abhorrent beliefs for generations, as our own history with black slavery shows. That some of those beliefs are still in circulation should surprise no one.

So while I applaud people who stand up against Nazis, who show up in Boston to demonstrate that there are far more of us who believe in diversity than there are in them who don't, that's just a band-aid. If the rest of us are vociferous enough, or if we elect a President less inclined to say supportive things about white supremacy the next time around, they may go back into the shadows. But they'll still be there, living among us as fellow citizens.

If we really want to move beyond endless demonstrations - if we really want to seek peace - demonstrations and taking down statues won't get us there. At some point, we're going to have to talk to the people we think of as our enemies. That can't happen in large groups, it certainly can't happen while people are carrying torches and clubs and shields, and it probably can't happen in public with TV cameras rolling. But in the end, it's the only way.

Years ago in graduate school, I wanted to start an article with what I thought was a clever observation: "everyone wants peace, they just want it on their own terms." My advisor stopped me and argued that I should get rid of that sentence. Not everyone wants peace, he pointed out. And he was right.

It's easy to look at those who march with Nazi flags and say, they don't want peace. But do we? We are comfortable in our knowledge that we're right and they're wrong and there are more of us anyway - just as they are comfortable in their understanding that they are right and we are wrong, even though there are fewer of them. Moral righteousness is addictive.

None of this means that we have to "meet them halfway" or adjust our beliefs in a racist direction. That's a red herring. But it does mean that we have to take the time to listen to our fellow human beings, and hope that they in turn will listen to us.

I don't know how to go about that, because all sides prefer the conflict we have to an uncertain peace in the future. But I know that, for myself, we are missing a piece of the moral puzzle: the piece that recognizes the common humanity of our "enemies" and seeks the seemingly impossible task of reconciliation. We have to live with "those people", like it or not. We might as well try to live together well.

Forgiveness: Really Hard and Really Important

Recently I attended a series of seminars by a master teacher, one of the best I have ever seen. He was fond of saying about the subject at hand: "This should feel hard, and it should feel really important."

There is an aspect of the shootings in Charleston last week that feels very hard and also very important: the question of forgiveness. This is much bigger than one incident - indeed, I think it's one of the most fundamental questions there is.

What follows here are partly reactions to what others have written, but mostly musings of my own. Some of this will wander into theological territory, and some of it will bridge from the societal to the personal. It's also likely to be long. I'm not an expert in any of this stuff, so I can't stand on title or degree or authority. Take it for whatever you find it's worth.

Cases like the Charleston shootings tend to get reported in context of other similar events in the past. The most common recent case I've seen cited is the Newtown shootings, although other racially/religiously-inspired shootings (the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, for example) have also been referenced. These past cases serve as a means of identifying and defining what's happened - they form the boundaries of the present.

One mass shooting I almost never hear referenced is the Nickel Mines case. In October 2006 a man entered a small Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. He allowed adults and boys to leave, but took a group of ten girls aged 6 through 13 hostage. A short time later, he shot all ten girls, killing five, and then turned the gun on himself.

The case was briefly a national story, in part because of the exotic nature of the victims (most Americans know nothing about the Amish, who keep largely to themselves) and in part because of what followed. After the initial frenzy had died down, the story came to focus on the response of the Amish community to the killings.

Within hours, members of the Amish community approached the gunman's family offering forgiveness and comfort. Those who had been victims reached out to the family of the perpetrator; many attended his funeral, and the gunman's widow was one of very few "English" invited to attend one of the funerals for the slain girls. The community responded with forgiveness and compassion far beyond simple words. A colleague of mine at the time, Donald Kraybill, and two other co-authors wrote a book, Amish Grace, which was later made into a movie. It is a powerful story almost wholly outside the mainstream American experience, which prizes vengeance far more than forgiveness.

Despite its power, the Nickel Mines story has largely vanished from public discussion. This is perhaps not surprising - the Amish exist largely outside American society and our categories. They are white, but we don't think of them as privileged whites. They eschew technology, yet aren't poor. They practice a radical form of both nonviolence and separation that largely keeps them outside our society. We don't know where they fit, and so they disappear (which, I suspect, suits them just fine).

Now we're faced with another shooting of innocents, in a religious context, by a white man. To early appearances Dylann Roof seems to have clearer motives than the Nickel Mines shooter did, which helps us put this event in the context of race and history which we already know. Some of the same questions are already being raised, about mental health and access to guns. But despite both similarities and differences in their particulars, both cases - indeed, ALL such cases - face us with the question: how do we respond? How are we to think about, and react to, the person who commits these crimes?

How we respond to the killer is important both for us and for the future. In the long run, responses of vengeance and anger shape us into vengeful and angry people bent on returning violence with violence. It is no coincidence that most major world religions have within their doctrines powerful injunctions regarding forgiveness, because the alternative is terrible: unending spirals of violence that spill blood for generations. We've seen modern examples from Jerusalem to Sarajevo to Chicago and Los Angeles. We know where that road leads. We forget sometimes that in the gospels, "An eye for an eye" is the start of a cautionary parable, not a prescription.

So in the long run, forgiveness and reconciliation are the only answers if we really want what we say we want: peace and justice for all. We know this is really important. We also know that it's really, really hard.

Stacey Patton in the Washington Post has beat me to the punch in bringing up the question of forgiveness towards Mr. Roof. Hers is a different take - she is frustrated at the speed with which blacks victimized by white violence are willing to forgive, at least in words. She points out that white America was not asked, and would not consider, forgiving al-Qaeda or ISIS - although the wars of vengeance launched by our responses there may not be the examples she's looking for. But she also writes this:

If we really believe that black lives matter, we won’t devalue our reality and cheapen our forgiveness by giving it away so quickly and easily. Black people should learn to embrace our full range of human emotions, vocalize our rage, demand to be heard, and expect accountability. White America needs to earn our forgiveness, as we practice legitimate self-preservation. [emphasis added]

Patton wants more anger from the black community as an expression of power - a means to force the white majority to come to terms with racism and take action to actually end it. Hers is a calculus of force, even if the force she envisions is rhetorical and political rather than lethal. It's interesting, in complicated ways, that the civil rights movement of the 1960s had this same debate, embodied in the twin figures of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The latter seemed a bit more like what Ms. Patton is calling for, though the former is credited (rightly or wrongly) with having been more effective in bringing about change.

But can forgiveness be earned? This strikes me as a very slippery slope indeed. How much does the perpetrator of the offense need to do before forgiveness is owed? Is forgiveness a market transaction? We teach our children this script - one child offends and then says they're sorry, the other says "that's OK" or similar words of reconciliation. Then we watch them (and we watch ourselves) twist this script to our own ends. "I said I'm sorry!" "Yes, but you didn't mean it!" Asking others to earn forgiveness is really just a means of exerting power the other way, and can quickly turn into a form of punishment.

So demanding accountability and acceptable action prior to forgiveness isn't just putting the cart before the horse - it's connecting two things that really should not be connected at all. At the heart of Christian theology is exactly this kind of radical separation: the forgiveness of God does not come because of our actions, but in spite of them. We are not forgiven because we go to a priest or a pastor and say confession - otherwise God is nothing more than a magic Forgiveness Box waiting for us to push the button. God's grace precedes our action and does not depend on it.

This question, of course, goes far behind our response to terrible events like the Charleston shootings. We are faced with this question nearly every day, every time someone does something to harm us. Do we wait for the offender to apologize? Do we even allow them to apologize, or do we accept the apology at all? When we are hurt and wounded, this is really, really hard, even when the harm is social or relational rather than physical.

Yet even at this level, we perpetuate the damage when we don't seek and extend forgiveness. Relationships remain broken or fragile. Grudges can be held, hidden and waiting to surface later in another conflict. Potential is lost, work doesn't get done, and we miss out on the benefits of human connection at work, in the home, or in our communities.

This is not to say that reconciliation comes through a magic panacea. It's hard work on both sides. There's no push-button formula, where you say magic words ("I'm sorry") and I say magic words ("I forgive you") and we're done. Forgiveness, like everything else in human relationships, takes time and effort from both parties. I have failed to hold up my end of that bargain at times in my life, and I've been in relationships where I wanted to do the work but the other side didn't. Both end up hurting.

And all of that is in the easy cases, the ones where the offending party can recognize the offense and wants to do something about it. How much harder can this be, then, in cases like Charleston where the perpetrator of violence may not recognize his actions as wrong or harmful? What if there is no remorse, no apology forthcoming?

This is where it becomes clear that we need to separate reconciliation from forgiveness. The former is what restores relationships, not to their former state but to a functioning condition again. Reconciliation makes it possible for people to work together again, despite the harms of the past. Forgiveness is a necessary but not sufficient part of that process.

Forgiveness, by itself, is important not so much for the offender who is forgiven as it is for the victim who does the forgiving. If I am harmed by someone, whether that person repents or not I have only two choices: to forgive or not to forgive. By withholding forgiveness I am retaining the anger and the pain by choice. I think this is what Ms. Patton wants - she wants her community to hold onto that pain and channel it into power. In the short run, this can be a potentially effective tactic. In the long run, retained anger poisons the soul.

So by forgiving, I may or may not be helping the person who hurt me. But I am absolutely helping myself. This, I think, may be the motive behind the expressions of forgiveness seen in the last few days towards Dylann Roof. And though I understand (and to some degree share) Ms. Patton's frustration at the lack of change around issues of race and racism, I cannot share her need to tell those victims how to cope with their own grief or demand that they do so in ways to advance my agenda. Pain is personal first.

In this case, the harm radiates out in waves. There are the shooting victims (those that survived) and their immediate families. The members of Emanuel AME church. The members of the surrounding black community, and the broader citizens of Charleston. There are blacks, whites, and communities across South Carolina, and across the South in general. And there are Americans across the country, many of whom felt the pain of this shooting if only distantly.

People in each of those layers will have to decide for themselves how to respond in ways that suit their own needs and serve the needs of the larger community. There is strong consensus on much: the need to heal the racial wounds of our society, the need to prevent as many of these terrible acts as we can, the need to forge a better and more peaceful community. How we do these things is the subject of much debate. That they need to be done isn't.

So we're left with the original question: do we forgive Dylann Roof? Actually, I think this is more an individual question than a collective one. It's something we each have to face. For those of us at a comfortable distance from the shooting, it may seem like a trivial choice. But in reality, it's a choice we face nearly every day of our lives. We are constantly hurting, and being hurt, taking apart our relationships and communities and putting them back together. Forgiveness is an important part of the putting back together process. And like anything else, if we want to become good at it we have to practice.

The Importance of Ideas: Higher Education, STEM, and the Liberal Arts

Those of us who work in higher education know that STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) has been on a tear lately. Long the recipient of the largest share of research dollars, STEM has become the darling of politicians, pundits, and university presidents everywhere. If you're in STEM, or at a STEM-heavy school, life is good now - because who doesn't want to help create more engineers to solve tomorrow's problems?

I'm lucky enough to work in that environment myself. My employer has an excellent college of engineering & computer science and a strong enterprise in biomedical research - two of the hottest areas out there. We just opened at $30 million research building for neuroscience and biomedical engineering. Since all of these areas have graduate programs (both master's and PhD), I'm thrilled - it's my job to support our graduate education enterprise and that job is made really easy when we have programs that can ride today's hot trends.

In the shadow of all of this STEM mania, the liberal arts have had a tough time of it. Long the punching-bag for politicians, the attacks have gotten worse in recent years. When Time magazine asked "Is college worth it?", they weren't thinking about mechanical engineers and biomedical researchers - they were thinking about English and sociology majors. It's been tough being in the liberal arts (including my own intellectual native land of political science, singled out to get cut out of the NSF funding pie) in recent years.

And yet, I can't help thinking of last week's tragedy in Charleston, SC. I wrote on Friday that one of the key takeaways for me from that incident: ideas kill. Since ideas are what we work with in higher education, we have a particular responsibility to help make things better by engaging the ideas that lead to these kinds of horrific acts.

But we're not talking here about STEM anymore. As wonderful as engineering and science are, they won't solve our problems with racism, extremism, and violence. We could raise the NIH budget by an order of magnitude and add another $10 billion to the National Science Foundation, but we won't scratch the surface of these problems. Ideas about race, religion, identity, and society will continue to kill, unchecked and unfettered.

So as much as I love my STEM colleagues and support their work, this latest act of violence should remind us that some of the most important and meaningful problems won't be solved in a lab or with new technology. They are the problems that live in the minds and hearts of people - the kinds of problems that people in literature, theater, art, the humanities and social sciences have been grappling with for centuries.

If you want to cure diseases, fund biomedical research. If you want to invent cool new technologies to make our lives better, fund the engineers. But if you really want to address the persistent and wrenching issues of race, gender, extremism and violence - fund the liberal arts.

Ideas Kill: Charleston and Our Failure to Talk About Race and Hate

A lot of words have been written in the last couple of days about the tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina. Interesting and important discussions have broken out about whether this act constituted terrorism (yes) or a hate crime (yes) or whether this is a manifestation of broken race relations (yes). Some have taken the opportunity to advance their favorite pet theories, perhaps the most absurd being  that pastors should arm themselves so they can be prepared to shoot assailants (I guess we should ask, "who would Jesus shoot?")

Smart things are being said, too, about the language we use to talk about these kinds of incidents. Why is it that whites who commit mass shootings are put in the "mentally ill" category when others (Muslims especially) who commit similar acts are labelled in other ways? Would reactions be different if a black man went into a white church and shot nine people as opposed to a white man in a black church doing the same? (almost certainly)

I don't have a lot to add to many of these conversations - a lot of smart folks are already saying smart things, and while it's fun to echo I suspect that many are only being listened to by those who already agree with them. That's one of the downsides of social media (says the guy who primarily uses Facebook to distribute his blog posts...)

Beyond human compassion for the victims and the affected community (which I hope we all share, regardless of our political, racial, or identity leanings), I want to offer a thought for consideration. Even this I can't claim full credit for - a friend of mine sent out a group email earlier today that got me thinking along these lines.

I often write about cases of gun violence from a self-defense point of view, as a student of interpersonal violence. In this case, I don't want to do that - the argument about whether pastors should be armed is to me so ridiculous as to not be worth engaging in. Instead, I want to approach this from the point of view of someone who has spent his life in higher education. From that vantage point, there is one important concept that I'm not sure has been fully grasped:

Ideas kill.

This is easy to say but much harder to understand. In our drive to both defend free speech and promote tolerance (both noble and excellent goals), we have neglected the much harder work of engaging ideas. Instead, we sling mud and names and labels at each other, pat ourselves and our friends on the back for our righteousness, and go out for a beer.

I started to address this problem after the Newtown, CT shooting in this blog post. The ideas I was talking about there were ideas about guns in particular. I think that post has held up pretty well, though most of the hard-liners in the gun debate don't want to hear it.

But what we appear to be seeing in Charleston is broader. It wasn't just Dylann Roof's ideas about guns. It was his ideas about race and society, his vision of the world as a whole, that led him to kill.

This is the part of the conversation we are terrible about. We've been talking about race in this country for centuries, but haven't made a lot of progress recently. To minorities - blacks in particular - racism is a major problem, but to far too many whites it's an annoyance, a "special group" issue, a side bar to the "real" problems our country faces. The problem with our conversations about race is that they're primarily conducted by blacks, Latinos, sometimes Asians, and a few sympathetic whites. We see this on our university campuses - chief diversity officers tend to be minorities, and the events they organize and the dialogues they hold tend to attract the attention largely of the minority population. For much of the white population, it's simply "not my problem".

So here's why we have to start taking this much more seriously: ideas kill.

Those nine people in Charleston didn't die because Mr. Roof is mentally deranged, though by some standards he may be. They didn't die because he had easy access to guns, although that was certainly a permitting factor. They died because Mr. Roof held ideas - ideas he learned and inherited and absorbed from a lot of other people - about race and American society.

This fact makes this a critical issue for higher education, because ideas are our stock in trade. If universities can claim anything, it is to serve as idea foundries - places where ideas are developed, tested, debated, tried, and shared.

This does not mean that universities should run out and frog-march their students and faculty into diversity sensitivity workshops so that their latent racism can be lectured out of them. It does mean that we need to pay much more careful attention to the ideas that lead to violence and killing, both as individual components and in constructed views of the world. We need to study these ideas, where they come from, and how they are spread, in much the same way that epidemiologists study diseases.

This is true not only of racism. It is also true of the ideas behind rape and sexual assault. It is true of the ideas behind religious extremism. It is true of any number of ideas and constructed ideologies that lead people to believe not only that it's OK to kill other human beings, but that it is necessary and laudable to do so.

These are difficult, difficult conversations. They are hard topics to tackle. If this were easy, we would have done it already. How do we separate ideas from people (because people tend to get defensive and, when cornered, will shut down or lash out) and how do we work together as people to deal with ideas? How do we do all of this without becoming coercive about it, which defeats the whole exercise? I don't know - I'm as guilty of anyone else of not trying very hard.

One thing I do believe is true: if this is going to happen anywhere in American society, it will happen in colleges and universities. Our politics are too fragmented and vicious and infected with cynicism for a public figure, another MLK, to force a conversation onto the national stage. But despite all the ridiculous rhetoric from people outside the academy, all the "sky is falling" predictions of how universities are going the way of the dinosaur, universities still succeed for the most part in creating environments and spaces for real and difficult conversations. And sometimes, they even succeed in leading them.

This is not a prediction so much as a call to purpose. For those of us in higher education, we need to take our jobs seriously. We need to take ideas seriously again. Because as the world keeps reminding us, lives depend on it.