Anger, Violence, and Society: A Personal Reflection

My son and I sat on the first floor of the Tepper Building, a brand-new, state-of-the-art academic facility on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. We had come for an admissions presentation, part of the formal pageantry of a college visit. We had just taken a quick walk through the campus, and were looking at a map and chatting about things I remembered from my youth. I grew up in and around this place, and it was interesting to see how the university has grown and changed. We were looking forward to the campus tour following the presentation.

The first floor of Tepper looks out on Forbes Avenue with big floor-to-ceiling windows. We watched as an ambulance went by, lights flashing, siren blaring, speeding up Forbes to the west. It's a city, and in that part of town there are hospitals everywhere. We thought nothing of it, and kept chatting.

Five minutes later, a police car and another ambulance went by in the same direction, moving fast. Two minutes past that, another police car and a third ambulance went screaming by. A TV van followed not far behind. It was clear that something big was happening east of campus.

Thirty minutes into the admissions presentation I got a text from my father: Police working on active shooting at Shady & Wilkins (Tree of Life). We hear 7 casualties. Be careful.

I know that intersection, that synagogue, instantly. I grew up in that neighborhood. Some of the kids on my school bus were probably members of that congregation. I could see it in my mind.

We read about mass shootings all too often in the news. But they are usually somewhere else, in some other place. For most of us, they are theoretical events, things to argue about with talking points and, in our present era, partisan rancor.

This was home - my home. The Tree of Life is perhaps a 20 minute walk from the CMU campus we were visiting. It's 15 minutes from my father's home, and 5 minutes from the campus where my stepmother teaches. It's a place I'd been past thousands of times in my youth, walking to friends' houses and the shops in Squirrel Hill. To Mineo's, and Games Unlimited, and Famous Frank's.

After the admissions presentation, a CMU staffer came out apologetically and explained that the campus was closing all events for the afternoon. There would be no campus tour. I checked in with my parents and we headed back out of town, shocked and disappointed and not sure what would come next.

It's hard to comprehend the level of hatred, anger, and rage that would cause someone to stockpile guns and ammunition, walk into a house of worship, and kill people in cold blood. To be so far outside society that you will fire on police, on the elderly, on anyone in your path. That's a heavy lift when it's a largely theoretical exercise, an event among strangers in a strange place.

For me this is harder, because it's so close. We were right there. We watched the shock waves ripple across the city in real time.

One thing we do know: this kind of wanton violence is born in anger, in rage, and in hatred. We know that these things are grown over time, cultivated in dark places on the internet and in small groups. We know that they are nourished by the broader zeitgeist. Hatred draws sustenance when hate becomes mainstream. Anger grows when anger is all around.

There is no direct line here, no way to draw a clear connection between a particular speech and a particular act, any more than we can connect one cloud or one weather front with a particular tree in the forest. But the atmosphere, the environment, matters. Plants grow when conditions in the environment are supportive. Anger and hatred flourish when the same is true.

So it matters that we have a President for whom anger and hatred are daily tools. It matters that people openly sell, and wear, t-shirts that revel in violence at political rallies. It matters that abuse (both verbal and physical) aimed political enemies and out-groups has become so commonplace that no one bothers to comment on it anymore. We have created a hothouse of anger in our society. We should not be surprised at the fruit it yields.

To my conservative friends: yes, there are people on the left contributing to this problem. Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" comment was a horrible thing to say. Eric Holder's "when they go low, kick 'em" was worse, even if he later explained it away as a metaphor. There are those on the left who have been calling to "fight fire with fire", arguing that anger must be met with anger. I'm getting tired of being told that I should be outraged all the time.

But none of that excuses the President, or the Republican Party, which has been gleefully throwing fuel on this fire or looking the other way when their allies do. "Fine people on both sides"? Scare stories about "rapists and murders" "pouring" over our southern border? Full-throated defenses of "free speech" without the slightest care or concern about what freedom is for? Politics has gone from being an effort to win elections to an effort to annihilate the other side, to create a "pure" society where only the "right-thinking" have a place. Sound familiar?

In the face of Saturday's culmination of a horrible two years of growing anger and hatred, I wonder whether there is any bedrock left on which we agree. Once, we agreed that violence was out of bounds in politics and society. At moments we have crossed that boundary, but we have at least agreed in hindsight that those were our worst moments.

Can we agree on even that much anymore? Can we agree that our public conversation has become so toxic that it is breeding and unleashing killers? I wonder whether we can, because to agree on the problem is to agree that we are part of the problem. When our national leaders boast of never apologizing or admitting to any fault or mistake, how can we take even the first step on the road back to peace?

I do not know what will happen in the future, or how much worse things will get before they get better. But I am reminded of the wisdom of CS Lewis: the devil wants us to worry about what will happen to us, but God wants us to be concerned with what we do.

Paul wrote about the "fruit of the Spirit", the outward signs of God's desire translated into human terms. In the letter to the Galatians he wrote, "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control".

You don't have to be a Christian, or a person of any faith, to agree that a society based on love is better than one built on hate. That peace is preferable to violence. That generosity is better than selfishness. That in the moments when we are at our best, we are kind and generous and patient.

I used to think that these things were the bedrock on which we build our society. Politics is usually about what we disagree on, but these are things on which we all agree. We all, I thought, wanted roughly the same kind of society, we just disagreed about how to get there.

Now I wonder if I was wrong. There are clearly people who want a very different society, one that is selfish and violent and angry and divided. Many of these people now occupy positions of prominence in our government. And many millions vote for them, apparently wanting the same.

What, then, to do? Be patient and kind and generous and faithful and gentle. Celebrate love and joy and peace. Be citizens of the society we want.

If enough of us agree, we might be able to move our society in this direction. It won't be easy, and it won't happen quickly. But in the face of Saturday's horror, it is the only response I can find that makes sense.

The Lost Art of Listening

You know you are living in strange times when news anchors have to give warnings about offensive language before playing clips of the President of the United States giving a speech, and when the most important issue on the national stage seems to be whether professional athletes should stand during the national anthem.

By all measures and to all indications, the United States appears more polarized and factionalized today than at any point since the 1960s and early 1970s. Our national leadership - including but not limited to the aforementioned President - seems determined to add fuel to the fire rather than finding ways to put it out. The media (social, mainstream, and otherwise) have become amplifiers that increase the volume. Everywhere people are concerned, confused, frightened, angry.

There are, as always, no simple solutions. But there is a simple diagnosis: we have forgotten how to listen to each other.

I don't mean that we've become actually deaf. But there is a vast difference between hearing the words coming from someone else's mouth, and listening. Generally, we hear others' words either as confirmation of our own views or as fodder for snarky memes and late-night talk shows that make us feel better about ourselves and superior to Those Idiots Over There.

Listening assumes basic human empathy. To listen to someone, I must first believe that they are of value, that they deserve "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" just as much as I do, that they matter. This is no small thing, because it requires us to recognize that someone else's humanity is every bit as valuable as my own. It forces us to love others as we love ourselves. We long ago sanitized Jesus' command (love your neighbor as yourself) by referring to it simplistically as "the Golden Rule", and in so doing forgot how genuinely hard this is.

We begin our lives as intensively selfish creatures. It takes time before we become aware of the existence of other humans, still more time before we come to recognize them as humans instead of moving objects in our environment. And though empathy often develops quite young, so does selfishness - the desire to Look Out for Number 1, to put ourself ahead of others.

We resolve this tension in part by forming groups, which helps us to exercise empathy and altruism towards some other people while still discriminating against and rejecting others. Tribes are, in a sense, a more complex form of selfishness. Evolutionary philosophers like Jonathan Haidt have suggested that this is as far as we can go - that selfishness is simply built into who and what we are, so we always have to have an out-group.

And yet we strive to be better. The highest ideals of nearly every society, and certainly every major religion, include some version of what we so glibly call the Golden Rule. We are reminded to show hospitality to the stranger, to care for the weak and helpless, to put the needs of others ahead of our own. The stories that unite us, the ones we all cheer for despite party or race or nationality, are the stories of heroic self-sacrifice: the firefighters rescuing people from the burning building, the fishermen who drove down to Houston with their boats to rescue people from the flooding, the neighborhoods coming together to help each other recover from the hurricane or tornado. As divided and polarized as we are, these are the stories that we all agree represent the best of us. Greater love hath no man indeed.

The lost art of listening is really just empathy put into its simplest action. If I can listen to you, not with the intent to rebut or ridicule or mock or disagree, but simply to try to understand your point of view, then I am practicing empathy. I recognize you as a fellow human being, made in God's image as I am.

Most of our current troubles derive from a lack of listening. Very few in government listen to those outside their party or their support circle. The President spends much of his time actively discouraging the practice, calling people names and denigrating those who disagree with him. We used to argue that the President is a role model for the nation. I think that's true, and our current one is modeling the problem, not the solution. Leaders in Congress and the most common voices we see in the media are little better.

We also don't listen much to each other. I've written before about "bubbles" and the problem of fear. We don't listen to each other because we're afraid of each other - afraid of being demeaned, dismissed, or even attacked (verbally or physically). Like all abilities, the less we listen, the less good we get at it. In an atmosphere where no one is listening, many people will grow up never learning the skill at all.

There are others out there making this same point, though they are often faint voices (because conflict is louder by nature, and because those who run society's megaphones make more money from noise than from quiet conversation). A conservative friend of mine sent me this one from the Weekly Standard. The author makes a lot of excellent points and hits on exactly the same problem, although parts of his article are couched in the same kind of partisan snark that makes listening so difficult. Those habits die hard, but die they must.

I've watched the bizarre conflict over the NFL mostly with sadness. Those yelling at the players, including our President (who seemed to think it important to call them profanities and demand they be fired), aren't interested in listening to what those players have to say. They don't want to hear the concerns of African American men who are trying to speak up for their brothers and sisters who can't speak up for themselves.

Likewise, those who support those protests don't always stop to listen to what the booing fans in the stands are saying. In a polarized time, symbols of identity become critically important. For some, those include the flag and the national anthem, symbols that have a nearly sacred meaning to some (even as they have a different meaning, or no meaning, to others).

To listen to others is not necessarily to agree with any of them. I can understand that for some of my fellow Americans, the flag means more to them perhaps than means to me. That's OK. I don't ask that they adopt my meaning. I can also understand that some of my fellow Americans have an experience of discrimination that I don't have, and that because of that difference they feel differently about some institutions than I do. I don't ask that they adopt my feelings either.

I don't know what the "solution" to these issues is. Race relations, protests, free speech on university campuses, immigration - there's a long list of things about which we are seriously polarized. I don't know what the solution to any of them should be. What I do know is that there is only one way to get to a solution: listening. The longer we put off really listening to each other, the more pain there will be. The sooner we start listening, the better our chances of finding solutions.

Wheaton and the Challenge of Modelling Christian Community in Higher Education

This story crosses two of my interests - higher education and Christianity:

Wheaton Gives Community Service to Players Facing Felony Charges

Wheaton is an avowedly Christian school. It advertises this widely, makes its identity clear on all of its communications from its website to the signs on its campus, and presumably recruits students for whom living in a Christian community is a part of what they want in a college. The college also has a code of student conduct rooted in Christian theology and ethics.

The behavior described in this article is thus doubly disturbing. This would be unacceptable on any campus, and at a state school would likely lead to suspensions from the football team if not expulsion from the university as a whole. Due process must be followed, of course, and it would be appropriate for any college or university to follow that process before deciding on consequences for the perpetrators.

It appears that Wheaton has already followed whatever on-campus process they are going to follow, and has chosen to mete out what looks on the surface to be a fairly minimal punishment: the students in question have been assigned to write an essay, and to some hours of community service. This seems pretty minor even in a secular context.

There are obviously a lot of details missing here, but the optics are terrible for an institution that claims to be an intentional Christian community. This kind of assault, in that context, is a fundamental violation of trust and a gross offense against any reasonable sense of Christian ethics. Because of the nature of the community, it is an offense not only against the assaulted individual but against the entire community. And it sends a signal to the rest of the world: those "Christians" over there aren't any different from anybody else. Their faith doesn't mean anything.

If you were particularly inclined to be uncharitable, you could conclude that they have revealed their true religion: football. In that sense, they're not very different from the rest of the world.

Here's another unfortunate comparison: some avowedly Christian colleges (not Wheaton, but schools with a similar identity) have been known to expel students for having (consensual) sex outside of marriage, or for declaring a different sexual identity. Those things are unacceptable, but kidnapping and assault is OK?

What would a Christian response look like? It's not so much about the punishment - if anything, a Christian response should leave far more room for forgiveness than the world usually wants. But it is about repentance, examination, and transformation. And since the offense was against the community, some parts of that should be visible to the whole community.

Administrators at Wheaton will undoubtedly cite FERPA and a range of other laws and regulations protecting privacy and due process. Those regulations are good things, but they are not the only thing.  What the college chooses to do in terms of its community process is up to it. At minimum, student offenders can be offered a choice: based on a finding of facts, participate in a process of repentance and reconciliation - one that is visible - or leave.

Sometimes, Christian communities come together and behave in ways that really do show the world that faith matters. Several years ago after a tragic shooting in the Amish community of Nickel Mines, the community came together and publicly forgave the perpetrator and his family. The process of that conversation was difficult but also moving. They did it in public, not because they cared about the publicity or what anyone else thinks of them (the Amish are famous for being indifferent to what we English think), but because it was the right thing to do.

I think Wheaton missed a real opportunity here to live out its faith in public. Perhaps they will reconsider, as I suspect they're going to be facing negative publicity for a while.

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.

The Pathology of "Terrorism"

In the last three days we have seen headlines for two horrific incidents of violence:

7 killed in London Bridge attack

Disgruntled ex-employee kills 5 in Orlando

Both are appalling reminders of the violence which individuals are capable of. Both have made national and/or international news. Both involved the deaths of innocent citizens going about their daily lives.

One attack was a "terrrorist" attack. The other was not. And our differential responses say a great deal about us and our tolerance for violence.

The London attack immediately became part of a larger narrative when the self-styled Islamic State claimed responsibility. In the minds of many, particularly politicians with self-serving agendas, this immediately made it part of a larger global "war on terrorism". Tweets were sent, heated words flew almost immediately as we rehashed yet again the now-tired argument (at least in the US) between tribal Republicans who decry "political correctness" and tribal Democrats who defend the value (or the reality) of a multicultural society.

The Orlando case, on the other hand, falls into a much more isolated narrative, the "disgruntled ex-employee". President Trump has not tweeted about the attack in Orlando, preferring apparently to argue with the Mayor of London. There will be no calls from national politicians to do anything in particular. The headline quote from the local sheriff after the incident was this:

“We have no indication that this subject is a participant in any type of terror organization,” Demings said during the news conference.

That's our main response: well, at least it wasn't terrorism.

If it were my spouse, my child, my parent killed in that business in Florida, I doubt that would come as any comfort at all. The very idea seems absurd. And yet, our public conversation treats the deaths of innocents completely differently based solely on who killed them. We can live with the deaths of innocents, so long as they're shot by disgruntled ex-employees rather than stabbed or run over by terrorists.

We have become pathologically obsessed with terrorism. In any given year, far more innocent Americans are killed by disgruntled ex-employees than by terrorists. That's not just statistics - it's lives ruined, communities wounded, productivity lost. Every one of those lost lives leaves an impact, a hole where a person used to be. They all hurt. They are all children of God.

And yet, we act as if only those lucky enough to have been killed by terrorists matter. Those deaths get the attention, the large public ceremonies with politicians and media attention and stern promises of "This bloodshed will end"!

No one will go to Orlando and console the survivors of that attack with promises of action and praise for how strong they are to go on living in the wake of tragedy. There will be no mass gatherings of funds for those families. I imagine the local community will gather around the wounded and the fallen, and that's as it should be. But for the rest of the nation - and in particular, for our public "leaders" - the lives of seven people in London are far more important than the lives of five people in Florida.

There was an attack in Orlando that garnered a great deal of attention - because the attacker could be described as a "terrorist". We all came together united in the wake of the nightclub shooting. Yet just a few years before, we tore each other apart over an incident in which 20 six and seven year olds were gunned down in their school. No unity there, just spite and hate (even people who want to deny that it ever happened.) Our own children don't even matter unless they're killed by terrorists.

I understand why all of this is. I get the politics, the use of narrative, the incentives that drive politicians to use events for their own ends, the tribalism that divides us from our common humanity, even our common national identity. I understand all of that far too well, having studied it for too many years.

What I can't shake is a fundamental conviction: that this is Wrong.

Many American politicians piously call themselves Christians (Vice President Pence has famously said that he is a "Christian first"). Under what reading of the Bible does one set of innocent deaths matter more than another? If you think your job as a public servant is to protect innocent lives, why do you lavish hundreds of billions of dollars to protect some and nothing to protect others?

In the years immediately following 9/11/2001, we had a national conversation - not a great one, but the best we could do - about what constitutes "winning" for terrorists. We told ourselves that if we allowed the terrorists to drive us into fear, to change us, to make us something we're not, then they would in fact have won. We argued about where exactly those boundaries were, but for a while we shared a general sense: as long as we go on being Americans, they have not prevailed.

We are now so enthralled, so bewitched, so addicted to the idea of "terrorism" that I begin to think that perhaps they have won. Not too many years back, it seemed that tragedy brought out the best in us. We came together after 9/11, but also when the Mississippi flooded its banks and inundated the midwest; when New Orleans disappeared under water; when Hurricane Andrew struck Florida. In between disasters we argued and bickered, but when the chips were really down we seemed to have each other's backs. That's probably a simplified version of the past - but if so, it's an aspirational one.

Now, each new tragedy divides. Terrorist attacks are simply grist for more division and arguing and spite, while other incidents - like this morning's attack in Orlando - are ignored.

As usual, I don't have any solutions - only a conviction that we have all of this badly wrong. And I am reminded of Mahatma Gandhi's famous saying:

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

The Terrible Temptation of "Christianity and..."

Years ago, C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters warned against the dangers of what he called "Christianity and":

The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call "Christianity And". You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. 

My Facebook feed (because of a comment by a friend) served up a striking example of this phenomenon today - a graphic accompanied by the following text, posted by a FB group called "Our President and Savior":

Of all the sacred institutions upholding our democracy, none is as important as loyalty to the President. What better way to show your loyalty than by making a formal pledge in the sight of GOD, for all to know? Voluntarily pledging in the comments will demonstrate superior integrity than if you wait for the pledge to become mandatory. Don't delay; pledge your loyalty to President TRUMP today!
~~~~~~~

The Donald J. Trump Presidential Pledge of Loyalty:

"I swear to GOD this sacred pledge that to the President of the United States and people, Donald J. Trump, supreme commander in chief of the armed forces, I shall render unconditional obedience and that as a brave patriot I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this pledge."

Amen!

In the (unsurprisingly extensive) comments section came this particular addition from the poster of the original:

Our President and Savior ATTENTION LIBERALS: This is a CHRISTIAN page and foul language will NOT be tolerated. We permit you to be here for your own benefit, but cussing and profanity are strictly FORBIDDEN. You have been warned!

I am baffled. Under what reading of the Christian Bible does it become "mandatory" to pledge allegiance to an earthly ruler? What kind of theology allows you identify as a Christian and call Donald Trump (or any other President) "Savior"? Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light" - I'm pretty sure he didn't make mention of the President of the United States, or the Emperor of Rome, or the Governor of Syria, or Pilate, or anyone else.

I'm also not sure what understanding of "democracy" regards "loyalty to the President" as one of the "sacred institutions" that upholds the system. Our government was founded on disloyalty to a ruler, and is clearly designed to protect the rights of anyone who wants to speak out and oppose those elected to office.

Somewhere, Screwtape is laughing.

Ideological Purity and the Loss of Tolerance

I've written before (here and here) about the dangers of trying to create an ideologically "pure" environment. Our politics are problematic in part because there are some folks on both the Left and the Right who refuse to have anything to do with anything that smacks of the other side. These people are doomed to live frustrated lives, since they will never achieve what they seek.

In academia, the forces pulling in this same direction can be even stronger. There is something about academic training, about dedicating a large portion of your life to seeking truth in a particular area, that seems to engender in us the need to Be Right and to vanquish all of the Wrong Thinking in the world. Academics are not much known for humility.

In this context, the latest wave of opposition to campus speakers has become particularly fertile ground for this sort of quixotic quest for purity. In the minds of some, to host an outside speaker on campus is to allow anything and everything that person has ever said to taint you. The institution itself becomes unclean by their presence, requiring rituals of purification. You could write these sorts of strictures up in Leviticus and they would fit right in.

One of the latest of these incidents involves a kerfuffle surrounding an invitation extended to James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist who, along with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, discovered and articulated the structure of DNA. He had a hand on one of the signature scientific achievements of the 20th century, on which a vast amount of biological and medical knowledge has been built. He is, as the saying goes, one of the giants in the field.

He has also, at various points, expressed some outdated views about race, gender, and other social issues. He has expressed concern that people in Africa are less intelligent than people in other parts of the world. He has said various things about women, about body types, and about homosexuality which most people these days don't agree with. He has also apparently been a supporter of eugenics, at least at the individual level. He is, from many points of view, on the wrong side of history on a number of social issues.

So here we have a man who has led a stellar scientific career, contributing to some of the most impactful scientific advances of the modern age, who also apparently holds some retrograde views on issues of race, gender, and sexuality - views not that uncommon, it should be noted, for white men born in the 1920s.

In other words, James Watson is a human. He has done things that are laudable, and he has done things that are condemnable. He has said things we wish he hasn't said, and he has done things we are extremely grateful for.

So when he is invited to give a talk about science - about the thing for which he clearly deserves praise - and then is disinvited because of things he has said unrelated to his scientific research, I not sure what the standard is. Can we only invite speakers who have led exemplary lives and have been saints since birth? Can we only host speakers who have never said anything that might offend someone's point of view? If so, our list of campus speakers will be very short indeed.

From a Christian point of view, this kind of intellectual purifying of the academy is nonsense. We are all sinners, and there is no coherent theological justification to suggest that some sins (racism, for example) are more egregious in the eyes of God than others (pride, or lust, or greed). People love to read the Beatitudes, but the rest of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 makes us profoundly uneasy (Cut off your hand! Tear out your eye!)

I am therefore a little perplexed when people write "I am ashamed to be faculty at Illinois" because some part of the university - which is a large, complex organization with many parts, not a unified whole - has decided to host Watson for a talk about his research. Such a person must be perpetually ashamed of many things, because we are all connected to institutions and social structures that do things that we find objectionable.

None of this is to defend racism, or sexism, or homophobia. When Watson argues that one "race" of people is inherently less intelligent than another, he is doing so on the basis of prejudice rather than careful scientific study. The bases of intelligence are complex and multifaceted, and it is entirely likely that his own intelligence is a result of the nurture of his upbringing and circumstances (of having "won the ovarian lottery", as Warren Buffet puts it) rather than what's in his genetic code. As we seek the roots of intelligence we find a very complex web indeed. We would also do well to carefully untangle judgments about intelligence from judgments about moral value, lest we fall into the trap of moral elitism - "smart" people do not have a greater inherent moral value than "dumb" ones.

But it is one thing to disagree with an argument or a point of view. It is another thing entirely to assert that, by inviting a speaker to talk on one topic, you are in some sense endorsing his views on others - an assertion that, when brought to light, is clearly silly. It is still another thing to claim that, by that person's presence on campus in some kind of invited capacity, the institution as a whole is morally tainted - a modern version of the Levitical code of purity.

Ultimately, I think our problem is that we are confused. We see ourselves as individual moral agents - as responsible for our own moral choices. Yet we also imbue our institutions - which are, after all, simply collections of individuals - with a sort of moral status of their own. In itself, this can be useful,  because we want to feel that we belong to and contribute to something greater than ourselves. But we are unclear about the moral rules surrounding our institutions. We seek to hold our institutions to the same standards as ourselves - forgetting that we are not alone, and that others may have different ideas about what is appropriate or inappropriate.

All of this, of course, is just a description of what it means to live in society. My concern is that we are forgetting this - we forget that one of the chief qualities that enables us to get along with each other and improve our individual and collective lives is tolerance for difference and ambiguity. The quest for purity is really just the reduction of the moral world to a zero-sum game: either I win, or you do. Either we are not racist, or we are. We are either a conservative place or a liberal place. Throughout the history of humanity, this approach has always led to suffering, and never to the victory that its adherents sought. Maybe we should step back and look for a better way to listen to each other without so much throwing of stones and slurs and signs.

Political Conflict on Campus Today

I write a fair amount about academia and higher education. I also write a lot about conflict. Sometimes, I get to cross my realms of expertise and write about both.

It was in that conjunction that this article from this week's Chronicle struck me:

From Video of Campus Forum, Virtual Venom Flows

The Reader's Digest version of the story is this: some folks at Northern Arizona University decided to have a public campus form titled "The Specters of Fascism?" It's the kind of thing that universities do - bring their expertise to bear on questions of public interest and hold open discussions about them.

In this case, the forum was mostly about Fascism in Europe, with the added question of whether there were lessons from those historical experiences that might be applicable to the United States today. It's the sort of question that historians, political scientists, sociologists, and others have discussed for decades - interesting, relevant in a high-level sort of way, and amenable to scholarly inquiry. In today's highly polarized political and tribal environment, however, it attracted a different sort of attention than one might expect when academics hold a scholarly forum.

A NAU student affiliated with a group called Campus Reform filmed the event and shared that video with the organization, which posted a segment of it on their website. Campus Reform, which bills itself as "America's leading site for college news", is a conservative project that "exposes bias and abuse on the nation's college campuses". It is an offshoot of the Leadership Institute, an avowedly conservative organization whose mission is "to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders in the public policy process".

Needless to say, university professors speculating about whether European fascism has any parallels in American politics today proved to be red meat to conservatives, who boiled the whole thing down to "liberals equating Trump with Hitler". Abusive and threatening emails started flying almost immediately, aimed at faculty members associated with the event (often for things that they didn't say, as the video was apparently unclearly labelled).

Interestingly, the student who took and posted the video also came in for a fair amount of online abuse and some pushback from people on her campus, some of whom accused her of being a racist and of belonging to the "alt-right". She characterized her treatment (perhaps a bit hyperbolically) as "full-on bullying from the university".

The usual frame by which these kinds of stories are viewed is the "academic freedom/freedom of speech" frame. In this view, everyone has the right to say what they like and to express the views that they like. The forum was an exercise of free speech, as was the taping of the forum and posting it online. The subsequent abuse and death threats are merely an unfortunate byproduct of our exercise of our free speech rights.

While correct in itself, this frame is largely useless for understanding what's going on here. What this episode shows is one manifestation of a much larger conflict taking place across society, on campuses as well as in other ways. Once we place this in a conflict frame, we have the chance to make progress towards both understanding and mitigating if not resolving these issues.

Like all conflicts, this one has at least two sides, each of which is a coalition of actors and entities that agree with each other to varying degrees. What holds the sides together is not agreement about facts or ideas, but a sense of common identity - "us" versus "them". The student who posted the video may not like being lumped in with the alt-right, but she's planted her flag on that side and so, in the eyes of her adversaries, she's one of "them".

Like all tribal conflicts, the dynamics are pretty predictable. Each side defines the other as both monolithic and defined by its own worst actors. Each side is reduced to simplistic, usually dehumanizing, epithets by the other ("libtard", "redneck", etc.) Each side has only a vague notion of its goals and objectives - though individual actors may have specific plans - but in broad terms, the conflict is seen as zero-sum - either "we" win or "they" win.

It is this last point that gives rise to the deplorable kinds of behavior that we see - the online bullying, dehumanization, and threats. Because people the conflict is perceived as zero-sum, each side focuses on "winning". There is no notion of compromise or accommodation - such thoughts are heresy, and those who entertain them usually branded as heretics and forced to recant or tossed out of the tribe. In the terms of my own research, each side is pursuing a Unilateral strategy.

Sometimes in international conflict, Unilateral strategies make sense. One thing my research has turned up is that Unilateralism is contagious - if one side gets it, the other side pretty much has to follow suit. It's very difficult for me to try to reach accommodation with you while you're trying to kill me. This is why Zartman has spent so much time researching the notion of "hurting stalemates", because once you're locked into Unilateralism on both sides, it's very difficult to get out.

Some of the rhetoric within our domestic political conflict has taken on this sort of flavor. Dig around a little bit and you can find conservatives (often of the alt-right variety) talking about a "genocide" of liberals, while on the Left you have liberals talking openly about secession (Calexit?) from the rest of the country. Both of these assume a universe in which members of both tribes cannot coexist, at least not in the same political space, giving rise for the need for one or another kind of "final solution".

All of this, of course, is ridiculous. My partner-in-crime on secession research Steve Saideman recently pointed out that Blue State secessionism is nuts and anti-democratic. And the idea that "conservatives" can somehow identify and remove (via death or forced migration) all "liberals" is both wildly unrealistic and horrifying.

The reality is that within the United States, Unilateral strategies are a waste of time. They will never succeed. The only thing they are good for - and this goes a long way to explaining their popularity - is helping some politicians get into power and stay here. The side effect of this political strategy, of course, is that the body politic as a whole suffers. And so a college professor and a college student are both made to suffer so that demagogues who have no interest in resolving conflicts can go to Washington.

The Atlantic recently ran an article covering research that suggests that one side effect of Americans drifting away from organized religion (in particular, the many branches of the Christian church) is that they are become less tolerant of each other. While Christianity is often associated in the public mind with intolerance (towards gays, Muslims, single mothers, and others, mostly because of particularly vocal denominations), it turns out that the universalism within Christian theology (a universalism reflected in most major theological systems around the world) does tend to make adherents less rigid than we usually think. You can only sing "In Christ there is no East or West" so many times on a Sunday before it starts to occur to you that maybe God really does love everybody, even the people you disagree with.

The flight from religion is particularly pronounced on college campuses, both among academics and faculty (who tend to share a culture of cosmopolitan secularism) and among students (who tend to share the young adults' gravitational pull away from the religion of their parents, who increasingly don't have one anyway). So it's not surprising that when the broader conflict surfaces on campus, its manifestation tends to be particularly intolerant. Each side, of course, uses this to accuse the other of hypocrisy, thus making the whole thing worse.

The thing about viewing this as a conflict is that it helps us think about the important questions. What would a "resolution" look like? What is the conflict about, and what kinds of solutions to those problems are possible? Because we tend to think that the conflict is about "ideas" ("liberal" ideas versus "conservative" ideas), we then erroneously think that the solution is for our ideas to "win". That is not, of course, how the "marketplace of ideas" works. Change tends to come evolutionarily. Nothing "wins" or "loses" in whole, but the interaction changes all sides and produces new (and hopefully better) ideas. Hegel was right - the conflict between Thesis and Antithesis produces, at its best, Synthesis.

As long as people are sending death threats to each other, of course, this kind of progress is going to be very slow. And as long as students (of whichever tribe) think that they need to help their side "win" - whether by posting videos of views they don't like to like-minded websites or by shouting down speakers they don't like at public events - not much is going to change.

When you're in a conflict, you should be thinking about how to end it - about what realistic conclusions are possible and about how to get from where we are to one of those, as fast as possible and with the least cost. Right now, people on all sides aren't thinking this way. They're trying to "win" an unwinnable war. If you don't like the idea of strangers flinging death threats around, heed the advice of Joshua: the only winning move is not to play:

Trump's Zero-Sum Universe

There are plenty of things to respond to in President Trump's inaugural address last Friday. Having read the text of every inaugural since Harry Truman (all easily available online), some simple observations jump out:

• It was remarkably short.

• It was not particularly uplifting nor inspiring. This is obviously something of a judgment call, but I have read inaugural addresses by Presidents whom I liked and agreed with and by Presidents I disliked and disagreed with strongly. Pretty much all of them were good pieces of inspirational rhetoric, whether I liked the President or not. This one wasn't.

• The phrase "American carnage" was bizarre. The America that Trump describes is not one that most Americans experience.

• I had no idea that schools are "flush with cash" but leave "our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge." My local public schools, which my kids attend, do an excellent job of transmitting a lot of knowledge to my kids, and even though we live in a pretty affluent area even our schools aren't "flush with cash". I don't think his description fits a single school district in the country, much less the entire system.

• "America first" has a ring to it that troubles some folks. What I found far more disturbing was this statement:

At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America

Calling for total allegiance to the state is positively totalitarian and certainly un-American. I can't imagine where this came from, or what purpose it serves.


But beyond all of this, what I found fascinating about the address is the extent to which it illuminates Trump's fundamental view of the world. Trump's world is all about competition, all the time. All interactions, for Trump, involve winners and losers. Everything to him is zero-sum.

This is both inaccurate and profoundly amoral. Let me elaborate a bit on both.

There are indeed some human interactions that are zero-sum, at least on some dimensions. Negotiation over the price of a car or a house is inevitably this way, at least so far as that issue is concerned: every dollar I give up (as a buyer) is a dollar gained (by the seller). Of course, this works primarily for single-issue interactions, because as soon as I introduce multiple values I introduce the possibility of tradeoffs in which both sides can get some, or even all, of what they want or need. This is negotiation theory 101, and the fact that Trump (who claims to have written a book about bargaining) doesn't understand this says a lot about his worldview as well as his intellectual breadth.

More broadly speaking, the defining characteristic of human civilization is cooperation that produces greater benefit for all, rather than competition that takes from one to give to another. The creation of wealth, the functioning of markets, the social interactions that produce what we call "civilized society" are all predicated on the notion that we do things that benefit not only ourselves, but others as well. If we were all about competition, we would barely have descended from the trees.

It is true that many these interactions have both relative and absolute gains within them. Trump is clearly a "relative gains" kind of guy - if the other side is gaining more, even if he himself is objectively better off, he feels that he's "getting screwed".

Relative gains thinking always leaves everybody worse off. It was behind the wave of protectionist tariffs and trade barriers in the 1930's (Smoot-Hawley in the US) that drove the world economy further into depression. It was in response to this disaster that after WWII, American policymakers put forward the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Japan - arrangements designed to enrich Europe and Japan more than the United States, because that was the smart thing to do. The result was massive worldwide economic expansion that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. No people has ever gotten prosperous on the basis of protection.

In Prisoner's Dilemma, relative gains thinking on both sides leads to very poor outcomes - both lose. Absolute gains thinking leads to mutual cooperation and better outcomes for both. This is, to a substantial degree, a matter of mindset. The winning strategy in PD is Tit for Tat, which assumes that cooperation is possible and starts every interaction cooperatively. Trump apparently hasn't read Axelrod.

In addition to being a lousy understanding of human interaction, Trump's worldview is also deeply disturbing from a moral standpoint. If everything is about winners and losers, then there are no real limits. Ultimately any behavior is justified, if only it helps you or your side win. Restraints on behavior are for suckers, and each side should be expected to do everything in its power to "win" (whatever that means in context). Winning, in turn, is its own moral justification. Might (achieved through winning) really does make right.

There are philosophical systems that have argued this point in the past, but they are profoundly un-American. They are also deeply anti-Christian. President Trump obviously has only the most tenuous connection to the Gospel, despite throwing in a few awkward God references in his inaugural address, but his zero-sum mentality makes it clear that he has no real relationship with Christianity.

The direction of the Christian gospel is pretty clear on this point. "Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." "Love one another as I have loved you." "Blessed are the merciful, for they will have mercy." "Do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other also." "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

The list goes on and on, of course. Even "us first" nationalism is difficult to sustain in the face of Scripture. At the beginnings of the Abrahamic story God promises that "in you all nations of the earth will be blessed", and Peter understood that "God shows no partiality".

I keep being confronted with the same question: for those of us who claim to be Christians, do we take this stuff seriously or don't we? Forget the Supreme Court, or LGBT rights, or abortion, or any of the other issues that Christians sometimes hold up as being "the" issue that justifies their choices. All of this is under Screwtape's "Christianity and..." - things we attach to God that become God. They are idols.

To view the world as Us vs. Them, to reduce every human interaction and every issue to a struggle to produce winners and losers, is an utter and complete repudiation of the Gospel of Christ. To follow a man who walks that path is to reject the injunction of Jesus' own prayer to God: Thy will be done. God's will is not for a world of conflict and strife. Why would we follow someone who wants to make it more so?

Bubbles, Reason, and Fear

Like many Americans, I watched President Obama's farewell address on TV last night. And like many, I found it to be moving and inspirational at many points. People may disagree with his policies and his results - heck, I disagree with some of his policies and his results - but I hope that there is a broad agreement that he has, on balance, been good for the office of the Presidency.

I know this sounds naive in the face of the rampant and irrational partisanship of our age. So be it. Lots of people think Obama is the antiChrist - not much we can do there. I prefer to ignore them. They're likely not reading this anyway.

Among many excellent points made in the speech (you can read the entire prepared text here), two stood out to me: his argument about the need for reason and his concern about "bubbles", especially social media bubbles.

I have been thinking a lot about both of these of late. My own social media bubble has been overrun for the past month with anxiety and fear. And because the fears are of the future - of things that haven't yet happened, but are imagined as likely or going to happen - they run unchecked. No appeal to reason can assuage them. Many of my friends are terrified, depressed, or both.

Some are also distraught and angry, and are seeking to channel that anger into action towards what they regard as better outcomes. That is all to the good - President Obama's call for everyone to be involved, at all levels, was well and sincerely made, and we will all be better off if more folks get involved in arguing, organizing, and pushing for what they think is right.

It's the fear and depression that I find more concerning. The tendency, it seems, is to swell political issues and problems to the size of existential crises, so that they sweep away all other concerns, thoughts, and values. Our lives are so much more than national politics - indeed, on a day-to-day basis national politics play only a tiny part in our time and attention. But because of the bubble effect, our politics have come to take over our lives. I believe this is very unhealthy, and does us far more harm than good. I also believe we have a choice in the matter.

I could argue (and have) that what we are facing is not an existential crisis. An existential crisis, politically speaking, is Somalia or Libya - a complete breakdown in all governing structures and "government" by warlords. There is no road from where we are that leads there.

We're not even facing the "Dirty War" years of Argentina, when a totalitarian government seized power from an elected one and proceeded to torture and "disappear" people by the tens of thousands for the better part of a decade. We are light years away from that kind of political and cultural collapse.

This helps lend a little perspective. We are facing the next few years of politics that a majority of Americans, often for very good reason, won't like. Civil rights may get harder to defend, discrimination may rise, racism and hate may be more out in the open. The rich may well get richer at the expense of the rest of us (although, in all fairness, that's been happening for the last 8 years, and the 8 years before that...) The US government may screw up some international relationships, and as a result crises will have worse outcomes for US interests and we may lose power and influence around the world. Millions might lose health insurance. Lots of bad stuff may well (probably will) happen.

But here's the thing. When we spend our days and evenings reading post after post, op-ed after op-ed, mostly from politically biased and emotionally charged sources, that talk about how all of these bad things will happen, that all of this is just around the corner - it begins to take over our view of the world. If all you ever read is bad news - in this case, the anticipation of bad news - then everything starts to look bad. Just as with our bodies, "you are what you eat", our minds are the same. To borrow from Nietzsche, the longer we stare into the abyss, the more the abyss stares back into us.

Politics at the national level are important. But they are not everything. Most of what matters in our lives happens far away from Washington. The nature of our job, whether our boss is decent person or not, our relationship with our spouse, how our kids are doing in school, traffic on our local roads, the quality of life in our communities - these and hundreds of other things all go on being and changing regardless of who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. What the federal government does can have an impact, usually at the margins, but lots of other things matter more. They're just not on CNN or our social media feeds.

"But what about...?" There are a thousand "but what abouts". Yes, there are serious things with serious consequences. Yes, global warming is real and having an incoming administration that doesn't seem to take it seriously is bad. I am not calling, in any way, shape, or form, for us to simply ignore all the bad stuff and pretend it isn't there. I stand with President Obama: we all have a duty to be involved in trying to make our nation and the world a better place, which means facing challenges squarely.

What I refuse to do is let the bad stuff own me. The world is more than the bad stuff. There is nobility, and grace, and kindness, and simple acts of goodness all around us, every day. For every racist fool whose video-recorded tirade goes viral on YouTube, there are a million decent people who held a door open for a harried mom, who helped a man in a wheelchair reach an item on the top shelf, who took the time to smile back at a child. For every five minutes we spend reading some toxic spew on the internet, there are hours we spend with our kids, our parents, our spouse, our friends, our dog.

Beyond this - which is hopefully accessible to anybody - I want to offer a perspective that likely only some of my readers will share. A part of my identity, as my friends know, is as a Christian. I was raised in the Episcopalian tradition, have spent time in wonderful Lutheran churches, and am currently active in an Episcopal congregation. My faith perspective is similar - though by no means identical - to those of many other Christians, both Protestant and Catholic.

When I look at this through the lens of my Christianity, I am immediately faced with a stark question: Do I take my faith seriously, or don't I? A core of Christian belief is that God created humanity and seeks relationship with the Created, and that the basis of that relationship is intended to be what we call Good: justice, peace, righteousness. We may argue around the margins about what exactly these mean, but the basic point is clear.

Christians also believe that God works - in ways that we often do not understand - in and through Creation to achieve that relationship. We believe that the fulcrum and culmination of that work was in a particular time and place and person, and that the death and resurrection of that person has (to borrow my rector's phrase) "already and not yet" restored Creation to what God wants it to be.

Christians believe, as MLK Jr. put it, that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice". That God is working his purpose out towards not just a more perfect Creation, but towards the perfect Creation. We believe that, though there will be "wars and rumors of wars", that in the end God's will shall prevail and all shall be well. And we profess that, despite all the troubles and travails of this world, "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God".

I look at all of this - a fairly plan, ordinary, basic description of the Christian faith - and I am challenged: Do I believe these things or don't I? Because if I do, then all of the "existential crisis/end of the world as we know it" concern that flows through Facebook and Twitter and indeed much of our national conversation, doesn't look very scary. Yes, bad things are happening now. But I am confident about how the story ends. There's no suspense. I already know the outcome.

Many Christians know (but easily forget) that the most oft-repeated commandment in the Bible is this: "Be not afraid". If I'm not supposed to be afraid in the face of God, why on earth should I be afraid of Donald Trump? The whole thing becomes simply ridiculous.

I don't know that any of this will convince anybody, and I don't expect it to. I only know that my path and my responsibilities will be the same on January 21 as they are on January 19, as they were last year and the year before and the year before that. Love God and love my neighbor. Do what little I can, with what little I have, to make the world a better place. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. And leave the rest to God.

There Are No "Deplorables"

A couple of weeks ago Hillary Clinton made a comment at a fundraiser in New York to the effect that half of the voters supporting Donald Trump's candidacy belong to a "basket of deplorables". She included in this metaphorical basket people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic, as well as other unspecified categories.

The comment was obviously bad politics, and Clinton suffered for it for a few news cycles. As one commentator put it: it's fine to denigrate your opponent, but never a good idea to denigrate the electorate (see "Romney, Mitt, 47 percent").

Trump supporters, of course, immediately decried the statement. Clinton supporters, and in particular many statistically- and data-minded academics, immediately began discussing whether 50% was too high or too low an estimate. But here's the thing that the Clinton supporters and data-miners missed:

Clinton was fundamentally wrong.

She was not wrong in the sense of getting the numbers incorrect. She was wrong for a much more basic reason: people aren't "deplorables".

People aren't Skittles, either. They're not "makers" or "takers", they're not Republicans or Democrats, "losers" or "rednecks" or "thugs".

People are people. If we insist that we treat one group of people - blacks, Syrian refugees, conservatives, what have you - with dignity and respect, that's only because we believe that all people are worthy of dignity and respect.

Most of us, in practice, don't really believe this in a practical way. We afford dignity and respect to people who are like us, or people whom we sympathize with. It's good when we do so for people who have been denied respect, because denying basic human dignity is wrong. That's why Trump Jr.'s tweet about Skittles was so bizarrely offensive - he was making it clear, by equating human lives with candy, that some lives (Americans) are more important than others (Syrian refugees). "I might get hurt if I try to help you, so screw you - you're not worth the risk" was the basic message. And yes, that's racist.

Think this is only a conservative/Republican/Trump problem? Check out this meme, widely circulated in liberal circles:

This hits a lot of classic stereotypes: poor, stupid white redneck with a pickup, no shirt, and hay between his teeth. It plays on a narrative of rural whites as morons, inferior to those of us who "know better". In its own way, it's as racist as the image of the hoodie-wearing urban black man - an object of ridicule and scorn (and often, of fear).

I'm not interested in offering advice or direction to either political campaign, or to voters. My point here isn't political at all, it's moral and theological. For those of us who claim adherence to the Christian faith, Hilary's "basket of deplorables" comment was as far away from the Kingdom of God as many of the terrible things that Trump has said. Because in the eyes of God, nobody is "deplorable".

There are deplorable ideas, deplorable actions, deplorable behavior. Christians call these "sin". But the fact that people sin does not make them "deplorables"; it makes them sinners, which is to say it makes them human like the rest of us.

This is one reason I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the conduct of American politics. We don't disagree with our fellow citizens (or even our opponents), we demonize and dehumanize our enemies. The people that Clinton called "deplorables" are humans made in the image and likeness of God, just as much as the "losers" that Trump is so fond of talking about or the "Skittles" that Trump Jr. insists are poisoned.

The recent shootings in Tulsa and Charlotte have brought back to the fore this basic question: are we really treating all citizens with dignity and respect? It seems clear that the answer is "no", but for anyone who believes in the fundamental nature of human dignity that's not a liberal or conservative problem - it's a fundamentally human one. It's not a problem we will solve by continuing to demonize each other, much less by winning an election. If we really believe that all people are worthy of dignity and respect, we should speak and act like it.

There Are No Enemies

Back in July I wrote a post about "Enemies in Politics", taking what was a fairly easy shot at the pastor who said the invocational prayer at this summer's Republican National Convention. It's easy to call someone out for labelling members of the other party "enemies", and he was widely criticized for his remarks.

More recently, we've had another use of the word "enemies" in our political sphere, when the Maine Governor Paul LePage said this:

A bad guy is a bad guy. I don’t care what color he is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy, the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, you shoot at red. … You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.

If you want to watch him say these things, you can see a video clip here.

Now, what Gov. LePage said was politically stupid - so much so that he is now considering resigning before the end of his term under a firestorm of protest. That's a pretty standard political story - say something stupid that angers a lot of people, pay a political price for it. His angry response to a state senator who called him out on it didn't help either.

But I want to make a much bigger point here. The point isn't just that Gov. LePage, or Pastor Burns from South Carolina, were wrong about who our enemies are. The point is that they are both wrong about whether there are any enemies at all.

Put another way: there are no enemies.

I'll say that again for emphasis: There are no enemies. "Enemies" are an illusion we create ourselves.

I'm hardly the first one to come up with this idea, though it's not common in the West. Morihei Ueshiba, founder of the art of Aikido and famous for his philosophy, had many variations on this theme:

• To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.
• There are no contests in the Art of Peace. A true warrior is invincible because he or she contests with nothing. Defeat means to defeat the mind of contention that we harbor within.
• The real Art of Peace is not to sacrifice a single one of your warriors to defeat an enemy. Vanquish your foes by always keeping yourself in a safe and unassailable position; then no one will suffer any losses. The Way of a Warrior, the Art of Politics, is to stop trouble before it starts. It consists in defeating your adversaries spiritually by making them realize the folly of their actions. The Way of a Warrior is to establish harmony.

Or this:

Opponents confront us continually, but actually there is no opponent there.

People will immediately object, of course. "What about ISIS?", they will ask. "What about Russia? China? Terrorists? Weren't the Nazis enemies?" (Because Godwin's Law).

We live in a culture defined by enemy narratives. Almost all of our stories, our movies, our TV shows revolve around the struggle with enemies, "good guys" vs. "bad guys", black hats and white hats. There are exceptions, of course, but they are relatively rare. The Enemy Narrative is one of the most recognizable stories we have.

The problem is, it's all wrong. Or, put another way, it's all made up - a constructed story we tell ourselves about the world that hides and obscures more than it illuminates. We believe that enemies are real, that they really exist, just like trees and oceans and clouds are real. But they're not. Enemies are just people with labels we attach to them.

But what about people who attack us? Aren't they our enemies? If someone tries to do me harm, I'm not making that up - doesn't that make someone my enemy?

Imagine this story: I go out for the evening with my brother (who would, for the record, never do this...). We have dinner, maybe hear some music, walk to a couple of bars. He's feeling down about things in his life. Over the course of the evening he drinks too much, thinks about the wrong things too much, grows angry. Soon he's consumed by his anger and rage, fueled by alcohol. He bumps into someone, starts scuffling. I step in to restrain him, and he turns his anger on me. He lashes out to hit me.

Is he my enemy? Of course not. He's misguided, confused, and mistaken. Yes, he's trying to do me harm. But he's still my brother. And I will respond to him as such.

Now, substitute the word "neighbor" for "brother" in that story and it's a short step over to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" Those familiar with the Christian gospels know where that question goes. We are all neighbors, brothers and sisters, to each other.

Why, then, do we lash out at each other? Because we are confused, mistaken, misguided. Most conflict - maybe all conflict - is invented in our heads.

Much has been written in the study of conflict about the impact of a scarcity of resources. If there's not enough food to go around, people will fight over it. We will become enemies of each other quickly, in what most people would think of as "real" conflict with "real" enemies.

But there is no scarcity of resources. There is enough food, energy, water, and material for everyone on the planet. Neo-Malthusian concerns aside, we're not anywhere near the carrying capacity of our world. And if you look around at the conflicts in the world today, they're not really about resources. They're about some people wanting to control other people, because of ideology, religion, or a lust for power (or some combination of these).

During the Cold War, we used to argue in International Relations about whether the conflict was "real" or not. We had categories we called "spiral conflict" and "aggressor-defender conflict", and we argued about whether the Soviets were motivated by their own security (making it a spiral) or by trying to take over the world (making them a "real enemy").

But the argument itself was an invention. Yes, Soviet motivations mattered tactically, because they determined how the USSR might respond to various stimuli in the short run. But labelling them an "aggressor" and then claiming that the aggression made them an "enemy" wasn't an argument, but a circle of labels. No one asked, "why"?

This is not an argument for complete pacifism (a topic I've dealt with previously). If my brother is attacking me, I'm going to resist. I may even use force against him. But because he is my brother, not my enemy, I will use the least force necessary. I will do everything I can to keep him whole and unharmed.

Likewise, if a terrorist group is planning to attack us we should attempt to stop them. But in doing so, we should remember that, however confused or mistaken they may be, they are still fellow human beings. When Jesus called on us to love our enemies, this is exactly what he meant. If you claim to be a Christian and yet want to lash out in anger and hatred at terrorists (or Mexicans, or "thugs", or anyone else), you've got a problem.

Gov. LePage will not be the last politician during this electoral season to label someone else "the enemy". Partisans on both sides will do so, because the Enemy Narrative is a great way to mobilize your tribe and get them to go out and do things. Every time we do so, we dehumanize each other a little bit more. LePage isn't the cause of the problem, he's a symptom.

This brings me back to a frequent theme during election years: why I don't like politics. I would rather spend my time searching for peace and building better relations among people than waste my energy creating enemies that don't exist and fighting imaginary battles. There are so many better things we could do with our time, our resources, and our creativity. What a shame to waste them all on something that doesn't exist.